Here’s how things look at the end of Week 15:
Starting with today’s games, we have one more week before the All-Star Break. We are DONE with 6-day weeks; from now on all our weeks will be 7-days (still only 6 games played).
Starting right after the Break, we start facing each other head – to – head. Each team’s schedule for the last 11 weeks will be set after we finish Week 16. We’ll be seeded according to our place in the standings. If the Seraphim survive Week 16 in first place (which I expect them to do), they’ll get an MLB team-to-be-determined as their Week 17 opponent, and then play the rest of us, starting with the team seeded #11 and ending with the team seeded #2. Their schedule would be found in Column N, Rows 20 – 30 of our 2022 EFL Season Schedule. Whoever is in second place at the All-Star Break will have the schedule found in Column M, and so forth. During the All Star Break, I’ll modify the 2022 EFL Season Schedule sheet to make it clearer.
Over weeks 17 – 27, we’ll each have one week with an MLB opponent. This will be the same opponent for every EFL team. We decided last Spring to face an MLB team we haven’t already faced which is projected to have a record that will get us as close as possible to .500 – level MLB opposition over the entire season.
I admit I am surprised our luck with our MLB opponents hasn’t evened out better. Here are our current “luck” standings:
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- Kaline: + 0.091
- Peshastin: + 0.043
- Flint Hill: + 0.019
- Bellingham: + 0.017
- DC: – 0.001
- Canberra: – 0.007
- Old Detroit: – 0.019
- Salem: – 0.040
- Haviland: – 0.041
- Portland: – 0.051
- Pittsburgh: – 0.081
The EFL as a whole has been slightly unlucky: – 0.009. Or maybe we should say, we have played opposition that was slightly better than .500 — more like .509. If we average the records of our MLB opponents in the weeks they were playing us, it comes out to .506. So we may look for our 17th MLB opponent to be a team projected to play about .491 – .494 the rest of the season.
Please have Week 16 allocations to me, using your July Allocation sheet, by noon tomorrow (Tuesday, July 12).
Finally, a word of consolation for pitching collapses this week to:
- the Rosebuds, whose 11 healthy .pitchers provided 40 innings of 7.25 ERA work, barely ameliorated by 2 rescue innings by replacement pitcher; and
- the Pears, whose pitchers delivered 16 innings of 7.88 ERA, leaving 26 innings up to replacements who managed to get the Peshastin weekly ERA down to 6.71.
The Pears had only 6 healthy pitchers, only two of which were starters. One of their starters was MacKenzie Gore, who surrendered 8 earned runs in 3.3 innings.