I am curious how you guys approach your team based upon your home ballpark. I am preparing to take over a team that plays in Wichita. That ballpark proves to be a difficult hitters park. Therefore, I am planning to seek pitching and speed. Is that the best approach?

I play in two pitchers' parks, Portland and Seattle. In both cases I chose them because I took over teams with little real offensive talent. The first time, I tried to play in a hitters' park - Wrigley - with mediocre hitters and got killed. Having drafted a slightly better than average pitching staff, I moved to Portland and saw better results. In the second case, I inherited a team with a decent existing pitching staff and figured I'd try to maximize its strength.

Also, in both these cases, I figure that great hitting is the most expensive thing to acquire in this game. Easier to pick up very good defenders and decent pitching along the way.

1/ You need good pitching but not necessarily great pitching. The park will suppress all offensive numbers, making your pitchers look better than they are. With hits at a premium, you don't want to give away free bases, so look for better Control, Pitches, and GB/FB is nice to have.

2/ Try to have very good defense. Again, if you can keep the errors down you'll give away less free bases.

3/ Prioritize hitters with better Eye and Contact. You still need Power, but it's slightly wasted. In my experience only elite power hitters can even get to 40 HRs in these parks, so don't even worry about that. You want the kind of offense that keeps the chains moving so to speak.

And you need to like winning games 3-2. It's not for everyone.

That is helpful damag.

I love making my park a defensive nightmare.

I have teams in San Diego and St.Louis because they are both Pitchers parks. I cranked up my pitching, bullpen and defensive players on both. If my team is giving up more then 3 runs a game is it doing something wrong.

Reasons why I like this.

A) People tend to avoid defense and you can get it for cheap. Pitchers may be expensive but I usually try to raise the talent in my farm system.
B) Only takes one good player to win a game. If I keep the opposition to 2-3 runs a game, anyone on my team has the potential to be a hero to hit a 3 run shot.
C) Speed is also important to my team. If I can get my guys on base, I want them stealing 2nd because, again, that 1 run is going to make a difference.

There will be some times that my strategy is a heartbreaker. Last season my San Diego team was scoring 0.3 runs a game for the first 40 games. It all evened out in the end though.

I go for groundball pitchers and good defensive range. I currently play in Las Vegas in one world (-2,-2,-2,0,0). 90% of my pitchers have a GB rating over 75 and my infielders and CF all have range well above the positional requirement. I'm currently leading the world in WHIP, ERA and OAV.

I won my first two WS in Las Vegas using a similar strategy. Great D but good, not great, pitching that had SP in 50-60 range for stamina(because everyone looked at them as LR).