Wondering if anyone has tried, and if so, has had success with a team built on speed and defense, ala Herzog's great Cardinal teams of the 80s?  Which HBD ballpark would you choose if you were to do it?

I had a nice run with a similar setup in St. Louis my first season in Clarkson. It was an abandonment, so I had a lot of ground to make up. The speed/defense combo shot me from dead last in the league to 1 game short of making the playoffs. I would think any of the pitchers parks (Seattle, San Diego, Burlington, etc.)  would work well under that strategy.

Yeah, I'd only want to try it with an already broken ballclub.  I'd be afraid of screwing up a decent club if I didn't do it right

There's a guy in OCD who does this in San Francisco; he even wants his catchers to have 70+ speed when possible. The last 3 seasons he has stolen 440-520 bases with an 80+% success rate, and he has made the playoffs all 3 seasons, winning 104 games last season.

I would do this in SF or DET, a park that is permissive of singles but kills HR.

There's a guy in Ripken Jr who has done it.  He had to slide his 3b over to SS this season and  had a real crappy guy playing 3b for much of the year, but once he corrected it, he almost made up enough ground to grab the wild card.  Last season w/ a better SS/3b options defensively he ran to the 2nd best record in the league.  He plays in KC (pitchers park) and his offense scored a bunch of runs.  However my fear that proved to be correc last year (granted small sample size) was that w/o more power (he had 2 big boppers but everyone else was speed/speed/speed) he would struggle vs better pitchers/catchers in the playoffs.  He got bounced in year 1.  Still, though he has a pretty good handle on it, just needs a little more OBP I think to make things work (and better defense at SS/3rd than he had this season)  Its irock's KC team in Ripken, JR if you want to have a look, though we're about to end the WS soon (I'm up 3-1 w/ game 5 tonight) in a private world, so you may not be able to access them for too long once the world flips.

This year's team isn't as extreme but I've been pretty successful with this strategy in American Pastime.

[URL=http://www.whatifsports.com/hbd/Pages/Popups/FranchiseProfile.aspx?fid=2451]Pirates[/URL]

It looks like you're winning despite your offense, and being carried by your pitching.

I was actually going to point to Crump's team in MG until I realized he's stealing a lot of bases, winning a lot of games but not scoring a lot of runs.

We did last year and i think the year before, i know one season we stole 500+, were 30th or soemthing in OPS and 4th or something in runs scored. This seasons been brutal, seems everyone is hitting <250 or has an ERA>5, Suarez aside.

Season 15, in MG, 522SB, 73 CS. 31st in team OPS. 6th in RS. We stole 670 in season 14, but despite being bottom in team OPS, we were only 26th or so in RS.

Posted by mhulshult on 10/4/2010 4:53:00 PM (view original):
It looks like you're winning despite your offense, and being carried by your pitching.

This year that's true but look at the previous 3 seasons... season 15 is good example.