Time to take a look back. Original comments in italic.
$70m Five Man (Luis Luis, Oh Baby, Me Gotta Go) - 90-72 (.556/.554 pythag), NL Wildcard winner, lost NLDS in 5
I couldn't come up with a pitching staff that I liked, so I cheaped out and went Petco to cover for it. Given the year range restriction and my general crappiness at low cap teams, I didn't see much of a choice. Offense is the usual Petco mix of triples/speed guys (Figgins, Castillo, Lance Johnson) and cheap OBP (Weiss, Nick Johnson). Pitching is 5 180-200 inning guys clustered in the $4-6 million range (81 Guidry, 07 Hamels, 04 Carpenter, 99 Schilling, 81 Honeycutt) who should be able to keep it together and give me a viable rotation. I hate my bullpen, but what can you do at this cap? This team is really lame but should win some games.
The OBP/triples Petco team worked pretty well, as the team put up respectable offense with great pitching. Guidry went 20-10, 2.49 ERA and won the Cy Young, so he might be a guy I go back to for future 5 man rotations.
$80m Clone Me (Marichal Raines Supreme) - 101-61 (.623/.676 pythag), NL Central winner, won World Series in 7 games
Raines was the first choice and proved to be the best. Considered Ruth, but couldn't keep the offense cheap enough. Considered Kingman, but didn't want to build a dingers-only team without being able to access deadball pitching. Ended up with five Raineses on the team instead of 3 - 82 at 2nd, 85 in left, 87 in center, 89 in right, and 01 on the bench. Since we were going to the Oakland Coliseum, I filled in the gaps with the typical cheap OBP machines (a Boggs, another Weiss, 1985 Pete Rose) and of course Gary Carter to murder opposing running games.
Unlike the hitting clone, deciding on a pitching clone was a long struggle. My initial plan was Greg Maddux, but using 94 or 95 proved too expensive and trying to build a rotation without those years was crappy. I cycled through a lot of different choices before settling on 66, 63, and 68 Juan Marichal. I had normalization concerns with those years, but the performance histories look fine so I rolled with it. The bullpen on this one is very good.
The normalization concerns were unfounded - the Marichals went 26-18 with a 2.97 ERA, 27-13 with a 3.24 ERA, and 25-13 with a 3.64 ERA, all throwing about 360 innings. Although, amusingly enough, after I had entered and read this thread, I started tinkering with another build with someone I'd missed entirely on the initial go-round - Eppa Rixey - and decided I liked that even better. The bullpen was phenomenal as advertised. 87 Raines won the MVP and 85 Raines finished second; I'm still shocked that more owners didn't clone Raines and entirely unshocked that most of the best teams universally were Raines teams. This team was hideously unlucky in expected wins even though the bullpen was an anchor, not that it matters. Swept the NLDS and NLCS, then came back from 2-1 and 3-2 deficits to win the Series as the Marichals were completely dominant throughout the playoffs. I almost want to enter a variant of this team in an OL to see how ridiculous it would be against weaker competition.
As I posted in another thread, the moral of the story is that Tim Raines owns.
$90 GM Challenge (1993 (Mostly) Metropolitan Men) - 91-71 (.562/.558 pythag), second in AL East/second in AL wildcard
Like a good Mets fan, I immediately went to the 1993 Mets for this one and never found better. The thought process was pretty simple: this Mets team has the worst Pythagorean differential in baseball history at minus-14. They lost enough games to get me 6 draft picks, but the talent was really a 4 draft pick team even before considering that I got access to a pretty good full-season Tony Fernandez shortstop that mostly wasn't on the real team. There were some good hitting (a 3B-capable Bobby Bo, a decent Jeff Kent, a strong half-season of Jeromy Burnitz, the aforementioned Fernandez) and pitching (strong third and fourth starters in Doc Gooden and Frank Tanana, two very good partial season starters that will serve as relief aces in Bret Saberhagen and Sid Fernandez) pieces already in place.
And 1993 is a really good year to be drawing draft picks from. Four were obvious. 1993 Barry Bonds is just a superb offensive force. 1993 John Olerud is a personal favorite. 1993 Chris Hoiles is a tremendous hitting/A+ arm catcher option. And a prime Greg Maddux to be the ace is never a bad thing. After those were finished, I needed a second starter and a centerfielder. The second best starter available was Kevin Appier. He's not really price-efficient because of his walk rate, but he had to be here to fit the team. For a CF, I had the option of an $8m Ken Griffey that I had concerns about normalizing, an $8m A+ range/okay hit Lenny Dykstra with too many PA, or a $5m OBP/speed Rickey with questionable defense. I went with Rickey and used the extra money to load up on extra pen innings.
That last decision may have killed my playoff aspirations, as Rickey was surprisingly mediocre (.253/.351/.380 and only 40 steals) and those extra not great innings never got used. Even more surprisingly, Appier outpitched Maddux. It's hard to complain too much about a team that came close to winning the best team without a playoff spot. I still think this was the right team for the theme and with better division/league luck probably would have been a playoff team, although I did have one team make it that absolutely didn't deserve to so it all evens out...
$100m Twist (Twistin' and Turnin' the 2002 Yanks Away) - 86-76 (.531//518 pythag), NL West winner, lost NLCS in 6 games
This was the one that gave me nightmares. The initial idea was a $100,000 Infield-era Philadelphia A's team. But I couldn't make the defense work. The second idea was the 1928 A's, an already great team that had access to the last great seasons of Speaker, Cobb, and Collins plus prime seasons of Foxx, Grove, Cochrane, Bishop, and Simmons. But I couldn't even get over $40m in pitching for that team - it was really going to be ugly. So after playing with some more options like the Ruth/Gehrig-era Yankees, Speaker/Ruth-era Red Sox, and Joss/Lajoie-era Indians, I eventually landed on the Torre-era Yankees. And it looks like a heck of a lot of people are in the same boat, so at least that's good. Ended up going with 2002 as the best option to get access to the best in hitting (99 Jeter and Bernie) and pitching (05 Clemens and Pettitte and 99 Rivera).
I should have used one of the A's teams - alleyviper came up with a way to get around the bullpen issues that worked splendidly for him, and the fielding could have been solved with a little creativity too. Or the 05 Tankees like most everyone else that took late Yankees teams and did very well with them. This team wasn't that good - good but not elite modern hitters and average modern starting pitching is not a winning recipe, and I know that. Got really lucky to make the playoffs and even luckier to advance. I'll take the points here and run away.
$120m Power/Speed (Why Does It Always Raines On Me?) - 102-60 (.630/.652 pythag), AL Central winner, won World Series in 7 games
The basic construction was "build the best 1500 inning pitching staff that will allow the least dingers for the theme, then backfill the offense." So we've got an 00 Pedro, 04 Unit, 64 Koufax, and 68 Tiant rotation filled out by a bunch of great relievers right around that 0.50 HR minimum mark. Working backwards from that $61m pitching staff, it struck me that there's no way other than catcher - such as park or pitcher - to suppress steals. But there absolutely is a way to to suppress power - use the Astrodome. So I built the best damn OBP/speed offense I could, figuring that between the as close to dinger suppressing as possible pitching and the park that I should be able to neutralize the power teams. I suspect others had the same idea.
And this is quite an OBP/speed team here - 87 Raines, 75 Morgan, 85 Rickey, 92 Bip Roberts, 93 Jefferies, 87 Molitor, 87 Gwynn. There's two concessions to price/feasibility here. There simply is no catcher with a D+ or worse arm, good on-base ability, and lots of steals at high percentage, so I picked a cheaper OBP guy that has enough pop to help on the road in Dick Dietz. And needing to save a bunch of money, I went with a more modest OBP/speed solution at short in my third Walt Weiss, who really needs to get a price increase so I don't get backed into using him so much.
As I suspected, pitching/speed in the Astrodome was the way to go here almost across the board. Another odd Rickey underperformance, as Walt Weiss put up a substantially better OBP (.350 to .324). There isn't much to say here - everyone got on base, almost everyone stole a ton of bases, the middle of the order had some pop on the road, and the pitching was great for the cap and theme.
$140m Across the Decades (Hold Me Closer Tiny Bonham) - 91-71 (.562/.575 pythag), NL Wildcard winner, lost World Series in 6 games
Similar to $120m theme, I wanted to screw the teams that are going to load on homers as much as possible. So I combined the best 1625 inning staff the theme could buy - a 00 Pedro, 95 Maddux, 08 Addie, 68 Gibson rotation with a super-pen of dinger-suppressing WHIP < 1 guys. Then I built the lineup around extreme average/doubles hitters - 88 Boggs, 99 Delahanty, 87 O'Neill, 19 Ruth, 93 Olerud, 00 Nomar, 02 LaJoie, 28 Foxx - and put the team in the +2/+4/+3/-3/-3 Palace of the Fans. I think it's going to be a pretty different lineup than what most have, but my experience is limited at this cap so I'm more or less guessing whether it'll work.
It was a pretty different lineup and it did work, although there was only a one game home/road split. I did learn some things about high caps here - the much more expensive Tip O'Neill got outperformed by Ruth even though the park should have strongly favored Ruth. So that's probably it for my Tip excursions. Non-elite long relievers, including namesake Tiny Bonham were a bad idea, and one of the contributors to my big playoff run was being able to dump them in favor of starters in relief. But I'd never played over $100m before and won a World Series and lost one in the two themes here, so all-in-all a success.
I really didn't have great expectations for all this when it started. Must be beginner's luck.