We have read, with great interest, Perfect Game's attempts to rank youth baseball teams across the United States. Combined with other organizations such as travelbaseballrankings.com, Travelball Select, USSSA, and Baseball Youth, there a multitude of sources available when trying to figure out who the best teams in your area and around the country are. With no baseball being played during the coronavirus lockdown, we devoted some time to performing and in-depth assessment of the the national youth baseball landscape. The end result was our very own national rankings.
National rankings have been something we have shied away from in the past. Mainly because of the effort they take to produce, but also because we didn't feel we could get an accurate feel for teams across the country. The coronavirus pandemic has given us a bit more free time, however. And Frankly, because we are bored and we miss baseball, we set out to develop our own ranking of the best 25 teams in American in each age group. We left out the 8u and 9u age groups because we felt they are impossible to accurately rank at the national level at this time. We also limited each age group to 25 teams because that seemed a "classic" ranking number, and we ran out of energy to go much beyond 25 teams for each age group.
Our rankings are a bit different than those from the sites listed above. Some different teams might show up in our rankings that are not in other rankings, and it may be that teams ranked at other sites are not in our rankings. That does not mean our rankings are better or more accurate than anyone else's. It just means they are different. As a reminder, the entire reason we do rankings at all is for fun and entertainment. We readily acknowledge these rankings are our opinion. The hope is to offer some conversation during this downtime, provide information for teams looking for the highest level of competition, and shine light on some high performing teams throughout the country.
The first way our rankings differ is that to be in our rankings your team had to have played games in the fall of 2019 or winter/spring of 2020. This means some really excellent teams were left out simply because they had not yet started their seasons before the coronavirus pandemic halted things across the country. This also means our rankings will have a slight regional bias towards teams in the South and West Coast who have been able to get far more games in than many teams across the country.
The second way our rankings differ from many others is that the tournament organization teams compete in is irrelevant to our rankings. We have tried to scour the results from as many organizations as we could find in order to put together our rankings. The only thing that matters in our rankings is on-field results. We have tried to limit our assessment to current participation-year results, but in some cases previous results helped break a tie. We have also made an effort to reward teams who have competed against other national-level competition. For some teams (Florida, California, Texas, etc.), this is easier to do than for others.
The third difference in our rankings is that because we are a state/regionally focused site, there is a potential for bias in how we view teams from this state and region. We have tried our best to avoid any bias in how we ranked teams from North Carolina or from the region, but we acknowledge that type of bias is possible. The final difference in our rankings is that we have included an extensive National Honor Roll of teams for each age group in order to keep track of some of the best of the rest teams who didn't quite make it into our top 25.
The state of Texas led the way with a total of 22 teams in the top 25 across 4 age groups including two #1's (11u Team Citius USA and 12u Texas Canes Elite). They were followed closely by Florida, who had a total of 20 teams in our top 25's across 4 age groups, and California, who placed 16 teams in our rankings, including #1's in the 10u age group (MVP Hustle - Ruiz) and 13u age group (MVP Hustle - Rodriguez). Our personal bias might have shown through a bit with North Carolina coming in with the 4th most teams in our top 25's with 8 across the 4 age groups. For reference, Perfect Game also has 8 teams from North Carolina in their top 25's in these 4 age groups.
We have included teams on the honor roll who have played few or even no games, but we certainly haven't included everyone who deserves to be mentioned. We will continue to update our honor roll teams as more suggestions come in. So please feel free to let us know who we are missing.
Click below for our rankings