post your strategy here if you're so inclined

$70m 07CWS 15Whales 85Toro 17&96Pirates

Looked cumbersome but I ended up enjoying this draft. Plenty of players for this cap just need to find teams with everybody "in the zone". Streamlined the selection process searching for key players then clicking on their teams..After finding 5 or 6 suitable teams at each position I stopped looking. Good enough for me. Compared them, matched the parts, went light on hitter stamina filling in with a boatload of 205k exemptions.

Straight to deadball pitchers for several reasons. High IP means fewer SP needed which means better odds of everybody fitting. They are priced better at this cap. Leaves more roster spots. And hitting .200 is meaningful in this theme. Most suitable teams had barely 1000 innings which put too much strain on finding RPs. 1907 White Sox had 1100 innings for under $30M from Ed Walsh, Doc White and Frank Smith. Could've added a 4th SP for all 1330 innings but didn't relish back-to-back game fatigue. RP from 1915 Chicago Whales, though not specifically looking for deadballers. They had 3 role players. Dave Black high inning Long A, Rankin Johnson Long B, and Bill Bailey low inning closer. Will also rotate #2 and #3 SP into the pen and probably won't PH much. Add a $205k mop and I'm good to go.

1985 BlueJays were the most balanced and among the most affordable Infield teams I found. 5 guys for $16.2M. Willie Upshaw, Damasco Garcia, Rance Mullinix, Tony Fernandez, with Garth Iorg backing everybody up. OF unexpectedly ended up in deadball territory again. Senators were the best choice (I bet you never heard that before). 1917 had Sam Rice and Clyde Milan affordable high PA hitters to leadoff, and 400pa Mike Menosky with good glove. Saved Catcher for last so I knew exactly how much money I had left to spend. Jason Kendall and Keith Osik of the 1996 Pirates. 4900 total PA and fill in with 8 $205k exemptions.



$80m Right Throwers Wrong Hitters
Can make a better staff with Righties. Lefty hitters do better against them. I'm not going to second guess what others will select. If you went against the grain and drafted lefty pitchers, more power to you.
Joe McGinnity and Cy Morgan and Ed Reulbach are bargains I've used in this price range. Added Tully Sparks then went all the way to 1932 for Lon Warneke, Modern pitchers are overpriced at this cap. Added middle year pitchers to the bullpen.
At this price range stellar glove might not be better than maintaining the hitting. So I split the difference with an Infield of Runnels Baker and Travis. McCann a good hitting Catcher as long as there's not too much running. Lefebvre filling in at C and other places too. Wheat and Doc Miller since I'm looking for average, then save money with low priced Dave Parker and Willie Smith. Fill in with several .300 hitting bench players.


$90M Giants 08-31-54
The flaw in this theme is most combos don't have enough cheap players to fill 25 roster spots without significant waste. Had to find some that had several cheap players I could use and several near $200k to waste. Spent the most time on this theme doing searches and drafting several teams. All had several flaws. Pitching was a nightmare so I started by looking for one team that could provide the bulk of my pitching. Then look for good hitters, then check the 3rd year to see if all the pieces fit, draft those that look right, then pick the best of those teams after I got tired of searching.

Christy Mathewson is heavy for $90m but he'll be good for the playoffs where I dropped 7 spots in round 1. Snake Wiltse and Carl Hubbell are adequate SP with high innings and decent bat. Red Ames and Hoyt Wilhelm in relief along with 2 bums and 2 mops. Good amount of hitting for $43M led by Terry Ott Donlin Mueller. Travis Jackson a good SS at a position many combos had trouble with. Hank Thompson saves money at 3rd. Hughie Critz bats 9th for half the games to keep his glove active, then two backup 2B with ok bat but terrible glove. Hey, I said every team had flaws. Shanty Hogan and a backup at C.


$100m Blacklist
Standard league without cookies. No extreme strategies here just draft good players most of whom I've used several times before.


$110m
Rule following was a problem, Got bounced out twice after the deadline. Apparently I'm not anal retentive enough to follow the restrictions.
I saved Ed Walsh and Shane Bieber for the more important round 2. Also saved speedsters planning to build a speed team. Had second thoughts about that but did it anyway. Not SB just baserunning prowess and staying out of double plays.

King Kelly was supposed to catch, instead I drafted Ewing and shifted the King to 2b. buh-bye Frisch. Reilly a speedster 1b with + plays. Ty Cobb of course. And 7 part time Outfielders turned up in my searches. Brett and Andrus the slowpoke 82 speed infielders. Mordecai Brown completes a stellar rotation with the underpriced Cy Morgan in relief. Murray Rigney and several little guys.


$120m checkbox league.
My least favorite theme because it takes away my best strategies. Telling us what generic roles to fill and where to spend money. And a number of combinations eliminated because the stamina didn't work out.

Ed Seward was a reluctant choice. Without him I'm stretching to get enough innings and spending more than I want on pitching. Justin Bieber my choice for 2020. Couldn't finagle a good 2-B starter I needed the money for Ruth. so I went with Tiant's mediocre 188ip year. Don't need another full SP so the mighty Greg Maddux is playing mopup. Nehf is my albatross pitcher he wastes the least amount of extra cash. Liam and Lloyd in the pen. Ron Reed at looong reliever, this type of pitcher is notoriously hard to use efficiently. Fewer pitchers than I prefer but it works in a DH league with no removal for pinch hitters.

Infield boxes have a lot of gold glove no hit wonders. I bucked the trend, other than Aparicio I drafted hitters rather than defenders in the infield because I like a more balanced hitting attack. 3B Tony Perez better hitting makes up for the glove. 2B Grantham a close call, tiebreaker was his extra PA . Couldn't resist stellar but non-full-time Soto and Mantle. Didn't want to overspend on Babe but coudn't punt the bench Ruth and get enough stamina with the plethora of part time players we're forced to draft. so 1930 Babe. Clements at C saves money. Cy Seymour not bad for under $6m. Wakefield Turner and Skowron at the halftime slots, 1B box insufficient so I'ill often play 1b out of position. Bench has 4 backups and a pinch runner.

70m

The hardest part here was finding a usable infield, what put me on the right track was getting owned by redcped and the 1978 Brewers in the Cooperstown Historical Replay league and thinking "wow that infield looks pretty good!". Super rangy Yount at shortstop, speedy and cheap Molitor at second base, rangy Cooper at first with a good bat, and then overpriced Don Money at third (but at least his A+ glove will minimize errors). 1904 Americans starting pitching, with a monster Cy Young and a very good Bill Dineen behind him, as we only have six non mop-up pitchers we will need a lot of complete games but these guys threw complete games every time out so they can go deep into the game Two relievers from the 2021 Dodgers to fill in the pieces and let me use Dodger Stadium, some 19th century outfielders for speed and cheap range, and Jack Clements at catcher to give the team some power somewhere. I have the same starting catcher in the 70m and 120m which seems like a really bad idea, we shall see.

80m

I figured the majority would go with right-handed pitching since there are more cookie options, so left-handed hitting was the choice, I went back and forth on pitching and eventually decided on left handed, really not sure why it was a while ago. My bigger decision was to get a bit crazy and choose Mile High Stadium, on the logic that other people would hate facing me and I could get a lot out of my super-rangy fielders (in the infield at least). Looking at my roster now and I somehow decided playing an outfield at first base was a good idea. Not ideal! But we will score a ton of runs against the mostly right-handed pitching staffs out there, so there's that.

90m

Spent more time on this one than any other, tried to make something work with the 2020 Dodgers but couldn't find anything I liked. Ended up settling on the modern Astros, which was somewhat surprisingly by far the most popular pick. Our pitching is excellent with 2019 Verlander and Cole along with 1981 Sutton and Knepper, plus a strong bullpen, but the lineup is a bit shaky and doesn't fit the Astrodome, but I felt I had to limit Verlander and Cole HRs and help with being a bit short on innings. Also the defense is awful and I hate having bad fielding teams. Not optimistic here.

100m

Went heavy on deadball doubles hitters on offense and a bunch of cheaper, rarely used pitchers in the 100 to 200 innings pitched range. This one will take a lot of active managing but should do OK. We don't have as much range as I'd like.

110m

I used up most of the modern ace years in Round 1 so went with the Bernhard/Walsh combo in Round 2 that several others are using as well. This is another doubles heavy team except I'm also using a Ruth, hoping some saved their modern aces for Round 2. Results could depend a bit on alignment.

120m

My main strategic goal is here was to go as left-handed heavy on offense as possible, based on the lack of good left handed starter options. Also went very heavy on home runs since if you didn't draft Seward or King your pitching is necessarily mostly modern. On the most interesting strategic question of the theme (second base, third base, shortstop) I went with all bat no glove at 2B and 3B and all glove no bat at SS. We are so bad on defense besides shortstop and center field but will hopefully score enough runs to make up for it. Also went with a very cheap HR happy Clements at catcher to save money, he's gonna make Dave Kingman look like Ichiro with his average but hopefully he can run into a few HRs in the short porch of Yankee III.

I'm impressed you found a way to use those 78 Brewers! I looked at them, but the PA just didn't work out well for me with essentially 5 guys I had to rotate around all season. I couldn't take all 5, but I couldn't figure out which one not to take! Looks like you left Bando off. Interesting!

we'll have Gantner and 200k scrubs backing up plus using one of the outfielders as a first base backup sometimes, even then fatigue may be a problem

Some of you might have reasonable confidence in your rosters, though I’m frankly pretty unsure how that’s even possible. I could see all of these teams making the playoffs or losing 90 games, because I can’t really picture how they’ll stack up. Maybe I found the nuggets in my research and built some teams that are a bit stronger than average that wind up in the right divisions. Or maybe I just came up with some bad fits that match up poorly and never gain traction. Or succumb to fatigue. Or don’t win much at home. Or just muddle along and do the sort of disappointing I’m building up to expect, so any actual success will be a very pleasant bonus.

Musical interlude: “Hope for the Best, Expect the Worst”
https://youtu.be/t2lh8zQFCYs

I missed Round 2 for a couple seasons, and it’s honestly just exciting to be here. I finished 14th in 2018 and hit my high mark at 7th in 2019 before a couple of head-scratching R1 flameouts. A top 10 finish would be amazing, but even 24th is nothing to shake a stick at. So I won’t make any predictions here. I wrote up the thought and research process as best I could.

I added some video links, too, so just enjoy those if you prefer. I probably put more thought into those than some of these roster decisions … Or you can try to guess the theme to my team names. Or just skip to barracuda’s writeup, which will have the distinct advantage of humor that this one probably badly needs. With no further ado, let’s get to these suckers …

70M: I Shall Be Researched

So the positive thing about this theme was the opportunity to research the entire history of baseball, which is always diverting if you have a few spare weeks. I tried originally to work with teams I’d used in various themes and see if I could squeeze them into a 70m restricted roster … but it turns out this is not a remotely easy thing to do. 80m would have allowed some wiggle room in case you couldn’t quite find the collection at each position that met the salary/IP/PA limit, but 70m was quite unforgiving.

I started out trying to use the 1986 Tigers infield, which I had remembered from high school for having all 20-homer hitters. My friend Marc had a satellite dish in his backyard because his family was from Detroit and wanted to watch all their teams. Anyway, I heard so much about the Tigers in those days and we were actually excited about Darnell Coles getting his 20th homer on the last day of the season to complete the infield (plus catcher, and Gibby as well) feat. But forget about all that. It was a pointless digression. You need to spend about $20M to roster the necessary guys and that wasn’t going to cut it.

I scanned through all the surrounding Trammell-Whitaker years in vain and then moved on to my childhood infield, Garvey-Lopes-Russell-Cey, but none were workable. I tried some of the late 80s Blue Jays outfields with Bell-Moseby-Barfield. I tried the early-40s Cardinals SP groups. I tried a few 2020 relief corps, couldn’t fit the 2001 Mariners at all, and then plugged in the 2002 Angels. I was working for a daily paper’s sports section that year in SoCal, so I was a daily witness to how effective that pen was behind Troy Percival, the only guy most people will remember. Sure they walk too many guys, but they’re hard to hit and you can’t get everything at 70M. Anyway, that Angels pen was the only early combination that I managed to stick with. After trying out several seasons and teams I remembered from various themes with nothing else fitting, however, I had to go into research mode for everything else.

I’m sure other people found more effective shortcuts, but mine was fairly painstaking. I selected variables that would show me groups of players who had the potential to be good matches, then searched decade by decade to find candidates. Then I took my list of candidate groupings and looked carefully at each option, did salary calculations, made notes on strengths and weaknesses, and then started plugging in the cheapest groups that met my main criteria. I hope this method showed me enough of the best options, but I’m about to see 23 other rosters with nothing in common with mine that will show me I certainly missed some better ones.

Where did I land? My first complement to that Angels bullpen was going to be the 1917 Giants rotation, but they wound up being a bit too expensive once I settled on my infield and outfield and needed more than $2M to acquire catchers. That pushed me to the 1906 Pirates rotation, minus Vic Willis – Sam Leever, Deacon Phillippe, Lefty Leifeld, and Mike Lynch, plus a couple low-inning guys. They give me 1000 IP for about $24.5M, plus 6 Angels (all RHP unfortunately) who add up to about $9.5M. The Pirates guys don’t give up many homers or walks, but of course they put the ball in play so I needed some decent defense here.

My 3 favorite outfields wound up being the 2020 Jays (all RH, and weak on defense), 2007 Reds (good all around with a lot of power), and the 1987 Pirates (won a WS with them in the Cooperstown League and remembered them fondly). I liked the speed and good LH Pirates bats from Bonds and Van Slyke, but I couldn’t squeeze the salaries in. The Reds won out for their balance, giving me Adam Dunn, Ken Griffey Jr., and Josh Hamilton with a combined 89 HR, and bringing a park that favored them in Great American.

My Cooperstown League experience did pay off with one group ultimately, the 2000 White Sox infield that I managed to a playoff berth. Of course, that group had Frank Thomas in the lineup and a couple great OF, but the IF of Paul Konerko, Ray Durham, Jose Valentin, and Herb Perry did a good amount of damage in a league that’s close to this in salary average. They’re solid enough defensively keyed by Valentin’s A+ range, have a pair of switch-hitters who can run a bit, and they all can hit it out.

Musical Interlude: The Kinks, “Low Budget”
https://youtu.be/FbCZJbPcJFI

All that left me about $3.4M for catchers and bench scrubs with 3 roster spots to fill. Initially I filled both backup catching spots with <205K guys, and used the remaining cash for the best catcher I could find. I had 118 PA from the scrubs, so I didn’t have to find two guys on the same team who fit as a combination. This was definitely the best position to save for last.

The initial pick was 2007 Jason Varitek for a hair under $3M, which satisfied the theme. I got it all written up … and then it occurred to me that I could probably get a better catcher if I tossed aside the 38 IP from Chappie McFarland of the ‘06 Pirates and replaced him with a mop. It freed up over 400K, so I searched catchers again and landed on 2018 Yasmani Grandal, another switch-hitter who throws out more guys and has more power than Varitek, roughly a 50-point OPS boost. Rewrite on the end of the narrative!

I haven’t the first clue if this is really a good team for this league, though statistically it’s better than my R1 team almost across the board. I’m hoping that proves a good omen. I’m counting on seeing quite a few deadballers and teams in extreme pitchers’ parks that negate my team’s power, and maybe with infinite time I could have developed a roster less susceptible to that. Yeah, that’s probably going to bite me.

(Update: Started looking at other rosters, and it’s absolutely going to bite me. Hello, 70-win season! And I had time to write all this crap up, so I can’t really say I didn’t have any way of finding another hitting combination. Too late now!)

Lineup:
S 2000 Ray Durham 2B .280/.361/.450
L 2007 Josh Hamilton RF .292/.368/.554 and R 2007 Norris Hopper RF .329/.371/.388
R 2007 Adam Dunn LF .264/.386/.554
L 2007 Ken Griffey Jr. CF .277/.372/.496
R 2000 Paul Konerko 1B .298/.363/.481
R 2000 Herb Perry 3B .308/.356/.483
S 2000 Jose Valentin SS .273/.343/.491
S 2018 Yasmani Grandal C .241/.349/.466

R 1906 Sam Leever 276 IP, 2.32 ERA, 1.08 WHIP
L 1906 Lefty Leiveld 271, 1.87, 1.10
R 1906 Deacon Phillippe 232, 2.37, 1.11
R 1906 Mike Lynch 126, 2.42, 1.11

Raw stats:
5237 PA, .278/.358/.476, 251 2B, 27 3B, 200 HR, 86/29 SB/CS
1,341 IP, 2.46 ERA, .235 OAV, 1.14 WHIP, 0.34 HR/9


80M: Don’t Think Twice, Hits All Right

The logical way to approach this, to me anyway, was to build entire rosters of righties and lefties, splitting the money as evenly as possible, and then see if either group stood out in any way. Short answer: NO! My RH lineup had a .305/.375/.470 slash, and my LH group had a .305/.375/.466. Not a lot of space there! My RH pitchers had a 2.44 ERA, .222 OAV, 1.02 WHIP, and 0.34 HR/9. My LH pitchers had a 2.44 ERA, .229 OAV, 1.02 WHIP, and 0.35 HR/9. Not a lot of space there either! Not helpful, people.

The other useful piece of information would be whether any ballpark favored one side enough to tailor a lineup to it. There are, I think, 3 parks with at least a margin of 2 in the HR numbers between the two fields, but since neither of my lineups relies too much on homers there wasn’t much sense in pushing for a + HR park. The best advantage I could get from the park would be to hurt any opponent who chose the opposite of what I did. Hilltop was tempting for the 0 LF/-3 RF split, but I just didn’t see being able to field a team that would benefit from the +3 everywhere else, especially since my pitching staffs were decidedly lower on innings. Going nowhere here.

Finally, there was the question of whether trying to outguess everyone could be useful. I certainly tried. I think I convinced myself equally of all possible combinations at one point or another. My initial thinking was that it was harder to build either of the LH groups, which could lead to more owners choosing RH options. But then that logic required those owners to make the same realization and would know that RH could be more prevalent and then switch to counter those. But then if more people switch, it might be better to swim against the tide and counter them. And so it went, ad infinitum. There was no hope of channeling Spock’s brain and landing on the right dimension of chess.

That of course put us back at square one. I started looking at which lineup could exploit any park advantage better as well as which looked better in terms of speed and defense. These led me to favor my RH hitters, who hit a lot more doubles and had a better starting lineup for productivity. I settled on Olympic Stadium for them, to get a +2 doubles park that is more or less neutral otherwise but with less penalty for HR to LF that would be to my advantage … unless I face a lot of RH lineups with more power, in which case I’ve accomplished nothing.

Video Interlude: Bruce Jenner winning gold at Olympic Stadium
https://youtu.be/ZEhRgwwPHCE

I’ve got Ben Chapman and Aramis Ramirez with 50 doubles apiece, with another 45 from Vlad Guerrero and a couple more over 30. Seven members of the lineup hit at least .300, too, so it feels deeper than the LH lineup. Now the question is whether they’ll face significantly more LH or RH and I wind up wishing I’d chosen differently.

As for the pitchers, well I don’t know what proved the most persuasive. I mean, if most other owners also came to like their RH lineups best then logically I should go with RH pitching to counter it. But historically there are more good LH hitters, and my hope is that a majority of owners bent to that idea so that my choice of the LH pitchers looks better. I’m almost convincing myself to switch back to RH pitchers just wavering on the logic as I write this. Truly, there is no winning this inner struggle. Lefty arms it is!

This group features Noodles Hahn, Randy Jones and Jerry Reuss atop the rotation, and I’ve had good results with them (FWIW, my RH rotation had Joe Horlen, Bill Bernhard, Frank Miller and Bob Wicker … and now I’m wondering how many owners were tempted by Bernhard enough to go RH here … no, stop overthinking. Finis.). I have a handful of relievers who can start to fill in the gaps, too, and all in all I prefer the inning distribution of my LH staff better and think it should handle fatigue better.

So that’s it. Now I just wait to see how many of you reward my logic (illogic?) and send up LH lineups and LH pitching staffs.

(Update: Looks like it didn’t matter too much which pitchers I chose as my league is split on the hitting side … but ooof we’re gonna see way more righty pitchers! Only two owners went with my combination, which suggests it was somewhat less than a great one.)

Lineup:
1903 Frank Chance 1B .327/.439/.440
1886 Pete Browning LF .340/.389/.441
2007 Vlad Guerrero RF .324/.403/.547
2012 Aramis Ramirez 3B .300/.360/.540
1936 Ben Chapman CF .315/.408/.472
1932 Bill Cissell 2B .320/.354/.440
2021 Trevor Story SS .251/.329/.471
1887 Jocko Milligan C .302/.344/.411

1904 Noodles Hahn 316 IP, 2.06 ERA, 0.98 WHIP
1976 Randy Jones 316, 2.74, 1.03
1980 Jerry Reuss 228, 2.51, 1.02
1990 Randy Tomlin 78, 2.55, 0.95

Raw stats:
5,331 PA, .305/.375/.470, 350 2B, 51 3B, 103 HR, 171/116 SB/CS
1,332 IP, 2.44 ERA, .229 OAV, 1.02 WHIP, 0.35 HR/9


90M: It’s All Over Now, Baby Doll

I saved this for last, in part because my first attempts at research early on showed it was going to be pretty time-intensive. I figured as long as I found a few possibilities, I’d be able to compare the rosters and pick my favorite from there. That said, I don’t think there is any shortcut to finding decent rosters here, nor is there any way to know if you’ve found one that’s actually going to be competitive. None of the teams I built is as good as I could do with an open $90M, and I had to accept some weaknesses regardless.

My research method may have been flawed, but I needed some approach to finding possible combinations. I looked at each franchise’s pitching history by sorting out anyone with 150+ IP and an ERC# under 2.50, in order of seasons. This allowed me to see what patterns with dates that lined up could allow a possible rotation I could work with. With a ton more time, I could have tried a lot of other approaches, but it was surprising to me how many teams had nothing close to a workable season combination.

Ultimately, I built 3 full rosters, though once I had 2 of them I would start testing out new combinations and see if they looked like they’d be better. If they didn’t right away, I moved on to the next franchise. I tried a lot of season combos for teams I was sure could be workable, like the Cardinals and Cubs, but nothing seemed to fit.

The first one I was happy with and became the default roster-to-beat was the 1924-1972-2020 Dodgers/Robins. You get a quality Dazzy Vance and Don Sutton atop the rotation and endless options in pitching from the 2020 roster. With $100M, I’m fairly sure this would have been my favorite choice, but to get the pitching to work decently meant leaving off way too many 2020 relievers who I wanted. I guess this is what makes it a Round 2 theme … but still, grumble grumble. Vance and Sutton get you 630 IP for $25M and that’s restrictive. Offensively, there are some studs from 1924 and 2020, but there’s also a few low PA players who need backups and that gets pretty limiting, too. And this was the best Dodgers option I could find. So, moving on …

(Update: jbohrman went with this exact group! Will be paying close attention to how they do.)

My second roster is one I never really felt I’d use: 1986-2002-2018 Astros. Scott-Cole-Verlander is a pretty solid top of the rotation, provided I played in the Astrodome to kill the HR. But the problem with that is the lineup this group produces rather likes the long ball: Bagwell, Bregman, Berkman, Bass. Killer Bs don’t go well with -4 HR. For everything I liked (bullpen with Dotel and Wagner) there’s something I didn’t (bad range for Altuve and Correa, and no great CF option either). Also, I loathe these current Astros, so that didn’t help.

The Dodgers remained the clubhouse leader as I tossed away option after option until landing on one that grew on me the more I tweaked it. And it surprised me tremendously where I ended up here. One of the last franchises I looked at was the Orioles, and initially I expected to use a 70s or 80s season, possibly paired with something from the early 2010s and then see what that offered up. But as I looked at some of those Browns seasons earlier in the history, a couple options emerged. Lo and behold, here I am with the 1921 and 1945 Browns, along with the 1969 Orioles. Yeah, of all teams, I’m going with a bunch of Browns.

Musical Interlude: Brownsville Station, “Smokin’ In the Boys Room”
https://youtu.be/5MM1a6x0icY

It works because 1945 and 1969 supply plenty of pitching that fits the cap, and 1921 was a loaded offensive season. The lineup from that blah 81-73 squad gives me C Hank Severeid, 1B George Sisler, and an OF of Ken Williams, Baby Doll Jacobson, and Jack Tobin – with averages from .324 to .371. Plus solid speed from most of them. I can then plug in dynamic gloves (and solid .280s AVGs/.350s OBPs) from ‘69 with Davey Johnson and Mark Belanger in the middle infield. A potent Vern Stephens mans 3B and represents ‘45 (Brooks Robinson didn’t hit a lick that year, so I went for offense at 3B instead). Five of those guys don’t need backups, and that allowed me to fill in a pretty cheap bench on a $50.5M offense. Sportsman’s Park was the clear choice over Memorial Stadium, because the +3 doubles suit the team well while Memorial’s -2 for triples would have hurt one of the 1921 group’s strengths. It’s not a perfect fit, but it plays to strengths, I think.

On the pitching side, the rotation features ‘45 Nels Potter and ‘69 Mike Cuellar and Dave McNally. The ‘69 O’s bring a solid bullpen trio in Eddie Watt, Dick Hall, and Pete Richert, with a couple low-inning 1945 guys filling it out along with 4th starter Bob Muncrief. I couldn’t squeeze in Jim Palmer and get the lineup I wanted, unfortunately. It’s a solid enough staff, though I do worry about fatigue with a hitters’ park and only 1,352 IP. But we’re in Round 2 here, and you have to push the limits. Also, maybe I’ve mentioned it, but there ain’t a lot of great options here!

(Update: So many people went with an Astros combo, but not the one I had working. Clearly I didn’t look closely enough for a better one there. On the bright side, we’ll be fine playing in the Astrodome.)

Lineup:
L 1921 George Sisler 1B .371/.411/.560
L 1921 Ken Williams RF .347/.429/.561
R 1921 Baby Doll Jacobson CF .352/.398/.487
L 1921 Jack Tobin LF .352/.395/.487
R 1945 Vern Stephens 3B .289/.351/.473
R 1921 Hank Severeid C .324/.379/.415
R 1969 Davey Johnson 2B .280/.351/.391
R 1969 Mark Belanger SS .287/.351/.345

L 1969 Mike Cuellar 291 IP, 2.38 ERA, 1.00 WHIP
R 1945 Nels Potter 274, 2.47, 1.10
L 1969 Dave McNally 269, 3.22, 1.18
R 1945 Bob Muncrief 157, 2.72, 1.21

Raw stats:
5,914 PA, .318/.375/.453, 273 2B, 81 3B, 90 HR, 98/64 SB/CS
1,352 IP, 2.72 ERA, .224 OAV, 1.12 WHIP, 0.53 HR/9


100M: Tangled Up in Blacklist

It occurred to me after completing this team that this theme would have made for a fascinating draft. We used to have a draft in R2 for a while, and this pool could have created a good one (though probably just blacklisting all seasons for any player on the list and only allowing one version of anyone in the league). Maybe someone will try to run one for fun sometime.

With some of the research-heavy themes, it was admittedly nice to have one where you just use the Draft Center and see who’s available that fits your goals. I went for a lineup that’s not homer-dependent since I knew it would be easy enough for people to minimize them. Good average hitters with some speed and doubles and triples were the order of the day. Most, but not all, of the lineup fits the bill. To some degree, the blacklist does force compromises, but I feel like we’ll still see plenty of variety among the rosters.

Musical Interlude: Rolling Stones, “Paint It Black”
https://youtu.be/nVrdXUHvsF0

My key hitters are 1896 Jake Stenzel, 1961 Roberto Clemente, 1914 Steve Evans, 1977 George Brett, and 1928 Chick Hafey. Up the middle I’ve got 1985 Ozzie Smith and 1979 Paul Molitor. It’s a little lower in productivity than my R1 100M team, but hopefully there’s enough offense here.

The key guys in my rotation are 1917 Eddie Cicotte and 1915 Eddie Plank, with about 650 IP combined. I’ve got 1961 Dick Donovan and 2005 Roy Halladay to round it out, and I’m more than set for spot starts since almost my entire bullpen is made up of starters: Red Ruffing, Dizzy Dean, Mellie Wolfgang, and Ray Caldwell. Plus a couple actual relievers to fill it out in Grant Jackson and Steve Farr.

Musical Interlude Encore: Rolling Stones, “Start Me Up”
https://youtu.be/-Bv6KfnuepA

We’ll play in KC’s Kaufmann Stadium to boost the 2B and 3B and keep the homers minimized for those pitchers who are susceptible.

Lineup:
R 1896 Jake Stenzel CF .361/.409/.486
L 1914 Steve Evans 1B .348/.416/.566
R 1961 Roberto Clemente RF .351/.390/.559
R 1928 Chick Hafey LF .337/.386/.604
L 1977 George Brett 3B .312/.373/.532
R 1979 Paul Molitor 2B .322/.372/.469
L 1952 Smoky Burgess C .296/.380/.429
S 1985 Ozzie Smith SS .276/.355/.361

R 1917 Eddie Cicotte 365 IP, 1.53 ERA, 0.91 WHIP
L 1915 Eddie Plank 283, 2.08, 0.99
R 1961 Dick Donovan 170, 2.40, 1.03
R 2005 Roy Halladay 142, 2.41, 0.96

Raw stats:
5,378 PA, .322/.383/.487, 293 2B, 88 3B, 119 HR, 172/93 SB/CS
1,362 IP, 1.98 ERA, .212 OAV, 0.97 WHIP, 0.25 HR/9


110M: The Years, They Are A-Changin’

This was the first team I built because I knew I could knock it out easily enough. I figured I’d go back and try to refine it later, but I don’t think it will benefit from tweaking as much as a couple of the others that required more research. Of course, because I built it first, I can’t remember what I was trying to do other than not use the same seasons again. I probably should have written down the park I intended to use, too. Oh well …

Musical Interlude: Steely Dan, “Reelin’ in the Years”
https://youtu.be/2WTh_IEyU1w

So the guy who built this seems to have gone for a lot of good AVG hitters who hit doubles and have a decent bit of team speed. A few guys can hit homers if the opportunity arises, but they can be productive without them. No huge star in the lineup, but it runs pretty deep. The middle infield is strong defensively with Lonny Frey and Lou Boudreau, and David Wright has A- range at 3B, too. Johnny Mize is the biggest bat, though 1937 isn’t his best season. I’ve got Fred Lynn in CF, flanked by Birdie Cree and Dave Parker. And good ol’ Wally Schang handles the plate. I had the choice of several of the best parks for 2B and went with Sportsman because it’s not quite as taxing on my pitching staff. And I didn’t exactly splurge on innings.

I definitely saved a few seasons for some key pitchers I expected to use, with the rotation headed by 1909 Mordecai Brown, 2015 Clayton Kershaw and 2018 Jacob DeGrom, plus 1910 George McQuillan as a 4th starter and occasional reliever. I’ve grabbed a few SP for the bullpen in case we need the occasional spot start, and 1958 Barry Latman and 1985 Steve Ontiveros can also stretch out. Hopefully this can reduce potential in-game fatigue issues in the pen to some degree.

Lineup:
R 1911 Birdie Cree LF .348/.415/.513
L 1978 Dave Parker RF .334/.394/.585
L 1937 Johnny Mize 1B .364/.427/.595
R 2007 David Wright 3B .325/.416/.546
L 1975 Fred Lynn CF .331/.401/.566
S 1921 Wally Schang C .316/.428/.453
L 1939 Lonny Frey 2B .291/.388/.452
R 1947 Lou Boudreau SS .307/.388/.424

R 1909 Mordecai Brown 363 IP, 1.31 ERA, 0.87 WHIP
L 2015 Clayton Kershaw 233, 2.13, 0.88
R 2018 Jacob DeGrom 217, 1.70, 0.91
R 1910 George McQuillan 162, 1.60, 1.04

Raw stats:
5,456 PA, .323/.401/.513, 318 2B, 69 3B, 144 HR, 137/64 SB/CS
1,372 IP, 1.84 ERA, .201 OAV, 0.93 WHIP, 0.34 HR/9


120M: Early Silver Kings

The best way to break this down is probably by box with whatever decision process merits an explainer, though I didn’t do them in order so the logic jumps around a bit. Half the time the reason for the choice is easy: cheapest option.

Box 1: 2020 Studs
I didn’t start here but I was definitely hoping to be able to afford Devin Williams for dominating bullpen innings. By the time I’d squeezed the rest of the pitching salary, I needed to free up some cash and went with Trevor Rosenthal. Cheapest option. … Then after I had everything written up, I took another look at my bullpen and remembered how much I hate low-inning relievers. Rejiggered many things and now Williams is in. I really think we’re gonna need him.

Box 2: Overpriced Studs
Did someone say overpriced? With all these limiting boxes of costly players? Good grief, get me the cheapest option! Mike Adams it is. A low-inning guy, but he looks better with Rosenthal gone.

Box 3: Deadball Aces
You have to get your SP innings for something close to $40M total to fit these other pieces in, and the only way I could figure to do that without using lousy seasons was to roster Silver King here. I don’t love using King because you have to throw him back-to-back a lot to get close to all his innings, but I couldn’t afford not to use him unless I was ready to accept a $70M pitching staff. Spoiler alert: I was not.

Box 4: Modern Aces
I tried out many many combinations between this group and Box 5 to complement King, and ultimately you need to use one of them as a swingman or just reliever to make it work. Enter 2006 Greg Maddux’s 76 innings. Box checked. What a waste of great seasons I can’t afford.

Box 5: Golden Age Aces
You need someone to start when King doesn’t and somehow I landed on 300 innings from 1969 Juan Marichal for that. Marichal often blows up for me, so this move baffles me other than I’ve got 1003 SP innings for $41M now and can barely squeeze everyone else onto this staff. How the heck is anyone making this work?

Box 6: Reliever Grab Bag
Several of these guys issue walks like a drill sergeant spewing expletives (which is to say, frequently. Lee Ermey style, that is). Or they give up too many homers by a wide margin. So forget any of them. That left 3 choices, and of course I wound up with … the cheapest option: 2020 Zack Britton. He does walk a few guys but he makes up for it by not allowing homers, and that may come in handy with some of these ballparks.

Video Interlude: Full Metal Jacket
https://youtu.be/tHxf17yJsKs

Box 7: LOOGYs
My original thinking was to salvage some innings out of this box because this staff could quickly wind up in fatigue hell. I slotted in 55 from 2012 Jake McGee. But when the aforementioned rejiggering took place, I wound up with 2010 Joe Thatcher, so I got my other low-innings guy after all. He’ll have to pitch like a real LOOGY, facing a whole lot of Ruths. PS: I never heard of Joe Thatcher until this league.

Box 8: Bargain Long Relievers
Well, you’ve got to spend another $2M here on one of these guys. Kyle Hendricks had the best HR/9# of the sorry lot, so I took him. Sadly he’ll probably have to use all his innings.

Box 9: Very Long Relievers
More like Very Expensive Relievers. Sure, we need innings, and good innings. Lots of ways to go here, but I saved a little money with Hoyt Wilhelm and hope he can be effective working in a lot of games. I’ve had mixed results with many of these guys, and it’s not so encouraging knowing how much of the load I need Wilhelm to carry here.

Throwing in a 200K mop, I’ve got 1,512 innings out of this group for $62.8M. But of course King has 703 of them and 3 of the other 9 have under 40. It’s a recipe for all sorts of fatigue if King doesn’t start close to 100 games and average 7.5-8 innings. Something tells me he might not do either. I’m pretty curious how the rest of you navigated this minefield.

Musical Interlude: Alice in Chains, “Man In The Box”
https://youtu.be/TAqZb52sgpU

Box 10: Deadball Outfielders
Lots of candidates to man center field and hit leadoff in this group, which is good because there aren’t a ton elsewhere. I initially lined up 1915 Benny Kauff. But in the rejiggering, I had to ensure enough PA here and went with ironman 1891 Billy Hamilton with virtually the same AVG# and OBP# and a little more speed.

Box 11: Golden Age Outfielders
This wound up being the place to solve the Box 20 problem (aka, half seasons of 1B). The best fit for a RH half of a platoon wound up being 1972 Al Kaline. There will be minus plays. Many, many minus plays. Not helpful to our pal, Mr. King, in the slightest.

Box 12: Modern Outfielders
This was actually the last spot I filled and needed some offensive firepower without spending much. Manny Ramirez does that pretty well, though I couldn’t ultimately afford 2008 and wound up with the 558 PA from 2006 instead. Let’s not talk about defense. Manny sure didn’t.

Box 13: Babes
Well, I didn’t want to waste a Babe opportunity by using one of the cheap seasons, and the two over $13M just didn’t fit any kind of budget I could solve. That left 1928, 1930 and 1931 without too much difference. I didn’t love the lower AVG from 1928, and at that point 1930 basically won the coin flip.

Musical Interlude: UB40 and Chrissie Hynde, “I Got You, Babe”
https://youtu.be/AH7tXaoNRSo

Box 14: All Bat No Glove 1
It seemed pretty clear I would be trying to fit these next two boxes together as a DH platoon since none could really be a good solution at 1B or be particularly trusted to play much in the outfield. 1946 Augie Galan can bat 2nd behind Hamilton against RH and take advantage of the walk factory arms out there.

Box 15: All Bat No Glove 2
I ruled out the LH bats here to fill the platoon and went with 1895 Tuck Turner for a total of 658 PA with Galan. Since he’s a SH, that helps since I expect most SP to be righties anyway.

Box 16: Second Basemen
Interesting approach here, with four defensive stiffs who can hit and four glove men with no stick. I knew I wanted range in the middle infield to help King out and I would be batting them 8-9 regardless. So I went with the cheapest option, Horace Clarke. I don’t need 700+ PA hitting in the last two spots, and Clarke has a bit more speed plus a switch bat.

Box 17: Shortstops
Similar logic here landed me with Luis Aparicio, who had the edge in AVG and speed among the 3 left once I pushed Bert Campaneris aside for the wasted PA. Also, stunningly, he’s the cheapest there, too.

Box 18: Third Basemen
I was willing to forgo the outstanding gloves here because I felt I needed a little more offense from this spot. It came down to Pedro Guerrero or Pinky Higgins, and you can guess why the latter won out. Cheaper option. I’ll wind up regretting not taking a defense guy here.

Musical Interlude: Nirvana, “Heart Shaped Box”
https://youtu.be/wifS1PhkmcI

Box 19: Catcher
With only 205K options as backups, I wanted someone with over 600 PA here without breaking the bank or being too reliant on homers or having salary jacked up by his arm. I don’t see a ton of effective base stealers in these boxes, so I won’t worry about that. I landed on 1891 Jocko Milligan with 614 PA, a C arm, and a .919 OPS# for $5.4M. That worked out well.

Box 20: First Baseman
All these choices are compromises. I didn’t want a low-PA option or McGwire’s HR dependence here, so a lefty half of a 1B platoon made the most sense. Enter Johnny Hopp with the best AVG of the remaining choices and we have the other half of the combo with Kaline. Please don’t hit the ball to either of them. Terrible corner defense with a pitcher who puts the ball in play should be amusing. Not.

Boxes 21-25
I grabbed a catcher (Kyle Higashioka) and a high-range 1B (Renato Nunez) to sub for my two lousy fielders, plus Gift Ngoepe to back up the middle infield in case we need to PH for a weak bat. Rounding it out with a 92 speed guy (Isaac Galloway) to be a PR and that’s all. I couldn’t really find a way to get a good defensive OF in there, too. Oh well. Also, there’s a mopup guy, the legendary Tommy Milone.

Ballpark: Bank One Ballpark
I honestly didn’t realize until after my first pass at the pitching staff that these were all heavy-duty hitters’ parks, so I was glad I locked in as many innings as I did. Hopefully I did the same with PA, but I won’t worry a ton about a little fatigue with guys who can’t field anyway. I didn’t really build around HR, so one of the “zero” parks for HR seemed most appealing. I wasn’t sure my pitchers would love the +3 singles from Oriole Park, so the BOB kinda won by default. I wish my hitters had more 3B to take advantage, but I’m not going back to try to maximize those at this point. Hopefully this plays to my team’s strengths somewhat without killing the pitchers.

(Update: I am the only owner to take King, which means it was a dumb move. I’ll find out how bad soon enough.)

Hey, did someone say Bob? Well, since all my team names are plays off Dylan song titles (maybe you figured that out long ago), let’s drop in a bonus song, my favorite. Also, hopefully it won’t be my mood as this round wraps up.

Musical Interlude: Bob Dylan, “Tangled Up in Blue”
https://youtu.be/YwSZvHqf9qM

Oh, hey, you still here? Well, in looking up that clip I somehow landed on a real gem, the only live version of Hurricane I’ve ever seen. So here, enjoy that, too.

Musical Interlude Encore: Bob Dylan, “Hurricane” (He was a "boxer," get it?)
https://youtu.be/voH11xV4AKI

Lineup:
L 1891 Billy Hamilton CF .340/.453/.421
L 1946 Augie Galan DH .310/.451/.460 and S 1895 Tuck Turner .386/.463/.510
L 1930 Babe Ruth RF .359/.493/.792
R 2006 Manny Ramirez LF .321/.439/.619
L 1950 Johnny Hopp 1B .339/.426/.528 and R 1972 Al Kaline .313/.374/.475
R 1934 Pinky Higgins 3B .330/.392/.508
R 1891 Jocko Milligan C .303/.397/.505
S 1967 Horace Clarke 2B .272/.323/.316
R 1968 Luis Aparicio SS .264/.302/.334

R 1888 Silver King 703 IP, 1.64 ERA, 0.88 WHIP
R 1969 Juan Marichal 300, 2.10, 1.00

Raw stats:
6,224 PA, .311/.398/.478, 288 2B, 63 3B, 151 HR, 202/107 SB/CS
1,512 IP, 1.95 ERA, .207 OAV, 0.93 WHIP, 0.33 HR/9

I hope you enjoyed the music at least ... Good luck, everyone!

First, let me preface by apologizing for the eye sore, I know of color theory, I just don’t know color theory. Also everytime I format an issue, another formatting fix gets erased. Alright let’s begin.





70M: DR9 17 Giant Clones

Hitters: 5234 PA, .299/.359/.405 | 212 SB

Pitchers: 1298 IP, .233 OAV, 1.07 WHIP .35 HR/9

I initially wanted that stereotypical A range speedster team and went with a 1920s Giants team with Frisch, Kelly, Groh and Bancroft paired with some 1890s Colts team with Jimmy Ryan, Bill Lange, and Walt Wilmot. It was an alright offense I guess, but I just didn’t fall in love with it, and scrapped it when I didn’t have the funds to combine it with the pitching I wanted which I’ll get into next.

I fell in love with the 1975 Dodgers rotation with Messersmith, Sutton, Hooton and Rau (who I tolerated), and toyed around with them for awhile pairing it with the 1968 White Sox (Wilhelm, McMahon, and Wilbur Wood).

After that pairing I went back to offense with a new goal in mind, draft as many stolen bases as I can. Searching the most stolen bases by a team post-1920 led me to many Cardinals and Athletics teams dominated by Vince Coleman and Rickey Henderson, and usually a split in SB between outfield and infield, which does no good for me.

Scrolling halfway thru the list, I came across the 1980 Dads, and their combined 136 stolen bases between the 3 main guys in the OF. Even better, they were efficient and could hit a little. Snagged Richards, Mumphrey and Winfield for under $14 mil.

Now to get an infield that follows suit. I tried the Ozzie Smith Tom Herr teams. I tried the Frank Taveras Bill Madlock combinations. I looked for any decent Jose Reyes David Wright pairings that weren’t too expensive, but couldn’t find any. That’s when I searched just for 3B that were cheap and fast. I came across old cookie Chone Figgins. His teammates didn’t steal all that much, but they were efficient, decent hitters, and most importantly, cheap. Orlando Cabrera, Casey Kotchman, and a Howie Kendrick Maicer Izturis platoon join Figgins in a .300 hitting sub $17 mil infield.

That left me just over a mil for a catcher (not including the scrubs) and unless I wanted a D- half time player, I just couldn’t go through with it. Out went the Dodgers pitchers that were $34k/IP, and I went to work searching for a sub $30k/IP rotation. What I found was the namesake for the team. The 1917 Giants had 3 pitchers with the same IP/162, relatively same ERC# and relatively same $/IP. Ferdie Schupp is no slouch either, a little more expensive than I’d like, but cannot complain with the outcome. Now it’s just a matter of finding some bullpen arms and a decent armed catcher inside the limit of the cap. There were a ton of options, and I went with my first choice of the 2012 D-Backs before I had to change because I used a combined season of Craig Breslow (which really put a damper on things). The 2019 Orioles weren’t bad either, but went with the choice that’d leave me with slightly more IPs in the 2014 Athletics. Leaving out an expensive Sean Doolittle and Fernando Abad, I’m hoping to get some decent run out of Dan Otero, Luke Gregerson, Ryan Cook and Drew Pomeranz. With how the league is designed, I could realistically draft any catcher I wanted and fill in the rest with scrubs, so A armed Johnny Gooch will play against division foes and other SB teams.

I’m cautiously optimistic with this team and am hoping for 90 wins.

80M: DR9 Biting the Bullet

Hitters: 5254 PA, .309/.375/.466

Pitchers: 1353 IP, .218 OAV, 1.03 WHIP, 0.21 HR/9

I kinda figured everyone in my division would go lefty hitting, righty pitching, and my first rough draft of this team was the counter to that. Outside of Slim Sallee and some sub-1 mil arms, I just didn’t like my options at pitcher. That’s okay, I’ll just make my normal cookie rotation and go all lefties in the batting order. In came Tony Gwynn, Eddie Collins, Mitchell Page and well, these were just good hitters, but given the small selection, I couldn’t choose a theme with the hitters and go with it. They were just mismatched toys. Also part of the reason my pitchers were cookies were because they performed well when given good gloves behind them, not a bunch of B/C and C/C+ guys.

Well imma just have to bite the bullet and lose the platoon advantage if I’m gonna create and enter a team I’m comfortable with.

So this is a stereotypical A+ range, speedy deadballers minus the switch hitting cookies.

John Kerins at C, Cap Anson at 1B, King Kelly at 2B, Jimmie Foxx at 3B, Tim Anderson at SS (usually a Vizquel for me here), but there’s a slightly different outfield. Instead of Marwin, Ketel or Max Carey, it’s Ben Chapman, Harry Stovey, and a Birdie Cree Pete Browning (only an A range guy) platoon. Now excuse me as I switch all my range to the right side of the field.

Pitchers aren’t too different from what you’d usually see from the OL vets that like to beat down on lesser comp. Kaiser Wilhelm, Cy Morgan, Henry Gruber, Frank Dwyer, Ralph Comstock, Charlie Smith, Stroman, the only guy I incorporated in was Bob Harmon, who massively outperformed his price in the Round 1, 100Mil cap, and repeated that performance on a separate OL team. He’s going to be used more in high leverage situations as my go-to Setup A.

Even considering that everyone will have a 2.5%? edge on me, I think I’ll do well with the meta OL themed team. 95 wins.

90 Mil: DR9 Stros Goes

Hitters: 5123 PA, .293/.370/.501

Pitchers: 1330 IP, .195 OAV, .99 WHIP, .93 HR/9

I tried really hard with the 2021 Dodgers pitching as Buehler and Urias were really cheap, and the plethora of cheap sub-50 IP bullpen arms, but there bats were just so underwhelming and I switched franchises.

My second choice was the Astros, as it just so happened, I dominated a league with the same cap and theme with the 1981 Astros pitching. Sutton, Knepper, Ryan, Sambito, Dave Smith, and even Vern Ruhle just killed it at the dome. So I went back to the well. I need offense and chose one that might even be better than the 30s Yankees in the 2019 Stros. This might be a hot take, but they are the 07 Patriots of baseball, possibly the greatest team of all time that lost the championship to a wildcard team.

That left the 2000s team as the middle piece as the Astros franchise wasn’t around pre-WW2. They had some decent bats, but their pitching was just absolutely dreadful. That meant I had to begrudgingly change as I don’t like to search for second options after I put my mind to one choice.

I looked for another good Nolan Ryan season and paired him with an alright Mike Scott from the 1987 squad. 87 has a hard to come by decent hitting season from an Astros catcher (only thing more rare than a good season at the plate from an Astros SS), some 200k scrub seasons, and a decent amount of stolen bases from Billy Hatcher. My high school baseball coach and former ROY runner-up Gerald Young will platoon with 2019 Air Yordan in right field.

Now I know the innings look a little shallow, but I’m really banking on not so strong offenses given the restrictions, coupled with the dome, and getting more pitches out of 1.12 WHIP Mike Scott and Nolan Ryan.

With the switch from 81 to 87, I had to switch some 2019 bats to pitchers, but fortunately for me, and unfortunately for y’all, the 2003 squad fit in nicely with my team. Dotel, Wagner and Miceli provided 200+ innings of good relief pitching; and Jeff Kent, Richard Hidalgo and Morgan Ensberg filled in some holes in the lineup.

While Verlander is my favorite pitcher of all time as a Tigers/Astros fan, he’s an afterthought when it comes to building WIS teams despite the great 2011, 2018 and 2019 seasons. Hopefully he finishes 2022 strong because that’s looking to be an all timer. All this to say, I expect my rotation to underperform. The offense doesn’t really match the ballpark either, I think I’ll finish the year with 79 wins.

100 Mil: Bargain Bin Brand

Hitters: 5470 PA, .327/.395/.456

Pitchers: 1349 IP, .205 OAV, .96 WHIP, .43 HR/9

To my surprise, a lot of the typical cookie hitters from 100Mil TOC Advantage leagues remained untouched. I guess that had to do with the extremity of the Round 1 league. The pitching however was decimated.

I’m glad Roger Nelson was left behind, he makes every roster of mine under $130 mil. Given the subpar pitching options, I went for what I perceived as values anywhere I could get them, and pairing them with A+ range (bold strategy, I know). I wound up with three 142 IP pitchers in Roy Halladay, Justin Duchscherer and Harry Brecheen. After those four pitchers, I kinda just decided on not spending more than $35k/IP. Fred Anderson and Pascual Perez join the frey as I make them a 6-man, 3-tandem rotation. 07 Cy Morgan, who’s been solid for me in roster twist leagues in the past, makes it as the multi-inning setup man for $32k/IP.

On the hitting side are cookies King Kelly, Cap Anson, Max Carey, although there is a slight wrinkle in using 1910 Tris Speaker and 1955 Richie Ashburn. I don’t think I’ve used Ashburn since 2019, but last time he did play for me, he ended the year batting .300 with 25 + plays. A+ range Bill Sweeney will lead off where his lesser speed will hopefully result in less double plays. I hate every single 3B in the sim so I drafted a $7million Honus Wagner and slid him over to third. And Jose Reyes rounds out the lineup.

I’d like to think this offense will be amongst the leaders in runs scored, but the innings do scare me a little if Sparky decides to remove the backend of a tandem early as he tends to do. If the + plays come in, and Sparky pitches everyone to their MPC, I’ll be fine, otherwise I could spiral. I want to be optimistic and say 95 wins though.

110 Mil: V.I.P. Status

Hitters: 5294 PA, .341/.408/.496

Pitchers: 1381 IP, .206, .89 WHIP, .31 HR/9

As opposed to the Round 1 team, Second-class Status, this team has all my first choices when it comes to team building.

That includes a rotation of 08 Walsh, 02 Bernhard and 72 Nelson. 2016 Kershaw is my super reliever, and all the best low IP value pitchers are in the bullpen. And yes I used 2020 on 26 inning Ryan Sherriff.

1913 Tris Speaker. A+

1921 Frankie Frisch. A+

1893 Billy Hamilton. A+

2019 Ketel Marte. Not A+ but a cookie regardless.

Just like the 100 Mil team, I went with Honus Wagner at third, and 2011 Reyes at short, hoping for some good production at the bottom of the order. Ty Cobb will man first despite his D- fielding there. I just wanted speed and hitting prowess. John Kerins rounds out the lineup with his 90+ speed and A+ arm for less than $5 million.

I liked this team a lot back in Round 1, I like it a lot less now due to the lack of PAs I drafted. My division looks pretty stiff here, but if I make the playoffs, watch out. 90 wins.

120 Mil: DR9 3 True Outcomes = 1 Likely Scenario: L

Hitters: 5892 PA .304/.418/.555 | 287 HR

Pitchers: 1400 IP, .192 OAV, .91 WHIP, .35 HR/9

This was my least favorite team to draft. I made one team without thinking, entered it, and told myself I’ll come around and make another. That never happened.

Homerun teams never work. Even more so when there’s a lot of deadballers to choose from. But homeruns are fun to draft so I’ll try to recreate my thought process (or lack thereof) when putting this team together in 15 minutes.

Man where do I even begin? I guess I first made the decision to go homerun or bust when I saw the shortstops. Usually I don’t mind sacrificing defense, but I didn’t really like the options of what were suppose to be the good hitters. Paul DeJong might provide some semblance of offensive value if he gets anywhere close to his 30 homeruns. There’s a gap in my memory but I remember thinking that I could use “All Bat No Glove 1” Dick Wakefield and his D+ D+ grade in RF, and then save some money by drafting an old Bonds season at DH. Like in the 70M DH league with Franmil Reyes, I underdrafted PAs at DH with 07 Bonds and I’ll throw him out every game despite the fatigue. I don’t think his hitting will suffer too much, he’s just there to walk and hit the occasional bomb. Same goes for the $10 mil Ruth I drafted, but I expect a little more with him hitting at Yankee Stadium III.

My mind is all over the place right now, so back to the whole defense thing. I don’t mind sacrificing it. At 2B is George Grantham, and at 3B is Bill Joyce. I just want them to walk and hit bombs like Bonds and Ruth before them. That’s this whole team, strikeouts, walks and homeruns. It’s a recipe for disaster in the SIM, but I went for it anyways. 1963 Mantle will split duties with Dick Wakefield as yet another guy who K’s or walks over a third of the time, and a HR/100AB# of 7. Even more extreme is that I drafted 200 Mark McGwire. And for some reason I have Rick Monday as his out of position platoon. I don’t know, I wasn’t thinking much and I don’t like this team much. Benny Kauff and Mike Piazza make up the last of the lineup as I kept with the theme of homeruns and Yankee Stadium III.

The pitching consisted of me drafting as few longballs and as many lefties as I could get.

2020 gave up quite a few homers, but Dinelson Lamet should be able to neutralize some of that with his 152 OAV+ and 205 HR/9+. Next I went with the deadball-iest of all deadballers, Mordecai Brown. I’ve seen that Big Train was the popular choice, but 1 HR given up over 363 IP is huge for me at YSIII. He’ll slot in as the ace. The golden age aces didn’t really leave me with much. None of them have good low IP seasons, and none of them are very good at containing the longball. I ended up with Sutton really just because of past performances with him. That leaves me with a rotation of:

363 IP Brown

275 IP Sutton

186 IP Lamet

Kind of an odd fit, so I had to get some innings in bulk. Ferdie Schupp was selected for his left-handedness, 150 innings, and homerun suppression. Still a lot of innings to go, next was Mark Eichhorn at a really good value. The only lefty in there was a crappy Willie Hernandez, so no thank you. Unfortunately, Eichhorn proved to cost too much so Medlen replaced him and will be the only RH in the bullpen as I feared a lot of Ruth’s, Williams’, Bonds’ and Joyce’s, along with anybody from Box 10.

Randy Johnson makes the squad with a solid 85 inning performance from the Astros in 98, and more Ruth suppression came in the form of Zack Britton and Javier Lopez. We’re reallyyyyy anti-Ruth here guys. Last came the bargain Long Relievers, and they all kinda suck, so I went with Rube Waddell in the spirit of anti-Ruth, but I went way over budget. Out with Waddell, in came Lester in keeping with the theme.

I haven’t made a decision on how I’ll configure the pitching staff, but I doubt it’ll matter all that much as I limp to 75 wins.

Scored 11 total runs in starting 1-5, with 5 of those in the win. Whoo-boy, that's not encouraging.

Anyone else gonna post strategies?

WISC #1 - Low Budget Super Indians

This theme was by far the hardest for me to build - and not in a fun way, but in a frustrating way. The most annoying part is that cheap effective multi-positional players, normally a mainstay of $70M teams are actually a really bad thing for this theme in the sense that a team's infielders or outfielders could be rendered completely undraftable for all intents and purposes due to a lack of rosterable PAs. For example, if a team has a multi-positional player that plays 60 games in the OF and 50 games in various IF positions, that team's infielders are pretty much undraftable due to insufficient PA in the infield.

I started with the pitching, because that was much easier to do. Since all the SPs had to come from one team, and they all had to be cost-effective, this pretty much guarantees that the starting pitching is going to be nothing but deadballers. I went with the 1905 CWS for my SPs. I knew my RPs were going to come from a 2020 or 2021 team, since the modern era's relentless focus on strong bullpens meant it was possible to find a team full of half decent relievers. In the end, I settled for the 2021 Miami Marlins bullpen pitchers, after first looking at the 2021 Tampa Bay Rays bullpen.

After going through endless permutations that just didn't work, I settled for the first one that seemed to yield a functioning roster. I got a decent leadoff hitter in 1998 Kenny Lofton from the 1998 Indians, and a big slugger in 2004 Manny Ramirez from the 2004 Indians. Then I rostered 1964 Buck Rodgers so I could throw out all the would be base stealers on other teams.

Hitting: 5617 PA 0.275/0.353/0.439 157 HR 107 SB
Pitching: 1254 IP 2.25 ERA 1.05 WHIP 0.230 OAV 42 HR

WISC #2 - All Righties in the Penthouse

If I thought that the quality of the team that one could draft at $80M would be roughly the same regardless of whether the pitchers were right handed or left handed (same goes for the hitters), I would have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the other owners were likely to pick. However, I think RH pitching staffs are of higher quality than LH pitching staffs at this cap (especially in the bullpen), and while the Left Handed Hitters vs. Right Handed Hitter debate is closer, I still much prefer the Right Handed Lineup. I think the innate advantages of selecting RHPs and RHBs outweighs the strategy of trying to perfectly guess what other owners will do with their rosters.

Batting: 5614 PA 0.297/0.368/0.436 89 HRs 293 SB
Pitching: 1324 IP 2.47 ERA 1.00 WHIP 0.229 OAV 40 HR

WISC #3 - X=57 Indians of 03/60/17

This theme was challenging as well - but I didn't find this one frustrating like I did the $70M, where some players were technically draftable but in practice were actually undraftable. Here, while every team was draftable and could be used, the challenge is that many franchises and choices of X yield low quality teams. Luckily, I eventually hit on the pitching staff of the 1903 Cleveland Indians and the Jose Ramirez / Corey Kluber / Andrew Miller combination of 2017, and the 1960 Cleveland Indians proved to be useful in filling the remaining holes on the roster.

Batting: 5590PA 0.293/0.351/0.474 164 HR 87 SB
Pitching: 2.11 ERA 1.00 WHIP 0.222 OAV 38 HR

WISC #4 - $100M of Round 1 Rejects

I didn't find the hitter part of the blacklist to be very restraining at all. I was able to roster most of my usual favorites, other than one OF in Chuck Klein that I'm not sure I have used before. The Pitching part of the blacklist had more of an impact on my team - some of my bullpen pitchers are not the ones I usually use. I also wish I was able to roster a better modern day SP than 2011 Justin Verlander - but then they were unavailable due to the blacklist.

Batting: 5646 PA 0.322/0.391/0.479 115 HR 191SB
Pitching: 1409 IP 2.17 ERA 0.96 WHIP 0.205 OAV 67 HR

WISC #5 - 25 Random Guys in Astrodome

After picking the 50 player seasons that I was going to use, I had the choice of making the teams roughly equal, or favoring the Round 2 team. I went with the latter, keeping the players I prefer to use for Round 2 while banking on a high average team with a pitching staff of Babe Adams, Christy Mathewson and Jacob Degrom to get me through Round 1. I won the World Series with the R1 team, so I guess the strategy paid off. Now watch as my favored guys somehow underperform...

Batting: 5682 PA 0.319/0.402/0.490 140 HR 269SB
Pitching: 1429 IP 2.11 ERA 0.91 WHIP 0.203 OAV 62 HR

WISC #6 - Ruth in a Box

It's not difficult to build a team, but it seems that it is impossible to build a team that doesn't have a crap infield and a smallish bullpen. I guess I wish the boxes actually gave us a choice of what trade-offs to make - here it seemed sort of pre-ordained what those trade-offs were going to be. We should have been able to choose whether to have a team focused on strong OFs or strong IFs, and similarly whether we wanted to have more or fewer roster slots to pitchers in a league with a DH. I really think this theme could have been one of the best ever if the boxes truly offered some interesting trade-offs and allowed owners to really customize their team, but I found that I didn't actually want to build a lot of different teams for this theme because such teams didn't seem to be that different from each other except in nominal ways.

Batting: 6456 PA 0.304/0.383/0.493 210 HR 175 SB
Pitching: 1453 IP 2.08 ERA 0.93 WHIP 0.205 OAV 73 HR

There’s a saying in poker that if you look around the table and can’t figure out who the easy mark is, then it’s you. That’s how I feel on the rare occasions when I make the cage. I can’t imagine that anything I write here will help anyone with their teambuilding in the future, but perhaps it will demonstrate how not to do it while eliciting a chuckle or two along the way. Kind of like an Ed Wood movie.

I’m going to provide my commentary on leagues in the opposite order of which they’re usually presented, because the opposite order is the only way my place in the standings will look any good so why stop there? Stats normalized, excluding mop-ups and scrubs, yada yada yada.

$120M – One weird team

Ain’t that the truth? I don’t tend to enjoy box themes, so my heart sank when I initially saw that this was one of them, but then I looked at the boxes and figured out that everyone else would likely hate this particular box theme as much as I did so I was OK with it. This is what is known as having been raised Catholic.

Rather than go through box by box and bore everyone to tears I’ll just comment on my general strategy enough that you’re bored to tears anyway. I decided early on that I wanted as little as possible to do with the Modern Aces and Golden Age Aces boxes, probably because this would be a homer-heavy league, so my rotation was going to be 50% Ed Seward and 50% four guys piecing innings together. Those four were Eichhorn (I’ve always been a fan of his ’86 season even well before WhatIf ever existed, and when they enabled sub-40 pitch counts for SPs he actually became usable), Nehf (most cost-effective of the bunch), Lamet (no idea why since he surrenders as many homers as the golden age guys and modern aces) and ’01 Pedro, who always underachieves for me but I suppose there’s a first time for everything which is a really stupid philosophy to carry through life. I chose the $340k Tiant as a Long B and Colome and McGee as double-barreled late innings guys, mostly because the former didn’t allow any HRs and the latter can actually throw 10 pitches without getting tired.

As for position players, if you’d told me that there’d be a bunch of boxes with choices between good field / no hit and good hit / no field, I would’ve bet the ranch that I’d pick the latter every time. Anyone who has ever read my writeups before knows that I usually eschew defense to almost ridiculous degrees. But the problem here was that I didn’t like any of the good hit / no field guys. Had I been allowed to choose my own iron-gloved ogres I would’ve done so, but for whatever reason in this case I thought the good fielders were better values. Which means they’re not. But I went with Campaneris at short because his SB% is good and he has enough PAs to lead off, and Seager because he’s a lefty hitter and a lot of the pitching in this league looked to be righty. I don’t remember my reasoning behind Horace Clarke, but he does remind me of a type of false reasoning that sports fans often employ. People often decry the late 60’s / early 70’s Yankees teams, the first ones in 40+ years to have an extended unsuccessful period, as the “Horace Clarke Yankees,” and direct a certain amount of hatred toward him because of that. On some level this is understandable because after experiencing Ruth/Gehrig/DiMaggio/Mantle, to have Horace Clarke be your team’s best player is a massive letdown. But the thing of it is, there was no reason to hate Horace Clarke. It wasn’t Horace Clarke’s fault that Horace Clarke was the best player on the Yankees. That was the Yankees front office’s fault. So many times, fans blame players for being who they are when instead they should blame management for placing players in inappropriate situations.

As for the rest of the team, I like the 1893 Billy Hamilton in CF, and if he hits 9^th he’ll be able to start the overwhelming majority of games. I went with a second-tier Bernie Williams (1997) in LF to save money and to spell Slidin’ Billy in CF occasionally. RF is manned by the 1930 Babe Ruth, who should do well in these stadiums. DH is a platoon of sorts between Tuck Turner and Dick Wakefield, and 1B is the same between the powerful Tony Clark and Al Kaline, who is one of the rare guys in major league history who if you combine their first and last names it’s an actual word, so he’s got that going for him which is nice. At catcher I used the 1998 Piazza, operating under the assumption that there weren’t many people as stupid as I was to use Campaneris and therefore there won’t be much stealing in this godforsaken league.

I don’t remember why I chose The Launching Pad. It can’t be because I thought I would be among the league leaders in homers because I clearly won’t be. Maybe it was because I thought nobody would be able to take Seward deep anyplace? We’ll see how that works out.

Hitters – 5954 PA, .314/.389/.505, 200 HRs
Pitchers – 1412 IP, 1.77 ERC#, 0.25 HR/9+


$110M – SSDY

As in, same shazbot different year. Or different 25 years. I don’t remember much about assembling this team because I created it right after creating my round 1 team to make sure I could make a representative team for round 2. It’s a bit of an unconventional team in that it has no starting RF but instead will cycle through ’04 Larry Walker, ’69 Francona, ’30 Blades, ’01 Holllandsworth, ’87 Mazilli and ’17 Wilhoit there. Why? Because we like you? No; despite being a Mickey Mouse team we’re ambivalent on that front. Your guess is as good as mine. The rest of it is fairly standard barracuda3 fodder except for being a little light in homers because of the assumption that people will use HR-suppressing ballparks because they hate fun. One departure from my usual slate is the 2002 Chipper Jones in the OF, who seems decent at a reasonable salary. Many of my mainstays make appearances, such as Posada, Daniel Murphy, and the best utility player in the sim, Terry Shumpert. You might argue Felipe Lopez, but I love that Shumpert can back up at virtually every position fairly competently while logging most of his plate appearances with the platoon advantage.

The pitching staff is a bit stranger. Half of the rotation is Charlie Ferguson, who I always enjoy using until I don’t. The other half is a righty/lefty tandem of Frank Smith and Lady Baldwin. The bullpen is a bunch of low IP guys such as Milacki, plus Cliff Curtis as a Long A. I chose Nationals Park because why take a stand when you don’t have to? No matter what ballpark I choose my teams are usually about eight games worse at home so what’s the difference?

I can’t put my finger on why this team doesn’t look so good to me, except that its overall numbers aren’t much better than what I normally put together for $110M themes such as Bookend Twist and Twist With a Hero, and they should be because this is practically a de facto $110M open league.

Hitters – 5445 PA, .341/.421/.514, 139 HRs
Pitchers – 1416 IP, 1.93 ERC#, 0.25 HR/9+


$100M – The Unwanted

I think that, overall, the themes were great this year, but IMO this one wasn’t very well thought out. In a normal year this would’ve been an excellent idea. But in a year where round 1 rosters had to spend either $60M on pitching or hitting (meaning that everyone’s hitting or pitching was either $120M league caliber or $80M league caliber) the blacklist didn’t have nearly the effect that it normally would, at least for me. In fact, there was a grand total of ONE non-$200k player on the blacklist who I wanted to use: Bernhard.

So is this a typical $100M team of mine? Perhaps, but I don’t play in enough open-type $100M leagues to know for sure. I’ve certainly used the Salkeld/Bard catching tandem before. Grantham platooning at 2B with the third-best utility player in the sim, Jeff Keppinger, is a typical play of mine. ’86 Ozzie, ’90 Denny Lyons, ’32 Ruth, we’ve all seen this before. We’ve also seen Steve Evans before. The question is why. The answer is that his performance history looks really good. But I’ve used him a bunch of times, and I’ve NEVER gotten a good season out of him. But I keep using him anyway. I was in a Rotisserie Baseball league for many years, and in the car on the way to the auction every year one particular friend and I would discuss what we thought certain players would go for at auction. One year in the early 2000’s he brought up the name of John Lackey, which prompted this exchange:

Me: “I have a sado-masochistic relationship with John Lackey”
Friend: <<chuckles>> “He hurts you and you like it.”
Me: “Exactly!”

Suffice to say I have a sado-masochistic relationship with 1914 Steve Evans.

Another fault of mine as a B-list owner on this site is that I will often see players be used as cookies by more successful owners and then start using those guys a bunch of times without even confirming that I’m using the correct cookified season for that player. “Ooh, everybody’s using Bobby Bonilla!” “They must be using the 1995 Bonilla since that’s the one with the highest OPS#!” (the primary stat I care about, almost certainly to my detriment). “Let me use him like 30 times!” <<several years later>> “Maybe I should check the performance history to see which Bonilla version is the cookie.” “Oh look, it’s the 1991 Bonilla that has over 1,000 seasons used, maybe because he’s not bad defensively at 3B. Who knew?” Apparently everyone else on this site, dumbass!

Have you ever seen the show Drunk History? It’s pretty awesome. The one about Cleopatra’s sister is one of the funniest episodes of any show ever. Anyway, a bunch of my friends have often talked about recording our own Drunk History episodes. Mine would be about the discoveries of Christopher Columbus, a subject near and dear to my heart because my heritage is 100% Portuguese and Portugal got screwed out of control of most of the new world. The treaty in force at the time of the first voyage of Columbus said that all land discovered south of the Canary Islands would belong to Portugal. This would include all of South America, all of Central America, all of the Caribbean Islands, most of Mexico, and the southern half of Florida. Instead Portugal ended up with nothing but a piece of South America that ended up developing into what is now Brazil. This happened because back then the Pope was basically the most powerful person in the world and the Pope at the time of Columbus’s discoveries was, you guessed it, Spanish. So the rules were quickly changed.

While attempting to fund his first expedition Columbus initially approached the king of Portugal, Joao II. Columbus tried to sell the trip as the easiest way to get to India, with whom everyone wanted to trade. King Joao would have none of it, because he knew exactly how large the earth was, had already sent an explorer (Bartholemew Dias) around the southern tip of Africa, and knew that going around Africa was the shortest sea route to India. Channeling his inner Jim Morrison, Columbus thought that the west was the best because he thought that the earth was much smaller than it actually is even though the ancient Egyptians had proven otherwise almost 2,000 years previously. So Joao said no (I picture him screaming at Columbus as he was leaving “YOU’RE GOING THE WRONG WAY!!!”) but Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain said yes. On his way back from what he thought was either India or someplace very close to India, Columbus paid a visit to Joao, possibly to rub his nose in it. He’d brought back minerals, plants, animals, and even people. In my stylized Drunk History scene I picture the conversation going thusly:

Columbus: “See! I told you I’d get to India! I brought back all this stuff! I even brought back a guy!” (the guy, standing idly by, looks vaguely like that Native American dude on the horse in that TV commercial about not littering where the tear ran down his cheek when he saw the tire in the stream and scared the ever-living crap out of everyone my age who I’ve ever known)

King Joao II: “You didn’t get all the way to India, dumbass!” <<points to the guy, who is smiling proudly>> “That’s not even the right kind of Indian!” <<guy’s smile slowly turns to a frown>>

So, as much as I hate the fact that Portugal got screwed out of half of the new world, I have to admit that in terms of using the wrong versions of cookies I’m essentially the Christopher Columbus of SimLeague Baseball. Except that I’m not funded by evil racist monarchs.

Wait, where was I? Oh yes, my $100M team. My pitching staff uses two of my beloved two-man tandems: lefties Kwang Hyun Kim and Marius Russo (whose autograph I got as a young boy in the 1970’s in a Union, NJ church after mass) paired with righties Joe McGinnity and Mickey Hughes, respectively. The bullpen rounds up some of the usual suspects: Red Ruffing, Todd Burns and some low-IP guys setting up Bill Harris.

I like this team.

Hitters – 5344 PA, .322/.415/.520, 161 HRs
Pitchers – 1428 IP, 2.00 ERC#, 0.31 HR/9+


$90M – 81 Houston 99 Astros 17

When I first saw the themes for this round I wetted my lips at two of them: this league and the $70M one. This is because those two would take a lot of research. I know for a fact that I can never out-open-league the best owners on this site. But I might just be able to out-research them. These two leagues might just give me a snowball’s chance to compete for a championship.

Then life happened. More precisely, in this case, work happened. My job tends to be very seasonally busy. I work in planning for a large company, so during planning season (for us, roughly June to October) my job is a lot busier than it is otherwise. And every year, there’s usually about a 3-week period, when the first version or two of the plan are released, when my job is tremendously busy. Highly stressful 12+ hour days every day, etc. Well this year, that usual 3 or 4 week period lasted for two months, and just ended on Friday. I was so burned out every day that I couldn’t spend any more time at a computer, and after my initial research when the themes were first announced I never looked at the $70M and $90M themes again. I waited until the very last minute to submit them, hoping I’d have the time and energy to revisit them, but it never happened.

Of the two, I’m at least moderately happy with the $90M team. To me the 1981 Astros provided the perfect pitching staff because they have 3 legitimate SPs at this cap, plus a fourth who won’t be great but can moved to LR in the postseason. They also add two excellent bullpen arms and a switch-hitting starting catcher who can throw guys out. The 2017 Astros have Altuve, Correa, some decent OFs and the greatest $80M-$90M league player in the sim, Marwin Gonzalez. In between are the 1999 Astros, with a nice Bagwell, a great cap appropriate OF in “Jurassic” Carl Everett and a pretty good half of a 3B in Caminiti plus some bench pieces.

In the short time I had to research this theme I never considered older (1920’s and prior) teams because I didn’t think they’d have the requisite cheap guys needed overall because there was no $200k exception here. Would I have found a better squad if I had more time and energy? Maybe. But this team won’t kill me. The other one, though…

Hitters – 5429 PA, .304/.384/.488, 215 HRs
Pitchers – 1386 IP, 2.36 ERC#, 0.37 HR/9+


$80M – Left Behind

My original thought was to call this team “Sinister” but I forgot about that until it was too late.

The game theory behind this very simple yet clever theme was fascinating. Here’s how I approached my decision:

1. It makes the most sense to have a right-handed pitching staff, because there are more cap-appropriate righty than lefty pitchers.
2. If it makes more sense to have a righty pitching staff, then it makes more sense to have lefty hitters to hit against them.
3. Therefore, the majority of teams will be righty pitching / lefty hitting, and therefore the optimal alignment would be lefty hitting / lefty pitching.

I felt pretty strongly about this, to the point that this was one of the first teams I submitted. And I think I got the strategy right. In my league, 5 of the other 11 teams are righty pitching / lefty hitting. None are the opposite, which would be the Sinestro to my Green Lantern.

But none of that means anything if your team is no good. And I don’t have enough experience in $80M leagues to know whether this team is. I think it might be, but would not be surprised if it’s not. Dummy Hoy has worked well for me at this cap in the past. The ‘67 Staub has done well for me at higher. I’ve never used the ’58 Musial but why not? Guillorme is a solid bench piece. Nicky Lopez looks interesting. But mostly I have high hopes for the 1901 Sam Crawford, who looks tasty and has gotten off to a nice start.

Pitching is Randy Jones, Rube Marquard, Doc White and Eddie Plank, with Slim Sallee as a long man and a bunch of low-IP guys in the (very) late innings. I think this team might be the canary in a coal mine for my success in this round. To have a chance for a top-half finish I need this to be one of my better teams. As to whether it will be, your guess is as good as mine.

Hitters – 5423 PA, .312/.398/.443, 78 HRs
Pitching – 1352 IP, 2.37 ERC#, 0.24 HR/9+


$70M – A Cornucopia of Mediocrity

Actually, this team should aspire to mediocrity. If they win more than 67 games I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

I know that given 10-12 more hours of research I could’ve done far better, but I just didn’t have it in me. So what was the thought process that led me to these guys? Here goes…

Outfield – 1991 Pirates
Remember that whole spiel about Bonilla the cookie and Christopher Columbus? You don’t? TL;DR? WELL GO BACK AND READ IT, DAMMIT!!! Or don’t. Your dime (what percentage of Americans even know what that means nowadays?). Anyway, once I discovered that the actual cookie is the 1991 Bonilla I was gonna use him come hell or high water. So I used him here. Except IT MAKES THE MOST SENSE TO USE HIM IF YOU CAN USE HIM AT 3B BUT IN THIS THEME YOU’RE DRAFTING HIM AS AN OF, DUMBASS!!! Kind of like buying a Ferrari and using it to toast English muffins on the engine. Except the Pirates have a couple of fourth OFs who are decent so if you don’t draft a starting 3B from your infield team you can use Bonilla at 3B sometimes which makes it not so bad. More like buying a Ferrari and using it to toast English muffins on the engine but also sometimes driving it to Costco to pick up some paper towels. The other starting OFs for the Pirates are Van Slyke, who is decent and cap appropriate, and Barry Bonds, who is better than decent but highly cap inappropriate. If he doesn’t win the MVP this team is in trouble. Spoiler alert: this team is in trouble.

Infield: 1980 Expos
So there’s this guy I’ve been wanting to try at low-to-medium caps: Rodney Scott. At first glance he looks godawful, but he’s fast, steals bases well, has A- range at SS, and is a switch-hitter who only hits .225 but walks a lot. Kind of a faster, suckier Walt Weiss. But Weiss usually punches above his weight so maybe Rodney will get some respect from the sim. Well, I hope so ‘cause that’s all I got. There is literally no other reason to use this team. Cromartie is weak, Speier is barely there, and Bernazard costs little and produces less. Brad Mills should be a decent PH, though. But basically I drafted a bunch of nothings just so I could take a flier on a guy I’ve had my eye on but who will probably blow. Awesome.

Catcher: 2005 Indians
In other words, Victor Martinez. Fine.

Starting Pitchers: 1907 A’s
There were probably dozens of deadball teams with three fair-to-middling SPs. This is one of them.

Relievers: 2015 Mets
I was looking for a team with about 275-300 innings spread out over 5+ pitchers who should be able to get guys out at this cap, including one who can be a closer. I think I found one. Whoopee.

Five $200k hitters and one $200k mop-up guy later, I have a team. Sort of. Not really. Please be gentle with me.

Hitters – 5242 PA, .277/.362/.422, 116 HRs
Pitchers – 1276 IP, 2.77 ERC#, 0.26 HR/9+

So that’s all she (or, in this case, he) wrote. I am honored to play against such elite company. Win lose or draw, it should be interesting. Good luck everyone.

When I jumped into this forum to check on barracuda's writeup, I wasn't expecting to see the words "Drunk History" and "Christopher Columbus".

Well done, sir!

Posted by schwarze on 9/28/2022 9:26:00 AM (view original):
When I jumped into this forum to check on barracuda's writeup, I wasn't expecting to see the words "Drunk History" and "Christopher Columbus".

Well done, sir!

Thanks! I'm glad someone enjoyed it, although the joy of having time to write for the first time in a while was plenty rewarding in itself.

I enjoyed it immensely! I was starting to think we'd run dry on posts in this thread and had nearly given up hope. But you, sir, have restored my faith. And made my day!

Posted by redcped on 9/28/2022 11:38:00 AM (view original):
I enjoyed it immensely! I was starting to think we'd run dry on posts in this thread and had nearly given up hope. But you, sir, have restored my faith. And made my day!

Thanks.