Sabermetrix Are For Kids: Introducing Our Little League World Series Power Ranking And Prediction Engine

We're a few days into the Little League World Series, which means it's time to unveil our system for evaluating the teams: DRURY, or Determination of Robustness of Undoubtedly Rambunctious Youths. It takes box score statistics from every game, converts them into a composite runs scored and allowed per game (BR/18O and BRA/18O, respectively), and then adjusts those figures for strength of schedule. The final figures are the teams' adjusted Pythagorean winning percentages; they're scaled so that the best team has a DRURY of 1. Without further ado, here's the first batch of rankings, based on games prior to today:

And here are the predictions for today's matchups, based on expected winning percentages from the above run totals.

Caribbean over Midwest, 51.5% (Actual: Caribbean 5, Midwest 0) Asia-Pacific over Canada, 91.7% (Actual: Canada 5, Asia-Pacific 3) Great Lakes over Southeast, 81.1% Japan over Middle East and Africa, 91.0% Mid-Atlantic over Southwest, 55.8%

With a sample size of only two games per team, DRURY's predictions won't be very accurate, but it will get better as the week progresses. Stay tuned for tomorrow's update.

Related: A Sabermetric Look At The Little League World Series [The Awl]