Welcome to the new and improved MLB Future Power Rankings! Weve decided to change our approach since the last time we updated these last November. We tweaked the categories and their weights in our total score for each team. We added a few relevant notes per team (such as best year to win a championship and worst contract). And we even changed the writer/ranker; master projector Dan Szymborski and his ZiPS system now provide the rank and snapshot of each franchise.So what are the Future Power Rankings? Simply put, theyre an attempt to measure how well each team is set up for sustained success over the next five years.We obviously cant project yet which team will be the best in baseball in 2030, but the near future is reaped from the seeds sowed in the present. Whats to come is always uncertain, but after a century and a half of organized professional baseball, we have a pretty good idea what factors commonly lead to future success. To get an estimated score for each team, we distilled the information available into four main categories:Current talent (25 percent of total score): This category focuses on the in-organization performance that teams are projected to have available from now until the end of the 2017 season. This is the easiest to gauge because of the shorter time horizon involved. A clubs 2016 performance may not necessarily be around in 2020, so current talent is not as heavily weighted as future talent, but players who contribute now can bring in future performance.Future talent (45 percent): This covers every bit of projected performance that teams have in their organization from 2018 onward, from veterans under contract to young major leaguers to this years draftees. With more uncertainty, computer projections are more fallible than in the near term; to take this into consideration, Ive also implemented Keith Laws farm system rankings.Financial support (20 percent): Poor teams -- or more accurately, less-rich teams -- can in fact compete, but it would be naive to pretend that its not trickier to keep a team like the Pittsburgh Pirates or Tampa Bay Rays in contention than the Los Angeles Dodgers. This category was developed with an index that includes historical team payrolls relative to team revenue, revenue streams and market size.Front office (10 percent): This is a small weight, both because of the subjective nature of ranking them and because a lot of a front offices abilities are naturally going to be reflected in the current talent, future talent and, at least indirectly, the teams recent revenue. Also, building a team is more than just making a lot of good moves; its also about having a coherent plan and using creativity and flexibility to further those plans.Overall score: We basically rank the categories from 1 (the best) to 30 (worst), then apply our category weights. So a perfect score would be 30 (first in all four categories).Tiebreaker: When two teams ended up with the same overall score, we used the best rank in the Future talent area to determine which team should be ranked higher.No previous rank? Because so much has changed, from the categories to the category weights to even the ranker, weve decided not to compare these to the November rank. However, one thing remains the same between the two sets of rankings ...Cubs retain top spotWhile its not the landslide it was in the November rankings, the Cubs are still numero uno. The objective for all big league front offices is to build the strongest possible organization. Thats exactly what the Cubs have done.Lets start with the major league roster. Even after missing out on the top free-agent pitchers this past offseason and losing their starting left fielder to a season-ending knee injury before the season even began, the Cubs have the strongest case for the best major league talent right now. ZiPS has their current roster with the best true-talent winning percentage in baseball from here on out, at .611, which is the best performance by any roster by ZiPS estimation since the 2011 Yankees. Considering the Cubs have the best winning percentage so far, thats not exactly a computer giving counterintuitive analysis. But believe it or not, theyve actually underperformed their run differential; an argument can be made that theyve played more like a .700 team this year.Whats truly amazing about the Cubs is they have done this all without being an ancient team that sacrificed its future for present gains. Sure, Arodys Vizcaino would look nice in their bullpen right now, as would Zack Godley, but the Cubs built this roster retaining essentially all of their young talent. In fact, all top 10 players from Keith Laws top Cubs prospects heading into 2015 remain in the organization, as do eight of the 10 players on Laws 2014 list (Vizcaino and Arismendy Alcantara are the only ones missing). And thats just the farm system. In the majors are many graduated prospects with long major league careers ahead of them, players like Kris Bryant, Addison Russell, Javier Baez and the injured Kyle Schwarber.Supporting this bevy of current and future talent is an organization that has shown every indication that it will provide ample financial support to maintain its juggernaut status. When the Ricketts purchased the Cubs, many soothsayers predicted gloom and doom, saying they would never invest in the team. Turned out they werent cheap; they were patient. Since the Cubs started to shift aggressively from rebuilding mode to contention after the 2014 season, theyve brought in Jason Heyward, Jon Lester, Ben Zobrist, Miguel Montero, Dexter Fowler?and John Lackey, among others.President of baseball operations Theo Epstein built his reputation dispelling one curse in Boston, and now hes working on lifting the hex from the Cubs. Even as a much bigger name starting his Cubs career than his Red Sox career, Epstein started off not by being flashy, but by patiently taking the long road, ignoring the people who wanted quick fixes, and implementing the rebuilding process that is paying dividends today.Cubs, Cubs, Cubs ... Well be hearing about them aplenty over the next five years.With that, here are the Future Power Rankings:Go to:?1-5 | 6-10 | 11-15 | 16-20 | 21-25 | 26-30?No, they have not won a World Series yet. But yes, the Cubs are the strongest organization in baseball right now. World Series championships are decided every fall based on a few breaks going one way or the other. An organization cannot build around those chances, but what an organization can do is build the best roster possible. Thats what the Cubs have -- the strongest roster in baseball.But what gives the Cubs the top spot here isnt just the roster they have, but the legs their roster has. Players like Kris Bryant and Addison Russell are still at the beginning of their careers, and the team retains an excellent farm system, even if its no longer as deep as that of teams like the Braves or Twins. Add in a willingness to spend money -- the people claiming that the Ricketts family would never spend money have had to eat a hefty helping of crow -- and a front office head (Theo Epstein) who already broke one curse in Boston, and you have the most dangerous team in baseball over the next several years. Whether the Cubs win a championship or not is in the hands of baseballs oft-cruel gods. 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Steve Nash Suns Jersey .com) - Following a late-game loss to the reigning NBA champs, the Toronto Raptors will look to sustain their recent high-level play as they travel to Indiana to take on the Pacers. Through the noughties, the SSC pitch was so flat Sri Lankans were granted a Test hundred there along with their birth certificates. There was a bleak, authoritarian air to SSC matches in that decade. Games took on the unsettling aspect of a military parade.Mahela Jayawardene scored hundreds almost by rote here, and towards the end of his career, appeared more relieved than joyful at the milestone, almost as if he would have been court-martialled for falling short. Captains then had Muttiah Muralitharan wheeling away for days on end. Like with the generals favourite jeep, his wearing parts would be continually replaced - limbs reattached when they fell off, eyeballs popped back in their sockets when they went rolling along the floor.In 2014, though, the old pitch was dug up along with the fossilised remains of generations of bowlers, and a new layer of clay had been put down. It is on this new strip that Rangana Herath smothered Pakistan with slow, lovable left-arm, in 2014. It is this strip that had been so seamer-friendly last year, that it inspired sweary, caveman, head-banging from Ishant Sharma. And it is on this pitch that South Africa almost lost a Test - saved on that occasion by rain, and batting so sleep-inducing that even its memory might prevent the conclusion of this sent...But if there is a Sri Lanka batsman who is the opposite of the noughties SSC surface, it is Dinesh Chandimal. His strokeplay is by nature, effervescent. He is so talkative he could chat up a power pylon. Chandimal, as character and cricketer, is more like Galle on day five, where the outrageous routinely occurs. Even on his quieter outings, he is Headingley on the first morning. He drives wildly, cuts extravagantly, throws his every atom into the sweep, and is in general like a human baila tune at the crease. It is not always great, but it rarely fails to get a few feet tapping along.In this innings, though, when the new SSC was contriving excitement with a score of 26 for 5, Chandimal embraced everything he is not, annd contrived for viewers the old SSC experience.dddddddddddd He made 132 from 356, when less than a year ago he famously struck 162 not out from 169. From the three sessions that he batted through, his returns were 30, 27 and 41. This was ballad batting. The block and leave were played again and again: two endlessly alternating chords.If there were two strokes that woke you up like the passing of a freighter, they were the slogged four off Jon Holland, and the reverse-swept six against the turn of Nathan Lyon, hot on its heels. But soon enough, disruption forgotten, his innings, and the SSC, was allowed to drift peacefully off again.This transformation of character took so much out of Chandimal that he was unable to take the field after his almost six-hour innings. Often a verbal runaway train after he has scored a hundred, Chandimal could barely muster one-sentence replies after play on Sunday. I was under pressure before this innings, he said. I didnt play that well for the reverse swinging ball. Because of that, I changed my approach a bit.Batting in partnership with Chandimal, it was Rangana Herath who provided the days liveliest moments. Clearly in the midst of a batting revival at this late stage of his career, Herath waddles to the middle frowning like an old man peeved to find kids playing on his lawn, and brandishes his stick irritably, slapping Josh Hazlewood over midwicket for four. Having exerted himself, he hobbled off soon enough, retiring hurt for 33 after he was hit in a nasty place. Thankfully, he recovered. His gentlepersonly bowling avatar was seen later in the day.Through their second-wicket stand, Australia have now moved towards parity. But it is partly because of Chandimal that Sri Lanka can still dream of that rare whitewash. His was not one of the SSCs handout hundreds. No matter what the surface was doing, for this one, he had to wrestle himself. ' ' '