Good news, bad news. The good news is the Trophy Room is now open for baseball and softball, with twenty seven different trophies per sport, awarded across every class and statewide. The bad news is your team's trophy might belong to somebody else by tomorrow morning. These are not end of season hardware. These are moving trophies, and they are calculated fresh every single night.
Lose a game. Get bumped. Win a game. Take it from somebody else. The leaderboard does not care about your feelings. It just runs the numbers.
How a moving trophy works.
Every day the gremlins finish pulling the day's scores, recalculates every metric on every team, and re assigns the trophies. If you held Top Power Rating in Class B yesterday but Wells lost a game and you kept rolling, congratulations, you might be on the page tomorrow. If your team is the current Shutout King and another team throws a one hitter tonight, you are probably about to lose the title. The Trophy Room shows the CURRENT holder. Last week's holder is not anywhere on the page. There is no second place. There is no "finalist." There is the team that owns the trophy this morning, and there is everybody else.
This makes it fun, and also a little brutal. A team that put together a beautiful 2-0 opening week can sit on three or four trophies for forty eight hours and then watch them all disappear in a single Tuesday afternoon doubleheader gone wrong. Welcome to spring sports. The DSI (Depth of Schedule Index) and PIR feed into a lot of these, so the trophies also account for who you have actually played. Beating two teams that are still trying to find their gloves is not the same as beating two state title contenders.
The six categories. Twenty seven trophies. Per sport.
Both baseball and softball get the exact same trophy slate, calculated independently, scored against teams in the same class wherever possible. Some trophies are awarded statewide. Most are awarded per class (A, B, C, D). The categories:
Strength & resume
This is the headline group. Seven trophies that try to capture, in plain English, who is actually the best team. Top Power Rating goes to the highest PIR. Best Win% is what it sounds like. Best SOS rewards the team with the toughest schedule played. Best SOV (Strength of Victory) credits you for who you have actually beaten, not just who is on your schedule. Best Pyth Win% is the Pythagorean projection based on runs scored and allowed, which catches teams that are winning by more than their record suggests. Most Quality Wins counts the wins against opponents in the top tier of your class. Fewest Bad Losses penalizes the opposite. Together this group answers the question "is this team really that good or did they just play nobody."
Offense & defense
Five trophies for the run line. Most Runs/Game is the bat. Fewest Runs Allowed is the arm. Best Run Diff/Game is both. Shutout King counts complete shutouts, which in April Maine softball is currently a contested category because half the state appears to be doing it. Best Sched Adj Wins is a more honest version of the win column, scoring each win by how hard the opponent was, so teams that beat better opponents climb above teams that just collected easy ones.
Clutch & dominance
Five trophies for HOW you win, not just whether you win. Most Dominant rewards consistent margin of victory across all games. Most Blowout Wins is a count of games where you put it well out of reach. Best Blowout Margin captures the worst beating you handed somebody. Best Close Win% pays the team that consistently wins the one and two run games (this is the opposite of the blowout trophies, on purpose, because both are real skills). Most Mercy Wins counts ten run rule games, because Maine high school baseball and softball both have them and they are a real metric of dominance, not just box score noise.
Road, home & neutral
Four trophies that split your record by where you played. Best Home Win% and Best Road Win% are obvious. Best Home Run Diff/Game and Best Road Run Diff/Game catch the teams that are winning everywhere they go. The road trophies are particularly hard to win in Maine, where "road game" sometimes means a two hour bus ride into the County and somebody's mom is the official scorer.
Momentum & streaks
Three trophies that look at recent form, not season totals. Best L5 Runs/Game is your scoring rate over the last five games. Best L5 Run Diff/Game is the same for run differential. Best Win Streak is the longest active win streak in the class. These trophies move the fastest. A bad weekend can wipe out a six game streak overnight.
Consistency & grit
Three trophies that try to capture intangibles with actual numbers. Most Consistent goes to the team with the lowest variance in margin of victory (loss) game over game, the team you can predict. Best vs Top Tier credits teams whose record against the upper bracket of their class is best. Lowest Luck Z is our favorite weird trophy, it goes to the team that is winning even though the underlying numbers say they should be losing more, or the reverse. It is a humility check on the standings.
A few of today's trophy holders.
Just to give you a flavor of who is wearing what right now. These are accurate as of this morning's update and could absolutely be different by sundown.
Lisbon softball — Top Power Rating, statewide. 48.1 PIR, 2-0 with a 27-0 run line. Highest power rating in the entire sport across all four classes.
Washington Academy softball — Shutout King and Best Win Streak, statewide. Three games, three shutouts, three game W streak. Both trophies are theirs until somebody else throws a shutout or pieces together a four game run.
Monmouth baseball — Top Power Rating in Class C. 47.1 PIR, 2-0, 37 runs scored and zero allowed. Currently the highest power rating in Maine baseball at any class.
Wells baseball — Fewest Runs Allowed in Class B. Half a run per game. Whoever is throwing for them is doing something wrong (right).
Ellsworth baseball — Most Runs/Game, Best Run Diff/Game, and Best Blowout Margin in Class B. Triple crown of the box score after a 33 to 1 opening day. They have only played one game. The trophies are sitting on a tripod made of one game.
There are roughly two hundred and fifty more trophies sitting unclaimed by your team specifically. Go look. The page lives at /trophies. Pick a sport from the sidebar to switch between baseball and softball.
How to actually use this.
Three honest tips.
One: do not get attached. The trophies move every night. Screenshot the ones your team holds. Frame them. They will be gone in two weeks. That is not a bug, it is the entire point. The trophies are a snapshot of right now, not a season long award.
Two: read across categories. A team that holds three trophies in different categories (say, Most Runs/Game in offense AND Best Win Streak in momentum AND Top Power Rating in resume) is the real deal. A team that holds one trophy in one micro category is having a moment. Both are worth celebrating. They are not the same.
Three: Lowest Luck Z is the most useful one. It tells you which teams are quietly outperforming the underlying math. Those are the teams that are about to either keep winning (skill) or come back to earth (luck). Track who shows up there week to week.
Coming next.
GameIQ predictions are about to come online for baseball and softball, which means every game on the Slate will get a projected score and win probability alongside the actual result. Once that goes live, the trophies will get a little more interesting because we can also start grading the GameIQ against the trophy holders. Are the GAmeIQ's favorite teams winning the trophies you'd expect? When they are not, somebody is over performing or under performing. We will write more about that when it ships.
The serious part.
Teams streak are going to end. We will still write down that they held the trophy. That is the trophy. The kid will look back twenty years from now and remember the spring his team won three in a row in the rain and somebody on the internet bothered to count it. We will count it.
Now go cook.