World Series "Pull Throughs"

Explanation of OOF and PULL THROUGH Team Strength at the World Series and how it assists with team classification

  In 2003, the North American Fastpitch Association began using a new method for examining a team’s performance at the World Series to assist us with the Classification of teams for the following year based on their place of finish at the World Series and the relative strength of the teams that each team played. This combined with our visually subjective evaluations allowed the NAFA Staff to be more Objective in determining how many places down in a particular class that we would bump teams to the next class for the next season.

  Although somewhat technical, these charts from the 2004 and 2005 World Series events provided by Mike Clark of Iowa continue to be an invaluable tool for NAFA. This brief description is intended to assist you in understanding what OOF and Pull Through mean and what the details of the end product are.

  OOF means Order of Finish or Final Standings of an event. Pull Through means the system by which we evaluate each team compared to the strength of the teams that they played based on pulling through each teams opponents through the bracket and assigning a strength to each opponent based on how they finished in the event and based on how they competed against other teams in the event and especially against the top teams in the event.

  The process starts when we send the completed brackets with game scores to Mike Clark at the conclusion of each World Series Bracket. Mike Clark then does the rest of the work which is the technical and most difficult part. First he calculates the record of each team and their final placement in the bracket. 1^st,2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th, 5^th(2), 7^th)(2), 9^th(4), 13^th(4), 17^th(8), 25^th(8) and so on until each team is labeled with its final order of finish. Each group is assigned a point total for their place of finish, i.e. 1^st-4^th 8 points, 5^th-6^th 7 points, 7^th-8^th 6 points, 9^th-12^th 5 points, 13^th-16^th 4 points, 17^th-24^th 3 points, 25^th-32^nd 2 points, and so on.

   Then the teams are organized in each place category by their level of advancement and by wins and losses. Then they are separated if tied by run differential. This information is inserted into an excel document and the excel spreadsheet calculates the total points a team earns for the whole event which is weighted by the number of games they played and more importantly it assigns a per game point average which the Executive Committee uses to compare what we saw with our eyes and what the objective OOF and Pull Through calculated for each team’s comparative strength to each other.