Posted by doctorcc on 5/15/2024 2:22:00 PM (view original):
I'm curious how frequently owners are actually running into the restrictions? Just glancing at the pitchers, yes, the 1920 limit severely limits your choices if you're working with Babe Adams, Walter Johnson, or Pete Alexander, but that's 3 pitchers out of 48. 4 if you count some lower quality Herb Pennock seasons.

I ran into occasional frustrations with the restriction, but not enough to take the joy from the $100m theme

Posted by Jtpsops on 5/15/2024 7:54:00 PM (view original):
To be fair, at least a handful of those (Perry, Blue, Singleton, etc.) are losing seasons that no one would use anyway.

Posted by just4me on 5/15/2024 11:12:00 PM (view original):
Fisk, Brett, and Schmidt have more than half of their useable careers outside the season range

Sutton has 8 very useful seasons outside the window including arguably his two best seasons…

I didn’t look at guys pre-1920 so can’t even speak to that, but the amount of lost seasons post-1980 is crazy for this kind of setup.

Posted by jbohrman on 5/16/2024 12:01:00 AM (view original):

Posted by just4me on 5/15/2024 11:12:00 PM (view original):
Fisk, Brett, and Schmidt have more than half of their useable careers outside the season range

Sutton has 8 very useful seasons outside the window including arguably his two best seasons…

I didn’t look at guys pre-1920 so can’t even speak to that, but the amount of lost seasons post-1980 is crazy for this kind of setup.

"Arguably" is doing a LOT of heavy lifting in that Sutton claim.

I was going to wait and include my thoughts in the team building strategy write ups as I felt that was a better place for it, but as this conversation continues (and my frustrations with this theme continues to mount), I think it’s better I post my thoughts now, before I either quit or build a protest team.

This is the first time though that I thought about dropping out of the tournament after I saw the themes and it was almost entirely because of the $100m, and I felt that way before I even began constructing a team. I felt that way even more the deeper I got into it. And I'm still on the verge of just eating the loss on my GC and saying nevermind.

Last year I wrote: “This year, more than most, resulted in a bunch of “quickly draft and forget them” teams as the rules or themes didn’t allow much creativity or strategy, most of them were fairly straightforward or restrictive enough to force certain types of strategies. I’d rather see more leagues or themes that force decisions or trade offs. The $255m was the closest to this this season in terms of trade offs. That said, I appreciate the effort to get this off the ground this year and I got to play most of these teams within the sphere of strategy that I find enjoyable right now without also feeling like I have no chance (which is usually the case). I may still have no chance, but these teams feel somewhat competitive AND fun and normally WISC teams only feel competitive OR fun. So, there’s still that. Looking forward to getting these rolling and seeing how they actually play."

Given the discussion around the $100m league in the other thread, I wanted to dive deeper here this year. In simple terms, there are three types of theme league designs. Good/Great, OK, and bad/poor. In the ~20 years of this tournament most of the themes fall into the OK category. We’ve had several that were in the good/great category, and a few in the bad/poor category. Whenever there is a theme in the good/great I always try to emphasize how well put together or designed the theme is/was.

So, what makes a theme good/great, OK, or bad/poor? Why do so many owners disagree on this (as seen by the discussion in the other thread)?

Good/Great Themes:
First, good/great theme rules should restrict eligible players, years, stats, etc without limiting the flexibility in roster construction strategies. Good themes use choices and trade offs to get owners to work outside of comfort zones or try new strategies or players. Themes like the $70 million, $80 million, and $140 million leagues are good examples of this. Despite the high cap at $140 million narrowing the player pool, these leagues allow for different roster construction strategies within the rules frameworks. A well-designed theme should provide meaningful trade-offs and choices, rather than boxing everyone into a similar approach.Good leagues should foster a variety of approaches and strategic thinking.

Bad/Poor Themes:
Bad/poor theme rules force owners to play in a very specific way,often aligning with the commissioner's team-building goals, or strategies, rather than allowing owners to pursue their own strategies and goals within the ruleset. However, themes like the $100 million league tend to force specific types of roster construction, limiting roster building strategies and the overall strategic variety to 1 or 2 very specific types of roster building (more on this in a minute).

OK Themes:
OK themes are somewhere in between. The $110m and $120m themes are good examples of that this year. While they both allow general strategic flexibility, both leagues requiring hitters and pitchers from multiple eras limit some of the few effective strategies for defenses and combating either deadball pitchers or modern switch hitters. There’s ways to minimize this within these rules, but it takes serious effort and likely using tools outside the draft center (which I don’t believe should be a feature of any league for a tournament like this), so in effect, both limit teams to only a couple of viable strategies in roster building and encourage owners to use more common players and seasons in leagues that are already nearing the higher cap ranges of already more limited player pools. This is where most WISC themes have fallen over the decades. Mostly designed to fit the roster building strategies and styles of the theme creators, but overcomable with serious effort, or if one is fine with just having fun and not expecting to win.

The $100m Box Theme:
The $100m "box theme" this year was particularly disliked because it forced owners into specific roster selections construction strategies without room for strategic diversity. This kind of design undermines the core enjoyment of simulation baseball, which lies in the freedom to create and compete with unique team strategies.

Owners that enjoyed this league are ones whose roster building strategies generally aligned with the design of the theme. Owners who were frustrated by it are ones whose roster building strategies and goals and don’t want to build a team that’s essentially the same as everyone else's.For example, I don’t want to run standard pitching rotations, I like using lots of platoons… both of which this theme practically eliminates due to the structure of the teammates and positional selection requirements, and then with multiple players having 50-70% of their useable seasons outside the eligible years range, made it more frustrating.

Suggested Improvements:
This theme could have been designed to appease both those frustrated by this league and those that enjoyed it. Changing up the boxes such that the players weren’t outside the target year range, and then a range wouldn’t have even needed to be specified. More diversity in the teams the players come from so that teammates of players aren’t mostly in other boxes (there were multiple selections who had 5-8 usable teammates who are also in boxes). This would’ve allowed those who enjoyed it to draft essentially the same rosters and team structure while still allowing others to be flexible in their team designs. For example, removing any players whose careers are outside the desired year ranges from the boxes. Making sure more teams were represented to give more variability in teammate selections so that 30% of a players teammates weren’t ineligible. Using the salary spreadsheets WIS provides, it took just a few minutes to set up filters and rules to create boxes that accomplished more of this flexibility, but even doing it manually through the draft center wouldn’t take more than probably 30-45 minutes to set up. You’d still have access to players like Ruth, boxed into 1920+ through teammates such as Aaron Ward, Lou Gehrig, etc.. This is where trade offs come in.

Examples of Good Trade-Offs:
The $80m league forced a trade off with the SB requirement and the year range limited to mostly post-ww2 also emphasized those tradeoffs. I’m using 5 hitters and 9 pitchers I’ve never used before on this team. The $70m forced a tradeoff in bench/bullpen value and how you use your FA. The $140m forced tradeoffs in how you use your clones to fill specific positions.

Many people also complained about the $70m while discussing the $100m, but I feel the point was missed in the complaints about the $100m in those comparisons. The complaint wasn’t that the $100m was challenging or hard, it’s that it effectively limits your roster building to one specific type of roster building strategy. The $70m was probably the most challenging, but it was also my favorite to build. You had complete flexibility in roster structure and the FA can fill almost any void (from taking a deadball team with only 23 players to 25 and making them actually useable, to reducing cap on an all-time great team by replacing some excess with cheaper FA, or by taking a weaker team on the cusp to greatness by giving them the pieces they were missing. The challenge was in the research, not in trying to force a team to fit a specific style of team.

I usually sign up before the themes are known. I also am generally disappointed in the themes and express that disappointment virtually every year as they’re almost always mid-high cap specific roster types that drive more luck-based success than anything meaningful in roster construction. I also try to call out themes I feel do a great job of allowing flexibility. The $70m this year, the $255m last year, etc… Usually it’s the lower cap leagues that do this well because the theme creators aren’t as familiar with them, so they keep the rules more flexible. But with the mid-high caps the rules tend to get very boxy (no pun intended) because the creators are familiar with them and are trying too hard to make something new in that space. The ultra high caps generally are also well designed because the player pools are already so limited, there’s not much you can do rules-wise without forcing everyone to draft the same team. Generally the problems are found in the $100-140m range.

Posted by redcped on 5/16/2024 12:21:00 AM (view original):
Yeah, with all due respect, I cannot think of a single argument that any season besides 1972 is Sutton's best season. Others might be more cap-friendly in some themes, sure, but I mean it's not even close as far as stats go.

Posted by just4me on 5/16/2024 3:11:00 AM (view original):

Posted by redcped on 5/16/2024 12:21:00 AM (view original):
Yeah, with all due respect, I cannot think of a single argument that any season besides 1972 is Sutton's best season. Others might be more cap-friendly in some themes, sure, but I mean it's not even close as far as stats go.

He was the 6th or 7th best pitcher in ‘72, and his WAR is within the margin of error for 1980 at 6.6 vs 6.3, despite the 60 additional IP. And he was 2nd or 3rd best in ‘80. After normalizing, both ’80 & ‘81 are roughly equivalent to both ‘72 & ‘73 on rate basis’, IP difference being only significant gap. ‘72 was a big year for pitching across the board. Lots of career years by traditional numbers that aren’t as clear cut career years after adjusting for the context. Thus the “arguably.”