70 Million - Born Sandy Devotional
Somehow I misremembered the theme rules, and started building a team where the stars were over $7 million. That was a tough theme! When I reread the rules, and saw that I could use $6 million players, it was much easier.
Anyway, the pitching on these stars & scrubs themes is usually easy - stars for starters, scrubs for relievers. I wonder if it would be useful to make the rules be about $/IP - say all players over $32K/IP or under $16K/IP?
The position players are more interesting. Usually I would just platoon in a stars and scrubs league, and then have all lefty pitchers to combat the platoons. But I couldn’t make either side of that work. Instead I went with a team full of switch hitters who can play lots of positions. My fielding stats at the end of the year should look completely crazy; I might end up with 4 or 5 people having spent some time at every position on the diamond. Except of course for C and 1B, where I have the stars.
The team name is from one of my favourite great songs and odd songs LPs, the Triffids’ second album, featuring ‘Wide Open Road’ and a lot of very strange album tracks. It seemed to fit a stars and scrubs theme nicely.
Batting: 5499 PA, .287/.384/.399
Pitching: 1357 IP, 101 HR, Whip 1.10
80 Million - Rhys ap Tewdwr
At first I tried to make work with pitchers who had both starter and reliever years. But I couldn’t get the pieces to fall in place for Eck, and I don’t like Smoltz, and none of the others looked attractive. So I started trying to build around my favourite single season teams at this cap, the 80s Cards teams. For some reason the first John Tudor team I tried was a mess. So I spend ages looking at others, basically working through everyone who started for the Cards any time in the late–80s. Finally I had another go at Tudor, and this time the pieces fell into place. I can’t believe I spent so long on the various options when my second (serious) attempt should have worked. The name is of the 11th Century Welsh king that the English House of Tudor was descended from.
Hitters: 5589 PA, .290/.376/.415
Pitchers: 1402 IP, 88 HR, Whip 1.13
90 Million - Seattle All-Stars of 2010
My usual starting point in these win-loss based themes is to look for teams that way under-performed their Pythagorean record. But none of them worked. The second idea was to try and find teams that were just over one or other of the thresholds. That didn’t work that well either, though it was a useful constraint in later searches. The third idea was to find an early C20 team with good hitters where each of the twists/free agents could be used for a mega-IP star pitcher. This did work - there were plenty of options. The 1914 Whales would be great if you like playing in Wrigley. (I don’t.) The 1902 Orphans would win a lot of games. I almost chose a 1903 team, but there aren’t enough $300K players that year. I would definitely have used a 19th Century team if there were enough $300K players, but I couldn’t even make a legal roster.
Finally I decided to look for modern teams with good enough pitching, and a poor enough record to fill in the gaps with hitters. Modern years mean that there is always a good player at each position to fill in. And the 2010 Mariners were just about perfect. 7 twists, plus a good Ichiro, mean that I could have gone with All-Stars at every spot on the diamond. But I got a bit nervous about the pitching, and decided I needed one reinforcement. That meant sticking with the great fielding, but woeful hitting, of Franklin Guttierez in CF.
But the rest of the lineup - what fun! Speed at top and bottom, power in the middle, unbelievable gloves everywhere. I ended up spending over $56M on hitting, which is more than I spent in the $120M league. Indeed, I only spent $2M more than that the $110M league, or this could have been my most expensive lineup in all 6 leagues. I thought about changing my $110M team so that it was, then decided that would be dumb. Still, I wonder how many owners don’t have any lineups as expensive as this team, despite the low cap.
The worry is that I’ll leak runs of course. But the pitchers are pretty good, for their price, the park will help some, and the defence will help a lot. And we should score a lot. I don’t know if this team will win the most games, but it is my favourite. (And what great puzzles the last two themes were!)
Hitting: 5843 PA, .299/.370/.468
Pitching: 1368 IP, 139 HR, 1.20 whip
100 Million - Seattle Giants
After the fun of that team, this is the most boring selection I could have made. I always use Giants for franchises if given a choice. I like using Seattle bullpens, and Safeco, and so that was a natural complement. The only thing that’s unusual about this team is how much I’m spending on pitching - over $55M. I usually spend more on position players, so this was odd. But otherwise this is just about a cookie team. I felt a little bad when schwarze said there were interesting choices in this theme; I felt like I was being boring.
Hitters: 5536 PA, .299/.391/.401
Pitchers: 1425 IP, 43 HR, Whip 0.85
110 Million - Tallulah
There were lots of reports of this being a tough theme, but it all came together fairly easily for me. I was able to use most of the kinds of players I always use: 19th century hitters at positions where D isn’t so important, early 20th century pitchers (plus Ty Cobb!), middle infield from the 80s, some sluggers and low-ish IP starters from the 21st century. When I was building the team I tried to get every era as close to $20 million as possible, and actually got it so tight I needed to go back and add dollars at the end. The DH situation I’ve got is a little weird, and I only have one real SP, but I can live with both of those things, especially when the 1 SP is 1908 Joss. I’ll have lots of nice lefty/righty tandems to run out there, but since I don’t expect there will be many platoons in this league they won’t be as effective as normal.
The title is the Go-Betweens fifth record, keeping with both the 5s theme of the league, and the 80s feel to my team.
Hitters: 6258 PA, .319/.422/.461
Pitchers: 1450 IP, 44 HR, Whip 0.89
120 Million - The Black Diamond Express
I didn’t like this theme as much as I normally like WISC themes. (And I should say that I thought overall this year’s were great - especially the 80M and 90M themes.) I thought the HR/9 rate allowed was much too low, and didn’t force us to make difficult choices. I tried to make a list of the starting pitchers I most wanted to fit in given the theme rules, and I think the first 100 were all ones that qualified under the HR/9 > 0.5 rather than WHIP > 1.1. I would have preferred having HR/9 > 1 as the requirement, to make us more nervous about conceding HRs, and given us more reason to think about the high WHIP pitchers.
I actually don’t think Coors is such a great park for HR hitters. It’s true it has +4 for both LF and RF, but it has +2 or +3 for everything, and HR are so expensive to pay for in hitters that I’m still not sure it is worth it. So I actually don’t have much power in my team. My aim is to win games by getting on base, staying out of GIDPs (real killers in Coors, and a reason to avoid having a team of sluggers), forcing opponents to offer up Long A and Long B pitchers, and then hopefully batting around a few times in the late innings of games. (I have speedy hitters to stay out of GIDPs, so I could in principle get SBs, but I think I’ll mostly avoid that.) So I don’t need too many HR, even if there will some pitchers around who give up some. Conversely, I’m much more scared of fatigue hell death spiral than of giving up a bomb or two. So all my pitchers, and most of my fielders, are chosen to get outs and get them quickly, even if there is a HR or two given up along the way. Even with all my pitchers qualifying under the HR rule, I only have 107 real life HRs. Maybe I’ll give up 200 in the sim, but I think I can live with that.
The big question is how many IP you need. I ran a lot of games through Sim Matchup using my own hitters. Since I normally lead my leagues in pitches faced, I figured this would be a reasonable guide to what I needed in a staff. And it suggested I needed about 150 pitches/game. So I have that, but only just. A few extra inning games early in the year and I could be in trouble. Hopefully with all the HRs around, there won’t be many zeroes being put up in late innings, so games shouldn’t go too long. Otherwise it will be time to start managing fatigue rather actively, and that’s not so much fun.
Hitters: 5758 PA (too few?), .324/.424/.500
Pitchers: 1580 IP, 106 HR, Whip 0.86