It’s not that the theme is hard, but that 50% of the seasons the players have aren’t usable. You have hall of famers with 20 year careers and are only given access to a small handful of them. It takes away the fun of going through rose’s 30 year career and finding a fun teammate. Or Don Sutton scanning the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, or Schmidt and Brett being done still in their prime. Just so many fun potential options that aren’t available

Posted by redcped on 5/13/2024 5:41:00 PM (view original):
Interesting. I probably spent the second-least time on the boxes theme, actually. I built one version, saw a couple areas I could improve it, built V2 and just went with it. Now, they might suck, I'll grant you ... but it didn't vex me like the 70M did.

I'm honestly surprised how many peeps are saying the $70M is pure torture in terms of difficulty. I mean, yes it involves a fair amount of research but it wasn't even in my top 2 for difficulty.

Anytime I see a theme that says roll with a real life baseball team with a small number of additions/subtractions, I'm looking for one that was probably quite successful IRL...that's a great way to narrow the search.

Meanwhile, the boxes theme vexed me to no end lol. I have a functioning roster now, but I'm still not enthusiastic about it and it may very well be my worst team of the six.

What makes this Championship fun and challenging is that everybody has a different opinion of which themes are hard/easy, which rosters builds are fun/torture. It forces everybody to build at least a couple of teams, that falls outside their comfort zone.

I think the general idea of the theme is fine. Having 17-20 players on the list have their careers crippled due to a years restriction is what I find pointless in this theme. If we wanted a specific year range to be used, different players should have been selected to add variability imo

I thought the $100M theme was great, especially combined with Round 2 at a different cap where you have to think about who you want to save for Round 2.

Overall I like these themes more than any year I've participated, goes to show you can't please everybody.

It's always odd to me when people say they aren't playing because of the themes. The whole point of the WIS Championship has always been to force people out of their comfort zones and find a way to win with different caps, players, parameters, etc.

For the Box theme, I get the frustration over the years (I was hoping to snag Walsh's or Alexander's stud low-inning seasons, or one of Walter Johnson's good years), but that still doesn't make the theme bad. There are plenty of options and iterations available with the players provided.

Posted by justinlee_24 on 5/13/2024 6:55:00 PM (view original):

Posted by redcped on 5/13/2024 5:41:00 PM (view original):
Interesting. I probably spent the second-least time on the boxes theme, actually. I built one version, saw a couple areas I could improve it, built V2 and just went with it. Now, they might suck, I'll grant you ... but it didn't vex me like the 70M did.

I'm honestly surprised how many peeps are saying the $70M is pure torture in terms of difficulty. I mean, yes it involves a fair amount of research but it wasn't even in my top 2 for difficulty.

Anytime I see a theme that says roll with a real life baseball team with a small number of additions/subtractions, I'm looking for one that was probably quite successful IRL...that's a great way to narrow the search.

Meanwhile, the boxes theme vexed me to no end lol. I have a functioning roster now, but I'm still not enthusiastic about it and it may very well be my worst team of the six.

The $70M theme was a blast for me. The hard part was that I never quite know what is "good enough" statistically for a cap that low.

However, I bet everyone will be using some players they've never had to use/rely on before, which is another great aspect of this tournament. We don't need leagues full of cookies and oft-used players. I loved doing the research for this. It was cool to see the caps on some of these teams. Some were way lower than I expected, others significantly higher.

This:

Quote post by Jtpsops on 5/14/2024 8:31:00 AM:

...The hard part was that I never quite know what is "good enough" statistically for a cap that low...

I don't have the foggiest idea what a good $70M team looks like. All I know is that I built 16 teams for this theme, settled on one, and then read this thread and realized that we can't use combined seasons. I doubt that any of the teams I assembled didn't have at least one key player who was a combined season, so it's back to the drawing board. I'm not at all complaining about the theme at all; it's great to use different players and I enjoy the challenge. It's just nerve-wracking to keep looking for something when you're not even sure what you're looking for. The $120M theme is also a PITA but at least there I'm able to recognize when I've found something good. The $70M is definitely the hardest for me.

This:

Quote post by Jtpsops on 5/14/2024 8:33:00 AM:
It's always odd to me when people say they aren't playing because of the themes. The whole point of the WIS Championship has always been to force people out of their comfort zones and find a way to win with different caps, players, parameters, etc.

And I will say this about the 100M year restrictions - perhaps we could have gone with 1920-1990, but the point remains that I see the deadball era players and the current era players used much more regularly than everyone else in the themes I play, so it's a nice break to force some use of players in between.

My experience in the (now possibly defunct) Cooperstown Historical Replay league gave me a different attitude about the 70M theme. When you've been managing real rosters with no alterations for many seasons, you get used to dealing with weak areas you'd never voluntarily choose. I've played teams with a bunch of D- range infielders, shortages of PA at key positions, one good pitcher on the whole staff, you name it.
So being out of my comfort zone doesn't bother me. What bothered me was how hard it was to find a workable roster (and then when I thought I had one, it had one Combined key player and I couldn't make it work with out him). So it was a bit frustrating in that respect, but it's kind of fun knowing there will be weaknesses on every team. Probably a few. I wish I knew which ones were hardest to survive, alas.

Posted by 06gsp on 5/14/2024 6:57:00 AM (view original):
I thought the $100M theme was great, especially combined with Round 2 at a different cap where you have to think about who you want to save for Round 2.

Overall I like these themes more than any year I've participated, goes to show you can't please everybody.

Most years I would have built the R2 roster first to get one I was really happy with, in order not to use someone I needed to save. But I got rushed this year and completely punted on that. So I may have set myself up for frustration if I'm fortunate enough to make it through. I'm currently at the phase of "all my teams are mediocre, I just know it."

Posted by Jtpsops on 5/14/2024 8:33:00 AM (view original):
It's always odd to me when people say they aren't playing because of the themes. The whole point of the WIS Championship has always been to force people out of their comfort zones and find a way to win with different caps, players, parameters, etc.

For the Box theme, I get the frustration over the years (I was hoping to snag Walsh's or Alexander's stud low-inning seasons, or one of Walter Johnson's good years), but that still doesn't make the theme bad. There are plenty of options and iterations available with the players provided.

Well, I will say this year's themes are harder as a group than they have been in past years, and year restrictions on deadballers/cookies did the rest. I think the increased difficulty and the inability to roster the players owners are used to rostering made them decide not to play.

I almost always hit the ground running in terms of building teams - often times I could have 3 or 4 out of 6 teams done within a week. Usually all 6 teams will be done within 3 weeks.

This year, I had exactly one done within a week - the easy one (the $80M). I think I got the clone one done not too long afterwards, and then I got stuck for at least two weeks.

Then I finally found the team I was looking for in the $70M (most of the other ones I had been looking at were either incomplete teams or were in salary cap hell), and around the same time I finalized my 13th warrior roster after endless tinkering. Sometime afterwards, I finished the roster for the $70M (It wasn't exactly as easy as I thought to finalize the roster once I had the team, but I did not look for other possibilities as I knew there was no way I was finding a better seed team).

The Pick 5 proved to be very difficult, as most of my attempts were coming in under the salary cap, and not by a little either. Then I realized what I had been doing wrong - as usual, I had been emphasizing cost effective players as I usually do for non-high caps. I think the key to this theme is to see it as a high cap league, but with significant roster restrictions.

Despite starting on it early, the box theme was by far the worst. My other 5 teams had been done for like 2+ weeks before I was able to even get a roster together for this one, and I decided I'm going to settle for whatever this roster does simply because it shouldn't block most of the valuable players from my potential R2 roster. I haven't even built that one yet because this theme is so vexing.

EDIT: The two main reasons the box theme is so vexing is the year restrictions (as others have pointed out, many players in the boxes have seasons, maybe even career seasons outside of the restrictions) and the teammates cannot be a player in any of the boxes rule (e.g. if you roster Gaylord Perry, you cannot pick Juan Marichal or Willie McCovey as a teammate - they will have to be separate choice(s)).

I love the Box theme. Not only did I build my $120M (round 2) roster first, but I built three $100M rosters that I liked and had a hard time figuring out which one to submit. My favorite part of this theme is finding usable teammates - even finding usable starting position players. There is no requirement that you have to pick a player from the box that you have to start.

I viewed the box theme as a cool puzzle to put together. You've got to find the pieces that fit, and it's not exactly plug-and-play like constructing some other rosters. You really need to tinker to find the best way to complete the whole puzzle.

That said, I didn't even attempt a Round 2 roster, so if I get there, I may feel differently trying to put that team together.

The teammate aspect justinlee mentioned was the most challenging part to me. Often you had a plum teammate available that would fit, but you weren't allowed to use them.

Posted by schwarze on 5/14/2024 12:31:00 PM (view original):
I love the Box theme. Not only did I build my $120M (round 2) roster first, but I built three $100M rosters that I liked and had a hard time figuring out which one to submit. My favorite part of this theme is finding usable teammates - even finding usable starting position players. There is no requirement that you have to pick a player from the box that you have to start.

That occurred to me early - but unfortunately, there's a catch.

Let's say you find a SS you love as a teammate. Great! Now you still have to roster a box SS in addition to the teammate you drafted. Oh, and he had better not cost too much, or else that's tons of wasted salary in a $100M league. And if you managed to do all that, he better not throw off the rest of your roster, because you can't have two players from one box or two players from the same row either (for example, you can't have two OF2s or Two LHP1s).