I think you need to drop the worst 162-game record from everybody before comparing, if you want an apples-to-apples comparison.
No explanation for the anomaly as I really wasn't following your teams that closely (we're not in any of the same leagues).
Have you gone back and examined the game results? Did you lose a lot of 1-run games? The schedule isn't necessarily equally balanced throughout the 162 game season... maybe you played a bunch of the top teams during that stretch (including inter-league games).
Regarding pre-season ranking, I still think you put too much weight on the "last-year-to-this-year" grade. I know when I was doing the rankings, I pretty much made the tournament results almost 100% of the ranking score (assuming you played the past 5 tournament), weighting the most recent tournaments way more, to the point where older tournaments had very little impact. If I want to be ranked higher in next year's tournament, I guess I should play in a bunch of open leagues to get my results to look better and definitely stop playing in those "screw-your-neighbor" type leagues.
Thanks for the vote of confidence. But remember that I am a regular season player and typically underachieve in the playoffs. Last year, I had the most combined Round1 + Round2 regular season wins. But I got only 18 "bonus" points in the round 1 playoffs and 12 "bonus" points in the round 2 playoffs, including 4 points from my 104-win team (losing to some mediocre 84-win team). For comparison purposes, brianjw combined for 73 "bonus" points (despite having one fewer playoff team than I had, 8 vs 7).
7/27/2020 2:30 PM (edited)