Geez that's a stacked D team. If your team can pitch, you may win a lot of games 1-0.

The SS bats generally suck.  This is an experiment where I'm almost completely punting offense to go with an extreme defensive lineup, just to see what happens.

I was hoping to acquire some good pitching arms as well, but seeing that this is a one season throwaway test world, and everybody else is taking a "win now" approach, talent is hard to come by.  So my pitching is mediocre at best.  There was little quality pitching talent available in the FA pool.

As for how did I acquire them: 2 of the shortstops were acquired via Rule 5, and another 3 were acquired via FA.  The rest were already in my organization at world creation.

Some interesting things about a one-season world:

1)  Prospects are pretty much worthless if they're not ML ready.  No need to develop them for a future that will never come.

2)  Just about everybody (except for me) is going for a "win now" approach.  Again, no sense in rebuilding when there are no future seasons to play.

3)  When you don't have to worry about future seasons, you can offer crazy contracts that are back-loaded in salary and with things like player options, because you know that you never have to pay the piper somewhere down the road.

I was able to anticipate these, but it's still been kind of interesting to watch it actually play out up to now (we just started spring training games).

Not sure what else to expect as the season progresses.

The trades will be interesting too. No one will trade vets for prospects. No point.

The draft will be another good chance to experiment as you will never see anything past the projections and current ratings. Maybe pick all guys with really odd projections? 0 durability for pitchers? 40 durability for starting pitchers.

I guess IFA is pointless too. Does everyone have a budget over $100 million?

Posted by hockey1984 on 8/28/2015 9:39:00 PM (view original):
The trades will be interesting too. No one will trade vets for prospects. No point.

The draft will be another good chance to experiment as you will never see anything past the projections and current ratings. Maybe pick all guys with really odd projections? 0 durability for pitchers? 40 durability for starting pitchers.

I guess IFA is pointless too. Does everyone have a budget over $100 million?

25 teams have budgeted over $100m for player payroll.  Two have maxed out (for a first season at $137m.  I'm third at $128m (I was hoping to spend megabucks for pitchers in FA, but I got "outbid" on max contracts for the only two FA pitchers that were worth a damn).

Surprisingly, there are a couple of owners who went low on payroll and high on prospect.  There's also a bunch in the middle who seem to have gone with the default budgets (cycles were running very erratically the first couple days of the season, and a lot of owners missed out on budget day).

And don't forget, with the draft, we can ONLY see projections since the May update.

The guys going low may also be experimenting.  Go $14M on IFA, sign every IFA you can see, and get a reasonable statistical sample to assess the quality of $14M scouting for prospects (assuming IFA is about as "fuzzy" as draft).  You could also go something like 12 HS, 10 COL and check each signed player's current ratings (and back of the napkin projections) against your projections for him.

Oh yeah, fair warning. If you find your team is in a position to make the playoffs, you'll be pulling your hair out every game. Holding a 1-0 lead will have you clenching your teeth because no Defense in the world can save your pitcher giving up the long ball. If you are down by any score in the 7th or later it's a good chance the game is over..... You'll find you hold your breath a lot reading the box scores.

I tried the "mega defense" for about 50 games when I was using a takeover team.  It didnt make the difference I expected.  Im curious to see how it works here

Posted by tecwrg on 8/28/2015 9:05:00 AM (view original):
So I'm going with the extreme defense option.  Here are the shortstops that I've been able to acquire, and the positions I'm considering for each:

NOTE: defensive ratings are (range, glove, arm strength, arm accuracy).

1B - Jed Hughes (82-90-95-96)
2B - Alex Woda (87-89-95-89)
3B - Juan Giminez (89-85-96-95)
SS - Josh Wisler (91-91-95-92)
LF - Yovani Chavez (88-85-91-90)
CF - Kenta Lee (89-89-91-92)
RF - Joe Andrews (84-88-89-99)

Bench - JD Kubinski (85-86-81-88)

My two catchers (who will platoon):

C - Stan Kozma (11-37-79-76, PC = 97)
C - Terry Guerrero (17-37-76-84, PC = 94)

And to round out my position player roster, I have:

Bench - Skip McCarty (80-86-51-61) - LH thrower, so restricted to 1B and OF - can hit, so likely will platoon as DH against RHP
Bench - Ryne Wagner (81-85-56-61)
DH - Jim Blevens (0-25-64-68, PC = 38) - decent bat, will platoon as DH against LHP

I'm going to still work towards upgrading (if possible) any of these players, but as of right now (ST games started today) this is my 13 man position player part of my roster.

Looking for any feedback on defensive assignments.

Already lost a guy, Alex Woda, to a season ending injury during spring training, so I had to move people around on the field.  So here is my revised potential defensive lineup:

1B - JD Kubinski (85-86-81-88)
2B - Juan Giminez (89-85-96-95)
3B- Joe Andrews (84-88-89-99)
SS - Josh Wisler (91-91-95-92)
LF - Jed Hughes (82-90-95-96)
CF - Kenta Lee (89-89-91-92)
RF - Yovani Chavez (88-85-91-90)

Bench - Carlos Pineda (84-76-82-79)

Still open to feedback.

I'll trade you one of my two guys on Trenton for a pitcher

Posted by tecwrg on 8/21/2015 2:25:00 PM (view original):
I know.  That's why I want the more meaningful strategy at the ML level, and restrict the stupid **** to the minor leagues.

Maybe I'll do hockey's high-temper and argumentative experiment in AA.  That's less about stats and more about how the engine handles ejections.

I can do low-temper at High A for comparison reasons.

I have a number of high-temper (75+) and low-temper (25-) guys already in my minors, so I'm going to start with them.

The tough thing about the temper rating is that it's not visible on any page except by pulling up each player's profile one by one and taking note of it.  So trying to acquire extreme temper rated players is going to be a bit cumbersome.

Posted by MikeT23 on 9/2/2015 10:03:00 AM (view original):
Quit whining.   Use the classify marker.   Red=high, orange=mid-range, green= low.

Jeez.

No ****, Sherlock.  Still gotta go pull up each player's profile to do that.

It's a one-time thing.  It shows on EVERY screen.  


Do you even play HBD?