MASH

Matchup Adjusted Simulated Head-to-head

Matchup Adjusted Simulated Head-to-head, or MASH for short, formerly known as OVR, is a way to gauge a fantasy baseball team's overall performance in a given week by comparing them against the entire league simultaneously. Instead of just looking at head-to-head matchups, MASH takes each team's performance in every statistical category and ranks them against all other teams in the league. For example, the team with the most home runs in a week would receive a high MASH score for that category, while the team with the fewest would get a low score. These individual category rankings are then aggregated to create an overall MASH score for each team for the week.

Think of MASH as a weekly power ranking that cuts through the noise of individual matchups. A high MASH score indicates a team performed strongly across most categories compared to the league average, suggesting a dominant week even if their head-to-head matchup result didn't fully reflect it. Conversely, a low MASH score highlights teams that struggled across the board, regardless of their win-loss record for the week. This helps identify teams that might be getting lucky or unlucky in their matchups and provides a more comprehensive picture of weekly performance.

The Formula

For each statistical category in your league (e.g., Runs, Home Runs, ERA, Strikeouts):

  1. Rank all teams from 1 to X (where X is the number of teams in the league) based on their performance in that specific category for the week.
  2. The direction of the ranking depends on whether a higher or lower value is better for that category:
    • For Home Runs, the team with the most gets X - 1 wins
    • For ERA, the team with the lowest gets rank 1
  3. In case of ties, the tied teams would share the average of the ranks they would have occupied. For instance, if two teams are tied for the most Home Runs, they would both receive a rank of (X - 1 + X - 2) / 2.

Once all teams are ranked in each category:

  1. For each individual team, sum up their ranks across all the scoring categories.
  2. The resulting sum is the team's MASH score for that week. A higher MASH score indicates that the team performed better overall against the league in those categories.