$70 MIL
The first team that I tried building a team with for this theme was the Giants, and I came out liking my team a decent amount, had to kick the tires on other franchises to make sure I wasn't missing anyone. I just couldn't arrive at anything that looked like it could be competitive with any other franchise. So this was one of the first teams I had finished and "easier" builds for me. That said, I'm sure we'll suck, LOL.

$80 MIL
Pretty self explanatory obviously, the only hiccup I had with this one was I submitted my roster initially and then realized I had Ketel Marte slated to start at SS for me with a D/D- So, I had to fix that obviously. So then it took me a while to find any one player that I could easily replace Marte with. The SS options I didn't really love, in the end I settled for Vern Stephens at SS and moved Marte to the OF. We'll see how it goes. In this league I'm really just interested to see how many teams selected GABP as their home, I'll bet alot. I went with Tiger Stadium myself.

$100 MIL
Another quote, unquote, easy build for me. I ran a StatMuse inquiry for largest single season run differentials in league history as I felt that would give me a team off of which I would have to do fewer twists and just run them out there mostly as is with a few tweaks. One of the higher teams on the list was the team everyone loves to hate, the 2019 Astros. This team definitely had a strong base as I was able to run 16 of 25 players untwisted, including 6 of 8 starters on offense and my top 3 starting pitchers. Again, i messed around with so many builds for other teams but every single one I could come up with a strong staff and a lousy offense or a strong offense and poor pitching. This was the only team I could get to where I loved the whole team. Now having said that, I still think our HR/9 allowed are super high, but I'm hoping that won't kill us.

$110 MIL
I can't really say that I had a strategy with this one, I was just kind of playing around with different franchise/Era combos and see what sticks. The first thing I told myself was, this is a DH league so I'll definitely pair the Dodgers with row 5 and grab Ohtani as my DH. That build didn't really shake out and ended up scrapping it and a half dozen other attempts. This was definitely probably the 2nd most interesting build behind the A-Z build. After a lot of trial and error, we landed on

A: Giants
B: Cardinals
C: Braves
D: Orioles
E: Astros

This theme kind of echoed my previous builds in that, in that 1920-1940 range the only franchise I really liked my build from was the New York Giants, just like had happened with the 70 Mil team. And then of course landing on the Astros of 2004-2025 gave me 2019 Bregman and 2019 Gerrit Cole leading this team and my $100 Mil team. I liked that this theme got me to a few guys I used in the sim a lot back in the day but haven't used at all recently, specifically, Hubbell, Mort Cooper Harry Brecheen, Musial and Chris Hoiles.

$125 Mil
I'd love to hear everyone else's experience with this one, because obviously, I've never set a team up like this before, so I don't know of the team I landed on is amazing or terrible. No clue how the platoons are going to work out, the 6 man rotation that averages out to 5.9 Innings per start. Not sure if this team might have to pivot at some point to using openers instead, just a total WTF build. Though I was excited to be able to roster a couple high dollar relievers that would usually be out of my price range.

$140 Mil
The Pièce de résistance. I was super excited to try and balance this one out between a good team now and a team that will be competitive should I be lucky enough to qualify for round 2. Funny thing was as soon as I saw $140 Mil I was telling myself, ok go ahead and plug in Ruth, Bonds, Gehrig, Ed Walsh, DiMaggio and I did start with all those guys in my lineup. But then after playing around with everything, some of them didn't have seasons I loved at the $80 mil level for next round and some just fell off because I needed to use their letter for someone else. In the end only Ruth remained on my final roster. Interestingly, Babe will probably be a bench player on my $80 mil team. Got to roster some more guys in this league also that I haven't used in awhile, Babe Adams, John Tudor, Ralph Kiner, Ed Delahanty, Yaz.

$70 Million

This was a tough build. $70 Million is not much to begin with, but assembling all of the puzzle pieces within the five-year slots proved to be the real challenge. I started with the positions that I had slotted as the most important, namely SP1, SP2, SP3, LF, RF, 1B.
I think any team that is allowed to use pitchers from 1901-1919 should pack as many of those innings in as they can and I was able to get just over 400 IP with two starters, Wiltse and Sallee, with two reliable inning-eaters in Halicki and Garrelts from later years.
With OBP and clustered HRs as a priority at such a limited budget, I took advantage of cloning by duplicating OBP monster Mel Ott, who helped with both, and corner LH power with McCovey and Thompson.
The theme made it very tough to fill in every slot and I got into a real quandary at the end and had to accept a subpar Ray Durham (.290 OBP) at 2B. His 11 HR and 10 SB meant I could at least stick him in the 8 hole and hope.
I felt like I had to gamble with fewer PA and IP than I would like but I did so thinking that all of the other owners would be similarly constrained. To counter that I chose what I think was the most run-suppressing park of the four available, so we’re going to chill at the ‘Stick. Literally.

$80 Million

At first I thought I was going to find every good pitcher whose HR/9 was right at .75, thinking that was one factor I could control and guarantee having the lowest HR/9 in the league. But then I thought that since everyone was going to have high-HR/9 pitchers, that I could afford to give up a handful more HRs in the pursuit of fewer BB and a higher K/9 ratio than I usually go after.
Similarly, I tried to target enough HRs to satisfy the requirement of 200 while maintaining as high of an OBP as possible. Knowing that dingers are going to be flying anyway, home or away, I wanted to be hyper-focused on getting runners on base at all costs. Stocked roughly 1,900 ABs with batters having OBP of .425 or better. I didn’t grab a dominant slugger, but all have sock, five with 28+ HRs. I hope to have the bases clogged and the HRs to come periodically.
It will be hard for anyone to plan on out-homering anyone else, so I’m hoping to have the most 3-run HR’s if possible.

$100 Million

At this price level I felt I had to have a minimum of two dominant high-IP pitchers and a third all-star-caliber SP3. I really wanted it to be a deadball team so I could maximize innings there but just never found a cohesive offensive counterpart that I liked. I love Pete Alexander in a league like this but could not both pair him with another effective starter and also be blessed with the remainder of a roster that could provide much punch.
This theme was a real challenge. I tried so many combos of SP1 and SP2 but constantly ran up against pre-1920 rosters that could not provide enough offensive and defensive depth to justify the pitching dominance. To be honest, I have always been underwhelmed with the performances of Koufax and Drysdale when I’ve had them in the past but getting a good SP3 in 1956 Don Newcombe in his “natural” year helped make up my mind.
In a way, avoiding big gaping holes was as much of a challenge as lining up talent.
Out of the dozens of teams I tried, this was the first one that had popped into my head. Despite trying so many different angles, I just kept coming back to this team. Thinking I had the pitching constraints down I was pretty pleased with the offense and defense. Campanella, Snider, Robinson and Reese are strong up the middle while Hodges and Furillo provide pop at the corner spots. Dale Mitchell and Jim Gilliam are passable, though Gilliam can steal bases and both walk a lot.

Going to have to lean heavily on the three-man starting rotation, though there is only one “blow-up” arm I had to put in there to make salary, Schiraldi, and he can mop up.

$110 Million

The real challenge here was twofold, having to avoid scarcity, especially from the expansion-era teams, and having to ensure that each team reached at least $20 million. That also limited any one team to no more than a mid-to-high-20M range without going too high.
I found that the Houston Colt .45’s and Astros from 1962-1983 was the best usage I could find for that group without also submarining better blocs. It did, however, fill in my starting middle infielders (Joe Morgan, Denis Menke) at a good price while giving me one of the three Starting Pitchers for my three-man rotation (Dierker), a left-hand bench bat and, in order to work the salary constraints, a dicey Vern Ruhle though I may not need him, or at least can put him at mop up.

At this price level, I’ve always loved John Tudor so I tried to work in the Cardinals. Getting a full-time Edmonds and McGwire plus two cheap pieces, added a lot of sock and a decent-fielding CF.
I wasn’t expecting to go with the Phillies, especially from the mid-century, but like Robin Roberts at that pirce level. That also gave me a bargain catcher with Seminick who comes with a .400 OBP / .524 SLG, plus two nice bullpen pieces with Schoolboy Rowe and Andy Karl.

Going with the Pirates in the first bloc, I found two solid relief pitchers and, surprisingly, two starters with Kiki Cuyler and Carson Bigbee, each with .400+ OBP and high SB. I probably overpaid for Johnny Gooch but that was mostly a puzzle move to get them over $20 million. A switch-hitting C with .364 OBP shouldn’t hurt anyway.
And the Dodgers fit in at the end as I found what I think is the perfect DH in Ohtani. Got a closer here, too, with Graterol, a cheap back-end LHP, a versatile bench player with speed and a dominant 3B with Beltre. He cost too much but he’ll play every day and produce, I’m sure.

$125 Million

This was a very interesting draft concept. At first I tried to stash as many quality players that cost just over $4 million so that I could have maximum cash left to make a better starting lineup. But I changed my mind and chose to go ultra-heavy with platoons, trying to favor LH hitters and having a couple switch-hitters. I put 14 batters on my roster but still only had 5250 Hitter AB’s with a 60-40 split in LH AB’s / RH AB’s.
The pitching was a little more difficult. There are a lot of good pitchers that cost between $4 and $6 million but few with more than 200 IP. I have a four-man rotation of Ron Guidry, Matt Harvey, Roy Prim and Joe Benz at the moment that only notched 706 IP. To combat a shortage there I found some good swing men that should be able to handle 18-20 starts each with CC Sabathia and Pedro Martinez with two more sharp bullpen guys that have 125+ IP in Medlen and Gonsolin. The three pitchers with under 100 IP are strikeout monsters and all are low-BB, low-HR.

PNC Park will keep HR’s down so I’m hoping mine will count for more than the opponents’.

$140 Million

This was like juggling two lineup balls of vastly different weights, though lineup balls aren’t a thing and don’t exist. Keeping in mind the distant chance that I could advance in the tournament, trying to figure out my “shadow $80 million team” was half the fun.
To get there I focused on major stars with long careers and a variety of usable seasons at different price levels. Thus, the roster has nine HOF bats with seasons hopefully just as efficient at $80 as $140 million. Foxx, Heilmann, Williams, Thome, A-rod, Ott, Posey, Doerr, and Cronin.
Though I’m sure I started with the top of my rotation. One guy I love at this price level is Pete Alexander. Two more are Mordecai Brown and Joe McGinnity. Then I looked at ticking off some boxes with letters like Q, Z,I, O, U, Y and V and noted letters already used.
I found a guy I like in a lot of formats, name or not, Mark Quinn. Valuing OBP, I thought of Ott (hey, that rhymes!), and I got a decent and versatile cheap bench player in Youkilis, another in Jose Iglesias and a versatile LH bat in George Zeber. Much later I found a switch-hitting catcher to backup Posey in Jason Varitek, a high-leverage RP in Uehara, and 10 letters were done. 15 to go.
Then I filled in most-desired players in each of the spots that were outstanding. I think Kershaw and Joss were kind of easy there since they both had so many good seasons at different levels. I think at this point I just looked for the best OF with the attributes I wanted and landed on one of my favorites, Harry Heilmann. He’s been great so often for me and he has all kinds of seasons to choose from. Valuing power in a high-price league like this I took Foxx at 1B.
Then I picked up Thome when I saw he had a passable low-dollar bench season that I could use if we advance while leaving him free to DH here. Finally I dropped Dwight Evans on the bench for cheap, and went after my next two spots, 3B and C. Posey is so good at this price and isn’t too bad on defense, and A-Rod has many other strong seasons to choose from for later.
At this point you really have to be watching the money but my hope was to have a bucket to spend for one awesome bat. Joe Cronin and Bobby Doerr, and in the bullpen Sutter, Grilli, Lyle and Nathan. Which left about $10.35 million for a strong OF bat and the letter W so we’re going with Mr. Ballgame, 1947 Ted Williams and his 1.133 OBP.
Griffith Stadium is going to squelch HR’s some but my team OBP is very high so hoping to win by keeping the ball down, stringing long innings because of getting men on base, hitting enough HR’s but hopefully with men on base. I’ve got the pitchers I wanted so if the starters consistently go 7+ innings then the bullpen has some versatility with very high K/9 and very low BB/9.
This team is loaded. Of course, at $140 Million so is every other team.

70m: The Running Redbirds

I built rosters for four franchises before seeing that the stats would be similar enough regardless. I had decided to try the Cardinals because I expected to be able to roster a lot of speedy switch-hitters. And then I had it done and realized I had only one switch-hitter. I was within 8K of the cap and figured I should leave well enough alone … but I didn’t. At one point I got 3 switch-hitters into the lineup but wound up with a timeframe mistake and had to settle for two. I’m pretty sure it’s the best overall team … though of course my Pirates roster had four switch-hitters in the lineup, and I’m not 100% certain if I wound up taking the right franchise, let alone the right version of their roster.

What I do have is a crazy amount of speed.

We’ll play in Busch II because we don’t hit homers at all (it’s -3) and an overall PF of 0.94 is good for making sure the pitchers hold up. Four starters in the 90s (a pair of Lou Brocks, Willie McGee and Jack Fournier) and two more in the 80s (Miller Huggins and Royce Clayton). So we’re going to run all day and all night, providing guys get on base. $70M rosters always look weak, so I never really know if it’s good enough.

5,486 PA, .281/.346/.394, 55 HR, 268 SB, $36.1M
1,328 IP, 2.67 ERA, .239 OAV, 1.09 WHIP, 0.65 HR/9, $33.9M

80m: True Outcome Paradise

I’ll be curious to see how many owners try to fight this theme vs. just giving into it. I decided to lean into it and try to maximize Earl Weaver baseball, drafting 308 homers. In backchecking rosters, I saw some owners even topped 400, and now I wish I’d tried to push even higher.

Topping my list is 2025 Kyle Schwarber with 56, plus three more with 40+ in 1992 Mark McGwire, 2005 Adam Dunn and 1983 Tony Armas. I aimed for players with good fielding ratings to minimize those errors that lead to multi-run homers, putting less emphasis on range as I expect a lot of strikeouts, walks and homers anyway. Also, something had to give in pursuit of the longball.

You can’t get away from the HR vulnerability, but you can try to maximize how many of those are solo shots. I’ve drafted pitchers who avoid walks and also, because they’re all modern guys, have decent normalized HR rates. My whole staff is from the 2000s.

Playing in Tiger Stadium, which is -1 for 1B and 2B, neither of which we do well anyway.

5,374 PA, .253/.347/.502, 308 HR, 22 SB, $38.3M
1,352 IP, 2.85 ERA, .230 OAV, 1.04 WHIP, 0.79 HR/9, $41.7M

100m: Twisting 12 of the ‘21 Dodgers

I built or tried to build upwards of 30 rosters here. I’m sure we will see some entries that I didn’t attempt, of course. I’ll be annoyed if one of them dominates my league too. Though I started with a couple modern rosters that I liked, I always worry about deadball pitching killing their power. So I tried really hard to find a deadball team I could use instead, or at least a team less dependent on power. I played around with so many old teams and nearly convinced myself I could live with their flaws. You know, like having only 6 useful pitchers or some really questionable defense. Some of them looked really good at the top (two ace SP or a few great bats) but didn’t really work as a full roster with these limitations on the twists that someone imposed on all of us. That guy, really …

I came down finally, I’d say, to rosters from the 1977 Reds and 2021 Dodgers. The Reds lineup really has it all, and even though I’d have to fill the bench with 300k exceptions they wouldn’t need to play much anyway. The bullpen couldn’t be very deep, as some of their guys had the same best seasons and you have to pick one. Also the SP innings didn’t quite add up well.

And even though I’d built the 2021 Dodgers pretty early on and tried hard to improve on them, I really couldn’t. I can use 12 twists and an exception or two to put together a really solid roster. The biggest compromise is probably trying to get by with a very short bench in a non-DH league. Maybe I can get by without a mop up and add another bat?

Even as I decided to go with this team, I still saw holes I wish I could fix. I tried a second version of the team and tinkered a bit to wind up with 12 pitchers and an extra bat on the bench. I think he’ll be more helpful than a mopup. Dodger Stadium should help us go with a slightly lower innings count.

I didn’t end up twisting anyone forward, so my twists are:

2020 Corey Seager
2019 Max Muncy
2018 Trevor Bauer
2017 Cody Bellinger
2016 Mookie Betts
2015 David Price
2014 AJ Pollack
2013 Kenley Jansen
2012 Justin Turner
2011 Clayton Kershaw
2010 Neftali Feliz
2009 Albert Pujols

From the 2021 roster, I am using C Will Smith, 2B Trea Turner, OF/IF Chris Taylor, C Keibert Ruiz, SP Max Scherzer, SP Julio Urias, SP Walker Buehler, RP Alex Vesia, RP Blake Treinen, RP Corey Knebel, RP Mitch White. Rest are <300K guys.

Having now seen that about half the owners went with deadball teams, I think division breakdowns could really determine if my power gets completely lost. So that’s a concern. Maybe those high-error fielders will help me out. I do think my pitching should keep a lot of those lineups in check, too. My bullpen should be near the best in the league.

5,628 PA, .289/.369/.529, 257 HR, 121 SB, $50.4M
1,386 IP, 2.45 ERA, .198 OAV, 0.98 WHIP, 0.77 HR/9, $49.5M

110m: Pit-StL-Bal-Hou-LAD

I always intended to build several versions of this roster and decide which I liked best. I wound up trying one combination and then tweaking it at the edges a few times and sticking with it. Mostly because I really didn’t have the time to devote to starting over and also because I kind of like how it turned out. Then I started to write it up and realized I had used two teams in the same group somehow and felt like a total fool.

I redid the team keeping four of my teams/eras the same and tried to find a good match among the teams I still needed to use. I think it came out pretty close to the first team and at this point that’s going to have to be good enough. Any time I potentially had to build a new roster went away with the fix for this first one.

I used: 1920-40 Pirates, 1941-61 Cardinals, 1962-82 Orioles, 1983-03 Astros, 2004-25 Dodgers

I knew the Pirates could get me several good bats and a couple bullpen pieces, and I wound up taking my entire starting outfield in Paul Waner, Max Carey and Kiki Cuyler. The Cardinals of that era have so many useful players and wound up contributing Stan Musial and Mort Cooper as the big pieces. The Astros were my expansion choice because I knew I could fill some bullpen roles and create a catching platoon from them. The Dodgers would provide DH Shohei Ohtani, 2B Orlando Hudson, SP Clayton Kershaw and some bullpen help. My last-minute swap was for the Orioles where I was able to plug in Brooks Robinson and Luis Aparicio on the left side of the infield and Mike Cuellar in the rotation.

Playing in Forbes for +1 singles and the rest neutral because I didn’t really build an offense around one particular strength. I probably should have aimed to build a doubles team in Sportsmen’s Park, but too late now.

6,270 PA, .312/.382/.498, 177 HR, 213 SB, $58.2M
1,418 IP, 2.23 ERA, .201 OAV, 0.98 WHIP, 0.56 HR/9, $51.8M


125m: Tandems, Platoons and One C, Oh My

I think the first key decision here is how many pitchers to draft, because you won’t have any workhorses or low-inning guys basically. I studied the pool in the salary range and decided I would go with a four-tandem rotation with roughly 230-250 innings per pairing. That’s 8 spots, and it’s tough to get the necessary good remaining innings with only four relievers. So I went with 13 arms, including three stud late-inning guys who will inevitably crash and burn.

To make the 12 hitting spots work and ensure I have someone available to pinch hit here and there, I needed to take a few extra PA. I’m not 100% sure it will work out fatigue-wise, though. I went with one catcher who can play every game (Ted Simmons), a 1b who barely needs to rest, 5 players to cover 2b, 3b and SS, and 5 to cover the OF.

I deemphasized homers and aimed for good speed and balance, with high averages and good gloves. I might be a tad too righty-leaning with 7 of them, vs 3 lefties and 2 switch bats, but we will see a bunch of pitchers every game so maybe it won’t matter as much. If there were more switch hitters who fit, I would have used them.

5,623 PA, .333/.414/.521, 141 HR, 169 SB, $61.6M
1,453 IP, 1.91 ERA, .188 OAV, 0.91 WHIP, 0.46 HR/9, $63.4M

140m: N is for Ngoepe

There will be two types of owners here: those who built their $80M Round 2 roster alongside this one, and those who will figure that out if they have to later. Since Round 2 is actually more important and I certainly hope to be there, I’m in the former camp. I didn’t make any decision that didn’t work for both rosters, and that meant a lot of tweaking the last 5-6 spots to make it all work.

I did a few of the toughest letters first to find players who worked on both rosters. Welcome aboard, Mark Quinn, Koji Uehara and Jeff Zimmerman.

I started building my lineup out with some switch hitters I could use at both caps, like Willie McGee, Tim Raines, Roger Connor and Frankie Frisch. I originally was using Bill Bernhard but struggled to find a 3b I liked. So I switched to George Brett.

With a triples-heavy lineup that doesn’t need to hit homers, we will play in AT&T Park courtesy of Buster Posey.

6,253 PA, .337/.402/.516, 134 HR, 245 SB, $72.5M
1,463 IP, 1.74 ERA, .203 OAV, 0.89 WHIP, 0.30 HR/9, $67.5M

So here it goes,

$70m -- 125 Years of Pirates

So this was one of two leagues where at least looking at things I had no idea what I was going to do. The only two times I've gone below an $80 million cap was the $70 million leagues in 2021 and 2022 when I last played, did some math and figured I’d start with pitching and settled on 3 or 4 franchises that I thought fit what I was looking for. I started with the Pirates, built this team in one go and then didn’t try any of the others. My one worry is I don’t know if this team is going to score runs. I’ve used 84 Johnny Ray before so I’m fairly certain that he’ll hit at this cap, the other guys, couldn’t tell you. Did my best to try and focus on guys with a lot of extra-base hits but not necessarily home runs. Other than my innings target (roughly 1,300, I’m not comfortable going lower) wanted to make sure that I was minimizing walks first, and then OAV when/where I could. Camnitz (I’m not really an OL guy so I don’t know if this is the good one), Zane Smith, and Elmer Steele (not the good one) have the bulk of innings. They’ll get spelled by 36 Waite Hoyt and 96 Danny Darwin (who doesn’t look awful), then some decent offerings out of the bullpen.

5,262 PA, .286/.348/.435, 108 HR, B-/C+
1,341 IP, .239/1.14 5.07 K/9, 2.28 BB/9

$80m -- 273

I love building power teams so this was one of the teams that tempted me into coming back and doing this and this in particular just kind of lends itself to fiddling around. Debated on trying to go ham with the line up, but in the end decided to just try and build what I think is a good team that would normalize well. Immediately I knew that I wanted 37 Rudy York on the team, but was open in other places. Eventually settled on an OF of 24 Santander, 15 Cravath, and 22 Tilly Walker and that never really changed. 24 Willi Castro at 2B is there just as kind of a flush to fill the position and maybe occasionally get on base and turn the line up over. 91 HoJo at short to take advantage of his range, then I had 25 Bob Meusel at 3B for a LONG time before subbing him out for 31 Foxx. Bench guys have remained mostly the same, did find a way in mix of moving around to get Pete Knisley in who has A range (to the extent that it’ll matter here) and can hit. Where I’ve really spent a lot of time monkeying around with this team has been with the pitching staff. I initially built a pitching staff with over 1,400 innings with as many as 9-10 guys being able to start if needs be, but eventually confronted that I don’t need that many innings and I don’t need that many starters.

Did decide to go with a six man rotation of 18 Kershaw, 22 Rasmussen, 17 Alex Wood, 21 Lance Lynn, 94 Butch Henry, and 01 Roy Oswalt. Then 22 Jeffrey Springs will be a long relief guy out of the pen who can also start games. Really almost all of my tinkering came down to the last 3-4 spots in the bullpen and I played with a lot of different ideas before settling here with Billy O’Dell as a bigger inning guy. 21 Kittredge and 22 Dylan Lee as a righty/lefty combo that I feel pretty good about and then 03 Dan Miceli just to spend the rest of my money. Tommy Milone is around to mop up or mitigate any potential death spirals. Given how much time I spent messing about here, I am really hopeful for this team.

5,588 PA, .273/.352/.514, 273 HR, C+/C-
1,336 IP, .224/1.06, 8.52 K/9, 1.96 BB/9, .92 HR/9

$100m -- 17 Dodgers/10 Twists

The second of two teams that I was almost overwhelmed on looking at eventually. Having no idea where I wanted to go, the first team that I sat down and looked at was the 2017 Dodgers and slowly, but surely I managed to put this team together. After I built the team, I didn’t look at it for month and then shortly before I entered it I gave it a once over of things and found that despite having not spent something like $2 million in my first go round, I also had two 6 year twist guys, so got back to work

Managed to get 10 twists in, and have two $300k exemption, so have 13 guys straight off the 17 team. Hitter wise managed to brought in 2011 Adrian Gonzalez, 2008 Chase Utley, 2007 Curtis Granderson, and 2025 Cody Bellinger. My two exceptions are here too in 12 Jordy Mercer and 18 Johnny Field (who?) Pitching wise have twists with 20 Kenta Maeda, 19 Ryu, 16 Darvish, 22 Urias, and 13 Tony Watson. Little short on innings that where I like to go but figure Dodger Stadium will help some with that. Had to get rid of 17 Sergio Romo when I realized I had the wrong one, so grabbed Luis Avilan, who isn't very good but can maybe get some leftys out. Lot of guys here who can start and be shuffled in and out of the bullpen. Will run at least a 5 if not 6 man rotation with starters used as relievers if need be

6,156 PA, .288/.363/.501, 243 HR, A-/C+
1,372 IP .206/.97, 9.73 K/9, 1.95 BB/9, .99 HR/9

$110m -- Shibe Vibe

This team was a PAIN to build, so I really hope that it winds up being good. Part of the issue was that I didn’t read the rules, so I’d build a team and miss that there was a DH (happened) or miss the $20 million per team requirement (also happened), took about two hours of pretty consistent work but managed to land on what I had here. As far as offense, DH wise immediately thought Ohtani, couldn’t afford the 24 version so went with the 25, that also brought me to 20 Seager. Looking forward to seeing how 26 Al Simmons and 29 Mule Haas hits out of the outfield.

Pitching wise started with and eventually made it to 3 big inning starters, 86 Scott, 46 Newhouser, and 69 Cuellar with 16 Rich Hill as a set long relief guy. The rest of the bullpen was just trying to be smart with my money to get in under all the requirements. Didn’t build with any particular ballpark in mind, but going to put them in Shibe to fit the 20-40 A’s era

6,604 PA, .303/.379/.518, 218 HR, C+/C+
1,403 IP, .198/1.01, 7.86 K/9, 2.67 BB/9

$125m -- $4-6 Million Men

Had a team built here, but had the thought could I go back and make a better one.My biggest goal here was to minimize if not completely avoid paying for plate appearances or innings that I didn’t need particularly at this cap, and while my first team wasn’t excessive I think definitely on the plate appearances side I had fallen in that direction.

My other goal was to get in and really maximize range for my fielders while trying to remain as offensively productive as I could and other than 18 Babe Ruth (which, I mean, he’s Babe Ruth) all of my field players are A- range or better. Have 24 Joe Hauser here on a second team which looks like its either going to be great, or terrible. 20 Miggy Ro, 12 Scutaro, and 97 Jeff Frye can play a bunch of different infield positions, 02 Charlie Hickman hopefully will get me a lot of extra base hits, and while 20 Salvy isn’t my starting catcher, he’ll spell Hauser if needs be and any time 43 Bill Dickey goes below probably 99 fatigue I’ll get Salvy in there too.

Pitching stayed mostly the same, have six guys that can start and will probably start the season off with a six man rotation with 01 Pedro, 20 Plesac Kershaw and Gonsolin, 24 Skenes, and 25 Eovaldi. Then 3 big inning guys out of the bullpen in 81 Fingers (this is probably a waste, I don’t think he’s ever been good for me) 12 Medlen, and 99 Foulke. Then 99 Wagner and 24 Clase as lefty and righty options to slam the door at the end. As long as Clase isn’t spiking pitches intentionally of course.

5,513 PA, .332/.392/.527, B/A-
1,418 IP, .188/.87, 10.41 K/9, 1.78 BB/9, .64 HR/9

$140m -- I Iz for Izturis

Its been a while since I’ve entered in this tournament, and while I’ve definitely gotten better at the game, I still really question the likelihood that I’ll need to bother with the $80 million version of this team, but rather than going with the first team that I built and bagging the possibility of the second one I decided to stick to the spirit and really have a go at things. I kind of built both teams simultaneously, the $140 million guys were pretty easy to settle on so I would go and check and see did they have a viable guy at the $80 cap range.

Started with pitchers and will roll out 08 Mathewson, 08 Brown, and 85 Tudor as a three man rotation. Tudor probably is going to get shelled (its been a while since he’s done well for me). Fairly happy with the line up. Triple Crown Yaz, got the low PA Votto (he’ll be spelled by Steve Pearce) 12 Zimmerman I’ve used before, 23 Max Carey and 75 Fred Lynn will hopefully be productive and get me a bunch of + plays.

Made a last moment tweak to add Jim Eisenreich to the team so that I could play in the Metrodome. This is another salary range that I can’t remember the last time I played it

6,382 PA, .330/.410/.534, C+/C+ (Most of this is due to back up guys who will play little to not at all)
1,502 IP, .192/.85, 6.33 K/9, 1.46 BB/9, .27 HR/9

Now time to read the ones from the people who are better at this than me, and try and learn something

Collective Strategy:

As mentioned in the past, given what I've seen with HRs allowed vs errors in overall RA/G, and how the HR impact was priced in, such that a pitcher similarly priced as another pitcher will essentially have the same RA/9 without regard to how they get to it. I generally don’t even look at the HR/9 for the pitchers I draft, most of the time, their HR/9 is relatively high.

I've also continued to play around with very heavily offensive oriented teams maximizing every roster spot with typically 2-4 platoons to use every $ productively. I no longer draft $200k scrubs or mop ups unless the theme requires it or provides an advantage in doing so. I draft with a goal of spending between 55-62% of my budget on offense, usually loosely targeting 60% and letting the exact distribution fall as it may on either side.

With the way the sim calculates fatigue and pitch counts for pitchers, modern pitchers get a boon due to their higher K/9 (gives them extra pitches on their PC, which is used for fatigue, but they won’t reach those figures due to normalization, even more so if facing deadball hitters), this means you get more IP for your $ all else being equal. Secondarily, I almost always try to draft from 2017+ due to dynamic pricing. There are still some bargains in the dynamically adjusted period, but when I know every player will be a good buy, it’s just easier to not have to account for it.

I really like to use players I’ve never used before, and I like to maximize value as much as possible. I prefer pitchers post-1960 and hitters pre-1930 (but especially from the 1880s).Given the modern/deadball distribution I usually go with for hitting and pitching, I also usually focus on drafting great range at CF, 2B, 3B, and SS, and catchers with CS% above 40% to combat teams relying on SB in -HR parks.

I have become a huge fan of non-traditional pitching staffs that are built almost entirely of RPs or shorter IP SPs. There's so much value in these pitchers with 80-130 IP, especially with IP/G <2. On most teams these days I run pitching staffs of 11-13 80-130 IP guys at roughly a 20-30% discount to a similar staff built around higher IP/G or traditional roles due to dynamic pricing and most of these guys being generally ignored as it takes a little more careful effort to use them effectively (primarily applies to 1961-2016 pitchers).

So, as you read through each of the team specific thought processes below, remember that all of them start with this basic set of goals.

$70m: From Gotham to the Bay (Giants) SBC Park (1, 0, 2, -3/-3):

No secret that I love the low caps. The lower the better. My favorite is $25-40m. As I’ve mentioned frequently, over the past few years, I prefer modern pitching. Especially in lower caps (though, I don’t really consider $70m a low cap, it’s at the low end of the mid-caps: I’d put low-caps at <$65m, mid-caps $65-120m, and high caps as >$120m).

I immediately thought about the Phillies, and relative bargain pitching options like Halladay, Lee, Wheeler, and Sanchez and then an offense built around Cravath, Cy Williams, Roy Thomas, and maybe Richie Ashburn… with a goal of cloning both Cravath and Williams since I could. A first pass build looked great, but I had some minor holes to fill and needed a little more IP. As I started building seriously, it became clear that the Phillies weren’t the right option… Wheeler and Sanchez were from the same 5-year window as were Halladay and Lee… IP options outside of them in other windows cost too much, and the offense while great, couldn’t fit if I had to spend more on IP. I’m sure there were some ways to make a Phillies team work, but not within my play style.

I then shifted to the Giants with the same goals but building the offense around Donlin, Connor, Seymour, Bancroft, Bresnahan, etc and a bunch of relatively cheap IP guys with 120-180 IP from the 60s-80s. First pass came together nicely and the hole patching made it all come together really well. Ended up not using a few of the guys initially on my radar (including one of my personal favorites in Donlin), but I really like this team overall. The one weakness here is my C arm, especially at this cap, where SB is an easy way to build an offense without sacrificing anything else, I usually try to stick well above 40% CS, but here, to fit budget and eras, I settled a little with a 31% CS. Should still be solid, but won't cut down the likely speed teams as much as I normally try to at this level.

This is one of several teams in the tournament testing a new ballpark strategy I’m playing around with. Despite my strong offensive team, I’m in a relatively strong pitching park, with a massive -3/-3 for HR, but still +hit factor. With the core of my offense being from 1901-1930, a park that boosts hits and reduces HRs suits their offensive style quite well, while also helping my modern pitchers with their biggest weakness (the long ball).

I really like this team.


LINEUP:
PITCHER
3B ’13 Tillie Shafer .287/.369/.398
2B ‘25 Frankie Frisch/’57 Red Schoendist .331/.384/.472 & .307/.337/.476
LF ’07 Cy Seymour .294/.350/.400
CF ’29 Edd Roush .324/.390/.451
C ’02 Rogers Bresnahan .278/.344/.400
SS ’20 Dave Bancroft/’32 Travis Jackson .299/.349/.396 & .256/.310/.415
RF ’53 Hank Thompson/’37 Wally Berger .302/.400/.567 & .291/.359/.548
1B ’44 Phil Weintraub/’48 Mickey Livingston .316/.412/.524 & .212/.350/.333

I'm running a 3-man rotation with tandems:
#1 ’61 Mike McCormick 263 IP, 3.20/.249.1.24
#2 ’71John Cumberland 185 IP, 2.92/.223/1.12
#3a ’18 Madison Bumgarner 129.2 IP, 3.26/.238/1.24
#3b ’88 Mike Krukow 125 IP, 3.54/.236/1.14

Overall stat lines:
Hitting: 5,175 PA, .299 AVG, .366 OBP, .448 SLG
Pitching: 1,271 IP, 3.40 ERA, .236 OAV, 1.17 WHIP, 1.04 HR/9

Rough Prediction: 88 Wins

$80m: Walkaholics Anonymous Coors Field (+3, +3, +3, +4/+4)

I love HR oriented teams and despite most leagues and owners using as many HR suppressing options as possible, I still build a large % of my teams centered around the long ball. This league gave me the biggest headache in terms of deciding which strategy to ultimately go with. I came up with an initial 6 strategies, of which 4 surfaced as strong options. I then ran those 4 (plus two others my brother put together) through a 160 game sim where each of the 6 teams played 160 games total (32 against each other option). One of the 4 I included was a team that I assumed would be the closest to what most other owners would use. That one was the 2^nd best overall team in this mini-sim winning 89 games. It also made me feel confident in the choice of what most teams would be doing. The team I built with the goal of beating that kind of team finished with the best overall record, winning 102 games in that mini-sim, however, they only went 16-16 against the team they were designed to beat. That made me less confident in their ability to do well here. I then asked our good buddy Claude to give me some run scoring and allowed expectations for the 6 teams, plus a new idea I had post mini-sim. For context, I gave it the Paul Bessire slides, the ballpark effects figures, emphasized the decision tree, full stats and performance history logs for every player on each of these teams, as well as the historic league averages to calculate log5 matchups (for opponents I told it to weight them to 80% of the one I expect most to go with and the remaining 20% to use a random distribution of the remaining teams I fed it)… it predicted the 102 win team above as the best option with a win expectancy of 97 and a range of 71-123 wins with the most likely range of 89-105. It gave my new idea that I hadn’t simmed, the next best expected outcome, and the one I expect everyone else to use as the 3^rd best, with a predicted win expectancy of 91. One that I really liked that used a 6-man pitching staff with all excellent hitting pitchers fared poorly in both the mini-sim and the predicted outcome (winning just 57 in the mini-sim and getting a 67 win expectancy from the prediction). So, for me, that left just my two remaining options, the one I originally drafted with the goal of beating the type of team I expect others to use (that only played .500 against them in a mini-sim) and my other choice, a team built around SB under the assumption that virtually every team will have Cal Raleigh as their C. This one in the projections also had a predicted 97 win expectancy (rounded for both, actual was 96.7 here and 97.1 for the other), with a much tighter expected range of 84-109, with most likely range between 91-103. This was clearly the safer option. Lower floor, less likely to be a catastrophic failure and a fun lineup with Rickey, Eric Davis, Bonds, Soto, Elly De La Cruz, Goldschmidt, Jose Ramirez, Ian Kinsler, JT Realmuto (who also stops others using the same strategy). Ultimately, I decided “go hard or go home.” I might barely win 70, but I have a chance at 120+, and I’d rather take that chance than play it safe.

So, the full strategy at play assumes most owners will try to minimize HR allowed by drafting the most pitcher friendly parks available (mostly Kingdome, Tiger, and GABP), drafting pitchers with low OAV to minimize hits that get turned into HR, and guys whose 0.75 HR rate normalize closer to 0.57-0.60. That meant two things, these guys will likely walk more batters, and given their parks, they are probably drafting more cookie-ish guys like Marte who have poor range but decent AVG.

So, first, that meant I was going with Coors. I need to take full advantage of the poor range and defeat their pitchers low OAV. This also means my hitters need to have good range to minimize the park effect on my pitchers relative to my opponents. Second, I needed to draft guys who walk a ton to take advantage of the likely higher BB rate my opponents have, and I need to draft pitchers who BB as few as possible. I can’t give up free baserunners in Coors. My pitchers need to be better than average on OAV, and near elite on BB/9. Higher K rate will also be useful to minimize errors and maximize pitcher PC to combat park enhanced fatigue. I ignored HR/9 and HR/9+. HRs are going to happen, I need to make sure it’s the only damage done.

All but two of my hitters have a BB rate over 15%, Schwarber is one of them… if Schwarber is one of your guys who walk the least, you know your team is going to take a ton of BB. I also have A+ range at 2B, 3B, SS, with a CF defensive replacement who also has A+ range.

I drafted a few hitters with high AVG and non-HR XBH, to try to take advantage of the non-HR hits and make sure I have guys on base for the thumpers. A couple of my guys are light on PA, so I’m running a non-standard lineup, that will act more like a standard lineup after the first time through (Caruthers then becomes the “high-OBP leadoff guy, with Bonds as the all around #2 hitter and Connor as my #3, etc and Schwarber becomes the all SLG #5 guy…), but for the setup, it’s:

LINEUP:
1B ’92 Roger Connor .294/.420/.463 12 HR
SS ’94 Bill Dahlen .357/.444/.566 15 HR
CF ’25 Kyle Schwarber .240/.365/.563 56 HR
3B ’73 Carl Yastrzembski .296/.407/.463 19 HR
2B ’48 Joe Gordon .280/.371/.507 32 HR
C ’27 Johnny Schulte/’21 Yasmani Grandal .288/.456/.538 9 HR & .240/.420/.520 23 HR
PITCHER
RF ’87 Bob Caruthers .357/.463/.547 8 HR
LF ’07 Barry Bonds .276/.480/.565 28 HR

With three low salary guys on the bench who serve as both key PH and defensive replacements who basically only hit HR and take BB in ’01 Davy Jones, ’89 Lee Mazzilli, and’96 Rob Deer.

I’m running a 4-man rotation with tandems:
#1 ’06 Dave Bush 210 IP, 4.41/.252/1.14 (1.63 BB/9, 1.11 HR/9)
#2 ’22 Miles Mikolas 202 IP, 3.29/.226/1.03 (1.73 BB/9, 1.11 HR/9)
#3a ’18 Jeremy Hellickson 91 IP, 3.45/.230/1.07 (1.97 BB/9, 1.08 HR/9)
#3b ’24 Shota Imanaga 173 IP, 2.91/.225/1.02 (1.45 BB/9, 1.40 HR/9)
#4a ’12 Jeremy Guthrie 91 IP, 3.15/.248/1.13 (1.87 BB/9, 0.87 HR/9)
#4b ‘’18 Sean Manea 161 IP, 3.59/.232/1.08 (1.79 BB/9, 1.18 HR/9)

I also really like this team, My biggest confounding factors are my assumption on others strategy for their teams here and my park choice. The park choice could hurt me more than my opponents and will ultimately be what makes or breaks this team. I looked at taking some more A+ range in LF/RF or at least having my starting CF with A+ range, but the salaries of those options didn’t quite fit wile maintaining the HR# rate and BB%. So, that might come back to haunt me a little.


Overall stat lines:
Hitting: 5,293 PA, .291 AVG, .416 OBP, .517 SLG 212 HR (901 BB, or 17% BB%)
Pitching: 1,322 IP, 3.40 ERA, .234 OAV, 1.06 WHIP, 1.69 BB/9, 1.13 HR/9

Rough Prediction: 73 wins or 111 wins.

$100m: 1928 Philadelphia A’s Shibe Park (+2, 0, 0, 0/0)

I took a short glance at the 2018-2023 Dodgers, and 2014-2022 Cubs, as well as the 2011-2022 Indians, but I didn’t feel the modern teams really allowed as much leeway with the twisting and limited you to your core season more. I don’t think that’s necessarily bad, some of those core seasons could easily support a $100m team on their own, but I wanted a team I could be flexible with. I had these A’s in the back of my mind, but thought I’d check out the 1891-92 Boston Reds, (figuring it would be the same problem in reverse, it was, but worse), and a couple of Red Sox options in the late teens. As soon as I started looking at this A’s team, I was fairly confident this would be the one. After my first pass at building something, it felt really solid with just a couple pieces needing shuffled around to better optimize some spots. After a few swaps I ended up with this version that I really like. They hit well, have solid defense/range. I expect this team to score a ton of runs, and hope the pitchers don’t have to deal with too much appearance fatigue as a result of how few arms I have and how I am using them.

I put together a little chart to make it easy to see what seasons each player had available to use and blackout out cells where they didn’t have useable seasons, and highlighted cells that had seasons I would want to use, then colored green with “Yes” any that I would be using. I also had an “X” column to notate players I wouldn’t be rostering at all and a column to highlight the players I’d be using the core season for. This gave me a really simple visual for seeing what pieces could be swapped around and allowed me to fit the puzzle together cleanly. It also showed me multiple paths to getting a 15 season twist, though I ended up only using an 11 season twist.

Sample section from the hitters portion:

POS

28

27/29

26/30

25/31

24/32

23/33

22/34

21/35

20/36

19/37

18/38

17/39

16/40

15/41

14/42

13/43

X

C

Cochrane

x

x

x

x

x

Yes

x

x

x

x

x

x

C/1B/3B/SS/OF

Foxx

Yes

x

x

2B/SS

Bishop

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

Yes

2B/SS

Collins

x

x

Yes

x

x

x

x

OF

Speaker

x

x

x

Yes

x

x

x

x

x

x

1B

Hauser

Yes

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

SS

Boley

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

Yes

3B/SS/2B

*****

Yes

x

x

x

x

x

3B

Hale

Yes

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

OF

Simmons

Yes

x

x

x

OF

Miller

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

Yes

OF

Haas

x

x

x

x

x

Yes

OF/1B/3B

Cobb

x

x

x

x

Yes

x

x

LINEUP:
CF ’17 Ty Cobb .383/.444/.570
LF ’20 Tris Speaker .388/.483/.562
1B ’23 Joe Hauser .307/.398/.475
2B ’21 Eddie Collins .337/.412/.424
3B ’28 Jimmie Foxx .328/.416/.548
RF ’28 Al Simmons/’28 Ossie Orwoll .351/.396/.558 & .306/.366/.406
SS ’29 Jimmy ***** .327/.412/.539
PITCHER
C ’37 Mickey Cochrane/’22 Cy Perkins .306/.452/.490 & .267/.322/.366

with ’28 Sammy Hale (.309/.334/.468) giving PA coverage at both 3B and SS

Running a very small (for me) 9 man pitching staff, with 3-man quasi-tandem rotation (these guys have relatively low IP/G, so they’ll all be available in relief, as well):
#1 ‘26 Joe Bush 118 IP, 3.01/.236/1.19
#2a ’32 Lefty Grove 307 IP, 2.84/.241/1.19
#2b ’31 George Earnshaw 301 IP, 3.67/.236/1.17
#3a ’28 Rube Walberg 250 IP, 3.55/.265/1.27
#3b ’28 Eddie Rommel 184 IP, 3.06/.266/1.17

Key Bullpen Pieces:
’28 Howard Ehmke 148 IP, 3.62/.254/1.29
’18 Jack Quinn 67 IP, 2.29/.208/0.88


Overall stat lines:
Hitting: 5,935PA, .327 AVG, .402 OBP, .484 SLG
Pitching: 1,427 IP, 3.32 ERA, .247 OAV, 1.20 WHIP, 0.57 HR/9

Rough prediction: 82 wins

$110m: 5 Teams, 5 Eras, 5 Invalid Entries Astrodome (+1, 0, +1,-4/-4)

This was an absolute nightmare for me. I also feel bad for my commissioner on how many “your team still isn’t valid” messages they had to send my way.


I won’t go into what variations I tried that didn’t work, but what I really wanted to accomplish really felt (and still does feel) impossible given them theme structure. I wanted to build a team with my 55-62% offense, drafting 12-13 pitchers with all pitchers coming from the 2.5 modern eras, but with the $20m per era AND the 5 players per team restrictions, it wasn’t mathematically possible to hit all those figures at the higher offensive salary distributions, and only possible in the <60%, but that’s dependent on finding players that can make it work within the limited team selection – I would have loved to have been able to use TB, or AZ, or even FLA/MIA to build out my modern era roster).

Because of how I build my teams, the question was never about having to figure out what teams from eras, but about how to make the $20m/5 player problem go away. The teams were just whatever. I never even ran into a scenario where I had used a team in one era that had players I would have liked to use in another era. Only pitchers I couldn’t access because they weren’t on any of the teams within scope, and having to draft excess IP and/or pricier IP than I’d prefer just to hit arbitrary $ targets. This is the only team I have in this tournament that is using $200k scrubs, and they were drafted just to hit the 5 player minimums.

That said, I did manage to still squeeze in a 59% offensive distribution, and carry 12 pitchers…. I am also trying the ballpark strategy discussed above here, as well, and hope that will help me some. Same reasons as above, strong non-HR oriented offense, modern pitching whose main weakness is longball, Astrodome gives me -4/-4 HR and +hit still. This was the one key choice, I wanted to make sure I had access to either Astrodome or SBC Park, so I needed Astros from this era or one prior or Giants from this or the era next.

There were so many back and forths making corrections that I my gut tells me I missed something in the process and failed to consider some element that will come back and bite me.

LINEUP:
SS ’42 Johnny Pesky (Red Sox) .331/.375/.416
3B ’36 Odell Hale (Indians) .316/.380/.506
CF ’50 Dom Dimaggio (Red Sox) .328/.414/.452
LF ’48 Ted Williams (Red Sox) .369/.497/.615
2B ’75 Joe Morgan (Reds) .327/.466/.508
RF ’25 Tris Speaker (Indians) .389/.479/.578
1B ’79 Champ Summers (Reds)/’23 Riggs Stephenson (Indians) .291/.401/.556 & .319/.357/.475
DH ’50 Al Zarilla (Red Sox) .325/.423/.493
C ’36 Billy Sullivan (Indians)/’81 Joe Nolan (Reds) .351/.382/.508 & .309/.371/.407

With additional OF/DH PA from the $200k scrubs (one each from Red Sox and Indians)

With another 3-man rotation, this time no tandems:
#1 ’20 Kyle Hendricks (Cubs) 220 IP, 2.88/.240/1.00
#2 ’90 Danny Darwin (Astros) 163 IP, 2.21/.225/1.03
#3 ’01 Roy Oswalt (Astros) 142 IP, 2.73/.235/1.06

Key Bullpen Pieces:
’25 Shota Imanaga (Cubs) 145 IP, 3.73/.218/0.99
’09 Ted Lilly (Cubs) 178 IP, 3.10/.230/1.06
’98 Randy Johnson (Astros) 85 IP, 1.28/.191/0.98
’92 Doug Jones (Astros) 112 IP, 1.85/.235/1.01
’14 Jason Hammel (Cubs) 109 IP, 2.98/.222/1.02
’12 Ryan Dempster (Cubs) 104 IP, 2.25/.210/1.04
’02 Octavio Dotel (Astros) 98 IP, 1.85/.173/0.88
’64 Bill Henry (Reds) 52 IP, 0.87/.170/0.83

Overall stat lines:
Hitting: 6,230 PA, .331 AVG, .415 OBP, .494 SLG
Pitching: 1,439 IP, 2.54 ERA, .221 OAV, 1.00 WHIP, 0.89 HR/9

Rough predictions: 86 wins

$125M: Seize the Means of (Run) Production Great American Ball Park (0, 0, -2, +2/+2)

This was the first team I built. This goes perfectly with my standard roster building strategies of lots of platoons and non-standard pitching setups… only ’20 Kershaw (157) has more than 150 IP. I am using a couple of pitchers who are a little over-priced due to dynamic pricing, but their stats and IP were too good of a fit to pass up (’01 Pedro, ’81 Fingers). This put me at the low end of my preferred distribution with just 56% of my salary on offense. Full roster below. Though lineup isn’t listed as they vary greatly vs RHP and LHP, so I am just listing position coverage.

LINEUP:
C ’43 Bill Dickey / ’89 Jocko Milligan .351/.445/.492 & .366/.408/.623
1B ’14 Steve Evans .348/.416/.556
2B ’29 George Grantham / ’99 Nap Lajoie .307/.454/.533 & .378/.419/.554
3B ’96 Bill Joyce / ’95 Matt Williams .313/.454/.506 & .336/.399/.647
SS ’41 Arky Vaughan / ’20 Miguel Rojas .316/.399/.455 & .304/.392/.496
LF ’87 Bob Caruthers .357/.463/.547
CF ’73 Reggie Smith .303/.398/.515
RF ’11 Fred Clarke / ’49 Joe Dimaggio .324/.407/.492 & .346/.459/.596

With ’09 Carlos Beltran (.325/.415/.500) backing up both Caruthers and Smith.

Despite the lack of any big IP pitchers, I didn’t use any tandems or a/b rotations here, just a straight 4-man with:

’20 Zach Plesac 149 IP, 2.28/.191/0.80
’22 Max Scherzer 145 IP, 2.29/.207/0.91
’12 Kris Medlen 138 IP, 1.57/.208/0.91
’25 Nathan Eovaldi 130 IP, 1.73/.194/0.85

Bullpen Pieces:
’20 Clayton Kershaw 157 IP, 2.16/.191/0.80
’16 Chris Devenski 108 IP, 2.16/.206/0.92
’99 Derek Lowe 110 IP, 2.63/.208/1.00
’99 Keith Foulke 106 IP, 2.22/.188/0.89
’01 Pedro Martinez 118 IP, 2.39/.199/0.93
’81 Rollie Fingers 116 IP, 1.04/.198/0.87
’20 Tony Gonsolin 126 IP, 2.31/.193/0.84

Overall stat lines:
Hitting: 5,999 PA, .333 AVG, .423 OBP, .535 SLG
Pitching: 1,403 IP, 2.07 ERA, .199 OAV, 0.88 WHIP, 0.69 HR/9

Rough prediction: 91 wins

$140m: Letters of Intent Coors Field (+3, +3, +3, +4/+4)

This one came together very quick for me, I started with my pitching and then went to offense… I just marked off letters as I used them… only real decision point came with my final 3 letters as I tried to sort out DH, backup C, and the final piece for PA fill out. As I looked at players, I didn’t want to fully build out an $80m team, but wanted to make sure I had options there, so part of my process was making sure every choice had a season that would also work at $80m and a useable low salary or scrub season so I could piece things together. The $80m version doesn’t have my preferred salary distribution, but it’s a very solid build with a roughly 50/50 pitching/offense.

A – Nick Anderson
B – Shane Bieber
C – Ty Cobb
D – Jacob deGrom
E – Mark Eichhorn
F – Doug Fister
G – Zack Grienke
H – Willie Hernandez
I – Cesar Izturis
J – Bill Joyce
K – Clayton Kershaw
L – DJ LeMahieu
M – Stan Musial
N – Dave Nilsson
O – Mel Ott
P – Albert Pujols
Q – Jamie Quirk
R – Babe Ruth
S – Chris Sale
T – Gene Tenace
U – Koji Uehara
V – Justin Verlander
W – Honus Wagner
Y – Kirby Yates
Z – Jeff Zimmerman

LINEUP ($140m):
DH ’96 Bill Joyce .333/.470/.518
LF ’28 Babe Ruth .323/.461/.709
1B ’52 Stan Musial .336/.432/.538
3B ’38 Mel Ott .311/.442/.583
RF ’03 Albert Pujols .359/.439/.667
SS ’05 Honus Wagner .363/.427/.505
2B ’16 DJ LeMahieu .348/.416/.495
C ’99 Dave Nilsson / ’71 Gene Tenace .309/.400/.554 & .274/.381/.430
CF ’21 Ty Cobb .389/.452/.596

With ’79 Jamie Quirk and ’06 Cesar Izturis .304/.353/.443 & .233/.282/.260 filling out some PA.

Here, I am using a 4-man rotation with tandems:

Rotation:
#1 ’21 Jacob deGrom 92 IP, 1.08/.129/0.55
#2a ’18 Chris Sale 158 IP, 2.11/.181/0.86
#2b ’19 Zack Greinke 146 IP, 2.90/.220/0.95
#3a ‘16 Clayton Kershaw 149 IP, 1.63/.184/0.72
#3b ’86 Mark Eichhorn 157 IP, 1.72/.191/0.96
#4a ’84 Willie Hernandez 141 IP, 1.92/.194/0.94
#4b ’20 Shane Bieber 209 IP, 1.63/.167/0.87

Overall stat lines ($140m):
Hitting: 6,250 PA, .338 AVG, .434 OBP, .562 SLG
Pitching: 1,386 IP, 1.81 ERA, .176 OAV, 0.83 WHIP, 0.65 HR/9


For the $80m version, I haven’t decided on actual lineup structure yet, but positionally, it will look something like this… with $40.1m on offense and $39.9m on pitching.

LINEUP ($80m):
C ’93 Dave Nilsson / ’71 Gene Tenace .257/.336/.375 & .274/.381/.430
1B ’15 Albert Pujols .244/.307/.480
2B ’15 DJ LeMahieu .301/.358/.388
3B ’97 Bill Joyce .304/.441/.433
SS ’13 Honus Wagner .300/.349/.385
LF ’18 Babe Ruth .300/.410/.555
CF ’20 Ty Cobb .334/.416/.451
RF ’28 Mel Ott .322/.397/.524

With ‘61 Stan Musial (.288/.371/.489) Covering for all three OF spots and serving as primary PH, as well as ’79 Jamie Quirk and ’06 Cesar Izturis .304/.353/.443 & .245/.295/.318 filling out some PA and also PH as needed.

Here, I’ll likely use tandems again, but for now here’s just a list of the key IP:

Rotation:
’14 Jacob deGrom 140 IP, 2.69/.228/1.14
’11 Doug Fister 216 IP, 2.83/.237/1.06
’23 Chris Sale 126 IP, 2.58/.220/1.07
’15 Justin Verlander 134 IP, 3.38/.229/1.09
’94 Mark Eichhorn 103 IP, 2.15/.240/.1.14
’77 Willie Hernandez 110 IP, 3.03/.234/1.111
’20 Clayton Kershaw 157 IP, 2.16/.194/0.84


Overall stat lines ($80m):
Hitting: 5,201 PA, .291 AVG, .372 OBP, .458 SLG
Pitching: 1,300 IP, 2.69 ERA, .222 OAV, 1.04 WHIP, 0.78 HR/9

Rough prediction: 84 wins


Final Thoughts:

This go around I spent a crazy amount of time on the $80m, a decent amount of time on the $110m, and basically drafted the other four on the fly with a few check ins on the $70m and $140m. The $110m was a struggle as I’ve discussed relatively thoroughly above. Despite the challenge with it, I don’t dislike that roster, and I like my teams overall. I expect the $70m team to be fairly competitive, the $125m, also. The $80m, $100m, and $140m were all fun for me and they may or may not do well, mostly depending on how the rest of my league built their teams and distributive luck. Generally speaking, I expect to finish somewhere around 36-44 overall.

$70 mil

I built this team last and since I always suck at lower cap themes, I decided to go with an old standby. Run baby run! Chose the Cards and with a lineup of Coleman, Brock, McGee, DeShields and Edman, we should give catchers fits. On the flip side, a defensive outfield of Brock, Coleman and McGee will have our manager drinking Maalox like Jim Leyland. Hopefully having a good arm like McCarver behind the play will suppress other teams running hopes.
Since I had no money for decent pitching (like an ace), I wanted low bb/9 guys who will not make a bad situation worse. Tewksbury, Pete and Warneke might be able to do that. Either way, I am expecting nothing from this squad and will just hope not to be the worst team in the tournament.
Prediction 68 wins

$80 mil

Finding homers is easy. Finding good D and adequate pitching to go with it is hard. Definitely did not succeed and will pay for it later. Found myself also in the Ketel Marte zone and moved him to the outfield where his lack of range will hopefully not matter as much when the balls are flying over his head into the bleachers from my suspect pitching staff. Again went with guys who hopefully will not walk as many. Rather give up solo homers than salamis. Playing in Briggs just to try something different.
Prediction 70 wins

$100 mil

This build was a nightmare as the commissioners will attest to (a million ? from a confused old man). I was singularly focused on the era of the 70-73 O's. Great pitching, underrated offense and solid D. Try as hard as I could, I just could not make the twists that I needed work. After a period of depressing decompression, I refocused on what WS championship teams had solid if not dominant offense and more than adequate pitching staffs. 3 Teams leapt out to me: 2018 Red Sox, 2009 NY Yankees and the 1998 NY Yankees. Rejected the Red Sox, too many LHP on their roster (a pet peeve of mine). No to the 2009 Steroid NY Yankees because they beat my Phillies in the WS and it still stings. Went with the 98 Yankees. Solid lineup twisting Raines to one of his good years, Brosius' best year, solid power with Martinez, O'Neill and Bernie Williams and the good Shane Spencer coming off the bench to pinch hit. Defense is ok with 2 A+ arms behind the plate in Girardi (manager in waiting) and Posada. Feel good about my O.
Not too certain about the pitching staff. Any team that has to rely on Willie Banks and The Fat Toad as their 4 and 5 starters is throwing caution to the wind. Have a good 88 Cone and 97 Pettitte to lead off. Lloyd, Darren Holmes and God anchor a more than acceptable bullpen. Cautiously optimistic.
Prediction 90 wins

$110 mil
I readily admit that I have zero chance of making round 2. The whole point for me is to have fun. I am too old and have too many synapses not firing any more to honestly compete with all of you geniuses out there. At my age I am just trying to tread water. So back to having fun. I decided immediately that I want to have Ruth and Gehrig on my team. That was non negotiable. Never had the opportunity before so this was it. The mid centre Cards were a no brainer. Got solid contributors in Musial, Schoendienst and Mort Cooper. next came those early 70s O's that I love. I could only afford Palmer but also came away with Aparicio and the underrated OBP machine Ken Singleton. Another non negotiable tenet was I wanted some version of Greg Maddux on the squad. His generally low bb/9 will help. A good version 2000 of Chipper come as the door prize with John Smoltz doing the color commentary. Last on the shopping list was the modern team. Thought long and hard about the Mutts but I really didn't feel like paying NY prices (twice in fact) no matter how good DeGrom is So I went with The Cheaters. 18 Verlander gives me another arm (tho he never normalizes well for me) and Hader, Pressly and Osuna should provide the bullpen with some backbone.
I went with guys who have lots of PAs because I knew my bench was going to be dead weight. Think I succeeded in that all but Red and my Catchers are close to or well over 700 PAs. Defense is ok other than the CI (looking at you Chipper) and whatever happens, I had the most fun doing this team.
Prediction 88 wins

$125 mil
No fun doing this league. Went with guys again who had high PAs and were switch hitters where I could and otherwise drafted some good platoons such as 06 McCann and 54 Burgess being the plate and 30 Manush and 25 Rice in the OF. The pitching is totally a tandem stab in the dark. Lots of good guys 2020 Kershaw, 24 Glasnow 01 Pedro, 85 Toad Ramsey, 15 Cueto, 21 Peralta, 21 Rodon and 22 Gonsolin will work in some yet to be determine combos. I have a solid bullpen with 20 Devin Williams, 14 Betances, 95 Percival, 79 Sutter and 95 God. Still I am very very worried that 1518 IP is not going to be close to enough. I also stashed my team in PNC park so hopefully that will help.
Prediction 82 wins

$140 mil
I have played this theme over the years at various caps and with varying results from a WS title to abject vomitissitude. Will I be king or King Spew? No clue. Team is loaded with the usual suspects Pedro, Ruth, O'Doul, Kershaw Quinlan, Zimmerman tho I suspect I will be one of very few not to roster Addie Joss. Hope Joe Jackson can hold up his end of the bargain. Lord knows I paid him well enough. (Under the table of course). Not enough pitching but hopefully Dodger Stadium will help.
Prediction: 64 wins

After reading the first posts, I thought i put a lot of effort and time in to building my teams but I guess I'm still an amateur lollll my write up won't be as long as others.

70M
I tried at least 5-6 of the original franchises and settled on the St-louis browns/Baltimore Orioles. It had a better overall team although I will be low on IP with barely 1250, I will be working with a tired pitching staff all season long.

80M
This one was tough to get a good pitching staff and I made the mistake of entering my team in an 80m open lesgue to test it out. Didn't go to well for my starters and had to go bsck to drawing board. My bullpen should be ok. On offense, all my hitters are over .300 hitting and good on defense except one outfielder.

100M
Again I tried so many teams and finally settled on the 1921 Indiens. Good old Speaker and others I could twist. On pitching, I will be using mostly 5 pitchers. 3 starters combined for 1000IP and 2 relievers over 250IP each. Rest are 300k

110M
Thus one I started forgetting about the 20M minimum for all eras. So I then noticed that I was going to have to pick 1 starter per era. I went with one of the best Koufax and the Dodgers for the 60s 70s era but at 16M I only had room for 4 relievers. Then I went with M.Scott and the Astros for the 80s 90s era. Next was the Tigers for the 2000s with Verlander as a starter and took 2 relivers and 2 position players, pudge and perhalta. Then I looked for offense and tried many combinations for the first 2 eras and settled on the Reds and Cards that gave me the best mix of avg. power and defense.

125M
Was the easiest one for pitching. Just enter the perimeters and take the best for the money. Had to draft a few positions of fielding as platoon players because of the low cap on players.

140M
LIke every one else I thought of players that could fit both caps. I built both 140m and 80m at the same time. Everytime I would be interested in a player I checked if he had a decent year around 5M for the 80m round 2 version. This was one of the most fun draft along with the 110m I liked a lot

$70M
I really like Vince Coleman at low caps and with clones, I couldn't pass up the opportunity for Colemen. So, Cardinals it was. 1956 Wally Moon is great value at 1B and 1966 Lou Brock is a monster at $60M so he should do decently at this cap. 1946 Red Schoendienst, 1934 Frankie Frisch and 1997 Royce Clayton made a decent hitting and good fielding IF. Molina behind the plate with his A+ arm is a great fit. The pitching staff gives up too many hits but has nice BB/9. Busch Stadium should help out with that.

Hitters: 5330 PA .280/.334/.385 $36.2M
Pitchers: 1,347 IP .245 OAV 1.12 WHIP 1.85 BB9 0.50 HR9 $33.8M


$80M
Not much strategy here. Open League reliables '21 Merrifield, '19 Marte, '16 Gattis and '17 Gonzalez with 4 other HR hitters: '86 Schmidt, '92 McGwire, '19 Glavis and'15 Cravath. Built the best pitching staff I could given the restrictions. I went with the best pitcher's park, which I think is Sick's.

Hitters: 5265 PA .283/.357/.507 $39.4M
Pitchers: 1,343 IP .222 OAV 1.02 WHIP 1.86 BB9 0.81 HR9 $40.6M


$100M
This one took the longest, starting to build a team, getting a few players plugged in, then abandoning it and starting over with another one. Ended up just using the team I took for last year's WISC twist theme: 2008 Dodgers. Great pitching, average defence and decent hitting unless I'm facing a deadball team. Dodger Stadium.

Hitters: 5511 PA .311/.387/.514 $48.8M
Pitchers: 1,434 IP .217 OAV 1.03 WHIP 2.11 BB9 0.67 HR9 $51.2M


$110M
This was the hardest to draft, mostly in getting 5 players over, but not too far over, the $20M mark. I wanted one team that had 2 elite SP for this cap and I like the modern Mets with '05 Pedro and '18 DeGrom. A few good bullpen arms on the Mets too and that seemed like an easy choice. '60-'70s Dodgers have a couple more great SP for this cap in '64 Koufax and '73 Sutton, and a couple of good bullpen arms in Regan and Rau, so that was my rotation done. Needed a few more bullpen arms and '40-'50s Cards had that in Hearn, Haddix and Wilhelm and also Musial to cover 1st and Marion to cover SS. 2B, 3B and catcher were covered by the '90s Phillies with Morandini, Rolen and Daulton, so that left the OF. '20s-'30s Tigers outfielders are massive AVG hitters, so I went with Manush, Heilman and Wingo with '36 Walker at DH. A few bench players and a mop up to round it out. Took a while to balance everything to get it legal, but I'm happy with it. Sportsman's Park III becuase we hit mad doubles.

Hitters: 6046 PA .326/.398/.503 $57M
Pitchers: 1,441 IP .203 OAV 0.97 WHIP 2.18 BB9 0.62 HR9 $53M


$125M
I took the best full-time MIF I could and the rest are all part-timers. Pitchers are mostly modern. Took PNC Park, but I can't remember why.

Hitters: 5552 PA .352/.418/.503 $63M
Pitchers: 1,405 IP .185 OAV 0.89 WHIP 2.15 BB9 0.45 HR9 $62M


$140M
This was the most fun to draft. I did the $140M and $80M teams at the same time. Lots of trial and error, but ended up with this:

Letter	$140M	$80M
A	2015 Jake Arrieta	2016 Jake Arrieta
B	1910 Frank Baker	1913 Frank Baker
C	1893 Roger Connor	1885 Roger Connor
D	2018 Jacob deGrom	2023 Jacob deGrom
E	2024 Lucas Erceg	2024 Lucas Erceg
F	1895 Dave Foutz	1887 Dave Foutz
G	2020 Tony Gonsolin	2019 Tony Gonsolin
H	1929 Harry Heilmann	1923 Harry Heilmann
I	2022 Raisel Iglesias	2022 Raisel Iglesias
J	1914 Joe Jackson	1912 Joe Jackson
K	2016 Clayton Kershaw	2012 Clayton Kershaw
L	1907 Nap Lajoie	1903 Nap Lajoie
M	1916 Christy Mathewson	1916 Christy Mathewson
N	2014 Pat Neshek	2015 Pat Neshek
O	1946 Mel Ott	1926 Mel Ott
P	2019 Drew Pomeranz	2019 Drew Pomeranz
Q	1962 Art Quirk	1962 Art Quirk
R	1995 Ivan Rodriguez	1997 Ivan Rodriguez
S	1927 Tris Speaker	1920 Tris Speaker
T	2015 Troy Tulowitzki	2007 Troy Tulowitzki
U	2019 Richard Urena	2019 Richard Urena
V	2017 Justin Verlander	2023 Justin Verlander
W	1910 Ed Walsh	1907 Ed Walsh
Y	2024 Ryan Yarbrough	2024 Ryan Yarbrough
Z	1896 Dave Zearfoss	1896 Dave Zearfoss

$140M:
Hitters: 6174 PA .351/.415/.520 $73.4M
Pitchers: 1,421 IP .192 OAV 0.86 WHIP 1.61 BB9 0.38 HR9 $66.5M

$80M:
Hitters: 5237 PA .302/.362/.435 $39.1M
Pitchers: 1,325 IP .216 OAV 1.05 WHIP 2.35 BB9 0.54 HR9 $40.9M

$70M: Cliff Lee is a 1B?
I suppose the right strategy here would have been to build a team from all 16 possible teams. But I have neither the time nor patience to do that.

At $70M caps, speed usually plays well. And the Cardinals immediately came to mind for that. But I like to build teams around AVG and SLG moreso than speed. So I tossed them out the window and narrowed the list down to teams that had decent power profiles – the Phillies, Cubs, Giants and Braves. It came down to the Cubs and the Phillies, and I debated which to use for well over 2 weeks. The Cubs had better bats with guys like Herman, Klein, Zobrist, Bryant, Hollocher, Lopes, Klein but the pitching staff had a 1.19 WHIP, which I didn’t like.

I went with the Phillies, and a much better 1.14 WHIP. I think this team will be a solid, but not great, team. And if they perform below my expectations, I will forever wonder if the Cubs would have been a better option.
C: ’53 Burgess
1B: ’25 Harper
2B: ’16 Hernandez
3B: ’04 Bell
SS: ’31 Bartell
OF: ’89 Hayes
OF: ’17 Cravath
OF: ’36 Klein
Key Bench Players: 1921 Lee, 1968 Sutherland
1909 Moore, 1905 Sparks, 1978 Christensen are the starting pitchers. Key bullpen pieces include 1975 and 1984 Tug McGraw, 1995 Sid Fernandez, 1964 Roebuck, and 2015 Papelbon.
Hitting: 5,364 PA, .285/.356/.438
Pitching: 1,374 IP, .228 OAV, 1.14 WHIP

$80M: CDTLB
Chicks Dig the Long Ball! For the past year or so, I’ve been building HR-based teams in open leagues. That experience has served me well in designing this team. And as a result, this build came together in no time.

I did not lean as heavily into HR as I could have because I was targeting a .290 team AVG. .250 guys with 40+ HR don’t really appeal to me. As a result, I ended up with 200 HR exactly. That strategy might come back to bite me if I lose a lot of high-scoring games because I’m getting outslugged.
C: ’39 Dickey (I prefer Rudy York but didn’t have the budget $)
1B: ’68 McCovey
2B: ’21 Merrifield (for budget reasons)
3B: ’20 Ramirez
SS: ’25 Seager (another budget move)
OF: ’15 Cravath
OF: ’34 Klein
OF: ’39 Ott

For pitching, you can’t hit a HR if you don’t put the ball in play. So I simply tried to target the lowest OAV guys I could afford. Pitching rotation is ’06 Halladay, ’56 Maglie, ’22 Bieber, and ’20 Wainwright. Key bullpen guys include ’60 Wilhelm, ’86 Schiraldi, ’15 Kontos, ’92 Aguilera, ’19 Manaea, and ’06 Sampson.

Hitting: 5,400 PA, .289/.377/.505
Pitching: 1,381 IP, .228 OAV, 1.07 WHIP

$100M: 2021 Dodgers
In the $100M theme last year, my 2020-2022 Dodgers underperformed. So I really didn’t want to use the Dodgers. I designed teams using the 2019 Astros, 2005 Yankees, 2003 Braves, 1998 Braves, 1962 Giants, 1965 Giants, 1907 Cubs, and 1888 Giants. The ’65 Giants were the most promising but I had too many wasted innings with over 1,900 IP. At the end of the day, I ended right back at the 2021 Dodgers. I suspect that many others will make the same choice.

Twists:
’23 Seager
’20 Bellinger
’18 Bauer
’25 Smith
’16 Betts
’15 Price
’14 Turner
’13 Jansen
’12 Feliz
’11 Kershaw
’10 Pujols

Key players from ’21 include Turner, Pollock, Taylor, Buehler, Scherzer, and a bunch of bullpen pieces.

I think this will be a competitive, but not great, team. Hopefully 85 to 90 wins.

Hitting: 5,296 PA, .295/.370/.515
Pitching: 1,396 IP, .200 OAV, 1.01 WHIP

To be continued....

First off, a sincere thanks to my fellow members of the theme committee for their creativity and hard work in coming up with the round 1 themes. I hope that all participants found at least a couple of the themes enjoyable to build, and I think we ended up with two that were a real challenge (the 100M and 110M).

Secondly, best of luck to everyone. Round 1 of the WISC is my absolute favorite part playing this game.

Regarding the comments below, despite being part of the committee, I was unable to put the amount of time into my builds this year that I would have preferred. Best case for me is probably making into one of the last few spots of the cage. Realistically, I'm probably looking at a middle-of-the-pack finish. All team totals below do not include scrubs and mop-ups.

70M: Not-So-Phabulous-Phillies
Everyone knows that at this cap level you have to compromise on something. My decision early on is that I would be willing to sacrifice on range. I love me some A+ range (as you will see in some of the other themes) but it's just too expensive at this cap. The other thing I decided to sacrifice was hitter PAs; I'm very willing to play guys at 90% or even lower fatigue at 70M.

Other design principles here:
-- I think every franchise can put together an acceptable bullpen at this cap, so I didn't really even look at my bullpen until I had the other pieces in place.
-- Power is a good strategy at 70M, and I expected that many teams would lean towards modern-era starters to take advantage of their PC boost (as detailed by just4me).
-- OBP is key; at 70M most pitchers will either give up HRs, walks, or OAV. High OBPs mean (a) more pitches for my opponent (b) better chances of HR driving in multiple runs/

With those concepts in mind, I looked at a few franchises, but quickly settled on the Phillies for a few reasons, starting with Gavvy Cravath and Tully Sparks, two players who generally do very well at this cap. I ended up with 5 starts with a .380+ OBP, and 2 others over .350.
Offense: .304/.372/.454
Pitching: 1309 IP, .219 OAV, 1.09 WHIP, 0.57 HR/9
Park: Connie Mack 0/-2/0/1/1; I though about Baker Bowl but decided the increased run scoring would only exacerbate the fatigue issues this team will face.
Prediction: 80 wins. Upside: 88

80M: I Miss the Steroid Era
My primary strategies here were: (a) get at least some guys whose HRs will normalize well (b) modern pitchers with low BB/9 (c) A+ range wherever possible (d) a park that is negative for hits.
Four of my starters should normalize very well for HR: 1887 Billy O'Brien, 1914 Gavvy Cravath, 1945 Mel Ott, 1963 Willie McCovey (who has hit 60+ in multiple progressives). I have A+ range at all 4 infield positions. Every non mop-up pitcher as BB/9 less than 2.00, and most are well below that.

Offense: .282/.365/.491, 209 HR
Pitching: 1285 IP , .217 OAV, 0.98 WHIP, 0.85 HR/9, 1.39 BB/9
Park: Kingdome -2/1/-1/2/2
Prediction: 88 wins; Upside 95

100M: 1916 White Sox
This was one of the first teams I looked at, and I liked them so much that other than looking at a few others, I didn't do much tinkering. I knew I wanted a late-teens team so that I could take advantage of deadball-pitching and twist some guys into the offense-rich 1920s. I also knew I wanted to find a way to roster 1908 Ed Walsh, who IMO is the absolute best value pitcher in all of SLB at 100M. Eddie Collins and Jack Fournier offered lots of flexibility with multiple excellent twist options. I was able to roster an A+ arm catcher, and B or better fielding at every position except for 1st base, which should help minimize the primary weakness of teams from this era: the errors. Plus, the 1916 ChiSox have a number of excellent pitchers in their base season (Benz, Russell, Cicotte, Faber).

My twists:
-1: 1915 Mellie Wolfgang
+2: 1918 Shano Collins
+3: 1919 John Cusack Buck Weaver
+4: 1920 Zeb Terry
-5: 1911 Eddie Collins
+6: 1922 Ray Schalk
+7: 1923 Jack Fournier
-8: 1908 Ed Walsh
The offense is not as strong as I would like (team OPS is lower than my 70M squad), but the pitching should be among the very best in the league.

Offense: .308/.364/.434 (and should normalize very well)
Pitching: 1394 IP, .202 OAV, 0.97 WHIP, 0.03 HR/9, 1.87 BB/9
Park: Comiskey1 1/0/1/-1/-2

Prediction: 85 wins; Upside: 95

110M: That's a Bingo (Homage to Christoph Waltz's incredible performance as Hans Landa in Inglorious Basterds)
Not much to say here, and this team I really wish I spent more time on. I started with 3 picks that I thought were obvious: Modern Dodgers (for the pitching); 80s-90s Cardinals (for switch hitters, speed, and defense), and the 1960s-70s Astros (more pitching). I picked the remaining 2 teams based on who best filled the holes in the lineup: 1940s-50s Phillies and 1920s-30s Tigers. 5 switch hitters in the starting lineup, 3 players over .450 OBP. But not enough power, and the defense isn't nearly as good as I would like. I'm very confident this team will not do well.

C: 1938 Rudy York
1B: 1994 Gregg Jefferies
2B: 1985 Tommy Herr
SS: 1986 Ozzie
3B: 1936 Billy Rogell (ugh)
LF: 1990 Willie McGee
CF: 1955 Richie Ashburn
RF: 1921 Ty Cobb
DH: 1925 Harry Heilmann
SPs: 1981 Don Sutton, 1963 Turk Farrell, 2016 Clayton Kershaw, 1946 Schoolboy Rowe, 2020 Tony Gonsoulin

Offense: .326/.408/.468
Pitching: 1400 IP .199 OAV, 0.93 WHIP, 0.41 HR/9, 1.64 BB/9
Park: Astrodome -1/0/1/-4/-4
Prediction: 75 wins; Upside: 85

125M: Dopplegangers (because I expect we will see much more roster similarity in this league than in any other)
As others have said, I think the key here is to avoid spending $ on PA and IP that you aren't going to use, so I focused primarily on that. No real surprises here. I have 2019 Ketel Marte, whom I suspect will be on at least 50% of rosters), 1990 Willie McGee (whom I expect we will also see a lot of), and then a bunch of platoons. Pitching is a hodgepodge of guys in the 120-170 IP range.

C: 1954 Smoky Burgess and 1889 Jock Milligan
1B: 1902 Charlie Hickman
2B: 1926 Eddie Collins and 1899 Nap Lajoie
SS: 2013 Hanley Ramirez and 2020 Jose Iglesias (why I didn't get a L/R platoon here or a SH...I'm an idiot)
3B: 1896 Bill Joyce and 2020 Ke'Bryan Hayes
LF: 1944 Dick Wakefield and 1987 Rickey Henderson
CF: 2019 Marte
RF: 1990 McGee
PH extraordinaire: 1953 Ted Williams
Sneaky good-hitting pitcher: 2019 Zack Greinke (.271/.300/.583)

Offense: 5822 PA, .348/.418/.547
Pitching: 1586 IP, .208 OAV, 0.95 WHIP, 0.45 HR/9, 1.44 BB/9
Park: WIS
Prediction: 88 wins; Upside 95

140M: X Gonna Give It To Ya
I didn't even bother building a round 2 team other than to general pick guys whom I knew had usable seasons at that cap. A few guys I knew I wanted right off the bat: Walsh, Maddux, Kershaw for pitchers. Ewing, Frisch, Reilly, Cobb, Speaker for hitters. Built everything else around that. Filled in relief pitchers last, as usual. I have A+ range at 2B, 3B, CF, but would have liked more. No idea how this team will do, which usually means "not well."

1963 Aaron DH
1913 Baker 3B
1910 Cobb RF
1897 G. Davis SS
1890 Ewing C
1927 Frisch 2B
2022 Phil Gosselin SCRUB
2015 R. Hill RP
2022 Iglesias RP
2017 Jansen RP
2015 Kershaw SP
1911 Lapp C
1994 Maddux SP
2017 Neshek RP
1932 O'Doul LF
2018 O. Perez RP
1918 Quinn RP
1888 Reilly 1B
1917 Speaker CF
1963 Tiefenauer RP
2015 Uehara RP
2017 Verlander RP
1908 Walsh SP
1914 Yerkes MIF
1999 Zimmerman RP

Offense: .344/.408/.519 (am I concerned that this team's offense is worse than my 125M? Yes, yes I am, thank you for asking)
Pitching: 1470 IP; .189 OAV, 0.85 WHIP, 0.31 HR/9, 1.38 BB/9
Park: Dodger Stadium 2/-4/-3/-1/-1
Prediction: 80 wins; Upside 85

Another year, another WISC. I say this every year because I mean it every year: I love these themes and I love this tournament. I also love writing about my teams if I have time to do so, as I did this time. As always, slash lines shown are normalized, and stats don’t include any mop-ups or scrubs who are anticipated to be used only in very low leverage situations. Let the fun begin…

$70M - Shopping @ Filene's Basement for Red Sox
Huntington Ave Baseball Grounds

Ah, Filene’s Basement. I still wear clothing that I purchased at Filene’s Basement in the late 90’s. And not the mediocre national department store chain that bore that name, I’m talking about the original Filene’s Automatic Bargain Basement underneath the flagship Filene’s Department Store that was founded 1881 in Downtown Crossing, Boston. They created the automatic markdown system, whereby an item’s tagged price would be discounted 25% if it didn’t sell in 12 days, 50% after 18 days, and 75% after 24 days. I’ll never forget shopping there, circa 1997, for my first Hawaiian shirt on the day of my first participation in my friends’ annual July 3^rd Cambridge, MA pub crawl. “Party shirts” were de rigueur for that crawl, and I found one that I loved (and in fact still wear), and it was originally priced at $17. It was two days away from being marked down 50% to $8.50, but alas the crawl was that day so I had to shell out the extra $4.25 and pay $12.75, which I shall never forget and still mildly bugs me to this day. Good times.

But I digress, to the surprise of no one who has ever read my writeups. I don’t have the foggiest idea what I’m doing when it comes to caps below $80M, so I usually start by identifying starting pitchers by calculating a target $/IP and finding the best pitchers near that target. This led me to the Cubs, and I built a team that looked reasonable given my complete ignorance on the subject. But I needed a team with which to compare it, so I created a Red Sox squad because they have several relatively low salary players (Victor Martinez, Eddie Lake, Bill Mueller) who I use a lot at higher caps and who usually punch above their respective salary weights. Comparing the two rosters, the pitching was similar, but the Red Sox offense was far superior, especially since it didn’t rely on home runs as much as my Cubs team did with their 1979 Kingman. I’m guessing that most people will use their early 1900’s slots on starting pitching which should suppress homers a bit.

I’m using Huntington Avenue Grounds, because its former site is on my way home from work and because it seems appropriate as it was still in use when the original Filene’s Automatic Bargain Basement opened in 1909. Truth be told, though, I should be allowed to use Braves Field. Not only did the Red Sox play their home games in the 1914 and 1915 World Series there (because its capacity was much greater than that of Fenway Park), but they also played all of their Sunday home games there from 1929-1932. For those years, the city of Boston enacted an ordinance that forbade the playing of baseball within 1,000 feet of a church on Sundays. Fenway was within 1,000 feet of a church, but Braves Field was not. I’d submit a ticket asking for Braves Field to be listed as an additional home stadium for the Red Sox for 1929-1932 if I thought there were any chance of it being updated this century. There’s no reason not to make the change though; it’s not a dissimilar situation to that of the Indians, who have two home stadiums listed for 1932-1946.

Offense – 5296 PA, .296/.380/.439, 115 HRs
Pitching – 1331 IP, 1.16 WHIP#, 2.74 ERC#, 0.41 HR/9#

$80M - What'sYourOpinionOfKingman'sPerformance?
Great American Ball Park

For those unfamiliar with the incident referenced by my team’s name, suffice to say that Tommy Lasorda would not be a fan of my team: https://youtu.be/cdWOFwt8P8U?si=NuD8THmF01Z6qBSd

What remains to be seen is whether I will be a fan of my team. Of the six, this is my biggest question mark. The irony is, I’ve spent most of my WISC writeups over the years railing against people using ballparks with extreme negative HR factors, accusing them of “hating home runs” and being “afraid of fun”, but now that a theme arises that rewards longballs my roster barely surpasses the minimum. I don’t know what the correct strategy was here: draft massive home run totals at the expense of everything else, or just draft what seems to be the best team within the given parameters. I went with the latter, with the thought that I’d like for some guys to be on base when the home runs happen, but I’m not going to be stunned if the inevitable 300+ HR rosters end up dominating.

45% of my team’s RL home runs come from two players: Dave Kingman and Todd Hundley. I’ll be disappointed if I get fewer than 70 dingers out of Kong. I’m curious to see how high 1901 Buck Freeman’s 12 RL HRs play up in this league. ’28 Ott should get a nice boost as well. The rest of the offense (Marwin Gonzalez, Bellhorn, ’83 Brett, Roy Thomas) is my run-of-the-mill $80M theme fodder. My pitching staff employs alternating throwing arm tandems, as is my wont, and is populated by pitchers for whom normalization theoretically lowers homers a bit, as I’m sure everyone else’s are. I’ll be surprised if at least half the teams don’t play in Great American to try to minimize the innings needed. I’m looking forward to seeing how this plays out, despite being a bit nervous about it.

Offense – 5402 PA, .288/.374/.500, 222 HRs
Pitching – 1340 IP (+26 mop-up), 1.06 WHIP#, 2.48 ERC#, 0.63 HR/9#

$100M – Los Angeles Dodgers 2021
Dodger Stadium

When this theme was announced, I posted: “That $100M theme is completely insane in the best possible way.” This is the highest level of praise that I am capable of issuing. I loved doing the research for this team. This type of theme is the primary reason I still play this game.

I created rosters for at least 20 different teams. For one of them, the 2000 Yankees, I had 15 twists. I really wanted to use them for that sake alone, but I found a team that I thought was clearly better. You wouldn’t think that such a recent team would work, because most of their twists are limited to going backward in time, but the 2021 Dodgers had such a good pitching staff that I couldn’t justify using anyone else. I rostered the best seasons of Scherzer, Bauer and Buehler, and the lights-out 149 IP Kershaw, and the pitchers on the 2021 Dodgers alone comprise the back-end of a very solid $100M bullpen. The offense features the best seasons of Bellinger, Betts and Trea Turner. It’s not a perfect team; the pitching staff is very homer-prone and the offense is not great at getting on base. But the former should be mitigated by what I expect will be a high number of deadball teams, and the latter is probably just nit-picking. I’ll very gladly tip my cap to anyone who finds a team that’s much better than this one. Lord knows I tried as hard as I could. If such a team exists it’s probably from the deadball era; I have a blind spot there that I have yet to fix. The good news is that such teams tend to rely on doubles and triples for their run production, and Dodger Stadium greatly suppresses those.

Offense – 5450 PA (not including 85 extra Beaty PAs), .302/.384/.506, 250 HRs
Pitching – 1405 IP, 0.97 WHIP#, 2.03 ERC#, 0.56 HR/9#

$110M – Phils Cards Halos Tribe Yanks
Sportsman’s Park

The polar opposite of my $100M team; this one fell into place almost immediately. I started with pitching; which team/era has the most pitchers I’d use at this cap? 1940’s Cardinals, who also have a solid 3B in Kurowski. Good start. So, 1920’s – 1930’s, probably not looking at pitching, where can I find some good hitters at reasonable prices? Phillies. Camilli, Klein, and maybe the optimal post-1920 $110M league DH in the 1930 O’Doul. Awesome. Now, ‘60’s and ‘70’s, probably focusing on pitching, don’t want to use a team that I might want to use in the modern era. Who is one of the best cap-appropriate SPs of that era? Dean Chance. Those Angels years also have several good RPs to choose from. Great. Now back to the offense. Still need middle infielders and a catcher, plus a few relievers. My favorite circa-2000 middle infielder? Probably Alomar, and he comes with an excellent CF and leadoff man in the ’93 Lofton, plus a bona fide closer and a setup guy in Karsay and Mesa. Now we need a shortstop and catcher, and maybe another reliever or two. My go-to catcher at this cap is Posada, and I love the ’09 Jeter. That Mo Rivera guy isn’t bad either. Done and done. I needed to change things around when I realized I wasn’t complying with the $20M per franchise rule, but even then I was already close, and basically I just had to get rid of Pollet and move a few guys around; maybe 15 minutes of tinkering.

I never even considered any other combinations. I feel like I know what a good $110M team looks like, and this is a good $110M team. Except for Long B’s and part-timers, I would have no reservations using any of these players in a post-deadball $110M open league with DH. Other than my customary skimping on defense (D/D- O’Doul will have to start ~70 games in the OF) I don’t see any weaknesses. This team even steals bases; Lofton, Alomar, Jeter and Abreu are a combined 140/167 in RL SBs. All that having been said, the way these things tend to go my hubris will probably be rewarded with an 84-78 record and missing out on the playoffs. But I’ll be genuinely surprised if that happens. This is my favorite team of the six.

Hitting – 6021 PA, .326/.411/.511, 186 HRs
Pitching – 1436 IP, 1.01 WHIP#, 1.96 ERC#, 0.30 HR/9#

$125M – Hobgoblins
Crosley Field

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

• Ralph Waldo Enerson

“It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.”

• Jimmy Dugan, A League of Their Own

The title of this theme is Egalitarian Pandemonium, which is apt in more ways than one. Certainly the player salaries are all within a limited range, which makes the player pool egalitarian, but I also feel like there will be a large number of players who each appear on a large percentage of rosters, which will make the rosters more egalitarian than usual. There’s still plenty of room for each owner to put their own stamp on their team and make it unique, but the range of difference will likely be narrower than in a typical theme. In this theme the devil is truly in the details, making it hard, but great.

This is a difficult team to write about. The pool of players who are in the specified salary range and would perform well in a $125M league is pretty limited, so it was just a matter of choosing the ones who fit my usual style. I felt like I needed one player who will play every day, and I chose the ’06 Carlos Guillen to play SS and hit 8^th. There will almost certainly be a ton of platooning in this theme, so my customary alternating handedness tandems should work well here. It seems that there was room for a few players who would normally be a splurge in an open $125M league, because you had to spend your money somewhere. For me the splurges were Randy Winn and Devin Williams. Instead of Winn I probably should’ve drafted more plate appearances, because I feel like my offense will be better than average so I’m probably a bit short there.

My prediction is that egalitarian players and egalitarian rosters will lead to egalitarian records. It’ll be quite an accomplishment to significantly separate your team from the pack in this theme. I’m sure that a few owners will find a way to do that, but it’s unlikely that I will be one of them.

Hitting – 5453 PA, .336/.437/.558, 180 HRs
Pitching – 1455 IP, 0.97 WHIP#, 1.71 ERC#, 0.19 HR/9#

$140M – Alpha-Bits
The Mistake by the Lake (Oil Can Boyd’s favorite ballpark: Cleveland Stadium)

We were never much of a sugary cereal family when I was growing up. We were more of an OG Cheerios family. When we got sugary cereal it tended to be Cap’n Crunch. We got Alpha-Bits a few times; it was OK but I was never really a big fan. That’s kind of how I feel about this team, and the $80M version to follow if I advance.

Actually, maybe that’s being a bit harsh. My concern is that, while this team is better than my $125M team, it’s not that much better, which might be worrisome. However, this theme has a DH, which takes up $7M - $8M in salary, and caused me to draft a few more innings. I also think that this theme is a bit more restrictive in terms of optimizing the roster; both because of the alphabet rule and because of the need to be cognizant of the ability to create an $80M roster from the same players. So maybe it’s not so bad after all. And if that’s not the kind of unequivocal, definitive take that you come to these writeups for, then I don’t know what is…

My first stab at a roster was based on using Silver King. My team ended up OK, but I thought I could do better. I was also nervous that King wouldn’t get enough hitters out in this league. On paper, solely in terms of ERC#, he’s a huge bargain even when accounting for the fact that he won’t ever reach his RL IP/162 * 1.1, but the problem is that I feel like he wouldn’t perform up to his ERC# at this cap. I think the sweet spot for him is $130M with DH. With my second try I went with the more conventional 1908 Walsh, and things fell into place. I paired him with 1909 Three-Finger Brown as the primary tandem anchors who will pair with Kershaw and Lamet respectively. Cesar Valdez and his delightfully, relatively high IP/G is the closer, with Hendriks, Iglesias, Erceg and the 30IP deGrom as setup guys. Quinn is a solid Long A. Offensively I started with 1895 Sam Thompson, who I adore at this cap. I’m a bit nervous that the ’55 Ashburn won’t produce commiserate with his salary, but at least he’ll play defense. I also don’t love the ’96 Piazza and wonder if I should’ve used Posada instead, but I like the rest of my lineup: Foxx, Eddie Collins, Nomar, Ott, ’62 Mantle, and 1894 Joyce at DH. Urias, Seager and Nieman provide three solid backups.

Upon further review I think this is a perfectly acceptable $140M DH team. I guess one concern is whether a bunch of people max out on this version without caring what their potential $80M team looks like, but I have no control over that. I tried twice to create teams with Cap Anson at catcher, who I think would overwhelmingly outperform Piazza, but I was afraid of using the D- fielding 1897 Anson at catcher in the $80M league, and I thought that would be the only Anson that would fit at that cap. As it stands, should I advance, my $80M team won’t be stellar but should hold its own. I haven’t used a lot of those versions of those players, but I love the ’60 Ashburn, ‘97 Joyce and ‘16 Zobrist at $80M.

Hitting – 5983 PA (plus 161 PA scrubs), .343/.442/.566, 206 HRs
Pitching – 1491 IP (plus 31 IP mop-up), 0.89 WHIP#, 1.57 ERC#, 0.16 HR/9#

Potential Round 2 team:
Hitting – 5387 PA (plus 56 PA scrubs), .294/.400/.458, 135 HRs
Pitching – 1343 IP (plus 59 IP mop-up), 1.12 WHIP#, 2.52 ERC#, 0.30 HR/9#

In conclusion, I’m happy with these teams. I expect to advance to the second round, but in this tournament nothing is guaranteed. Thanks, as always, to redcped and everyone who did the heavy lifting, from choosing themes to organizing to commish-ing. Sadly, I have my doubts about the long-term viability of this website, but it brings me a great deal of joy and I very much appreciate everyone’s efforts in making this tournament a huge part of that.

Thanks as always to redcped and everyone else for the great themes and their hard work. I swore I was done with this game, but I enjoy the WISC enough to make it my lone exception.

Here we go:

$70m: Moneyball A’s
Shibe Park
.265 AVG / .383 OBP / .376 SLG / 46 HR
1340 IP / .233 OAV / 1.10 WHIP / 0.54 HR/9

Just like the real Moneyball A’s, this team gets on base for cheap. I drafted over 800 walks, led by 1950 Ferris Fain (133), 1905 Topsy Hartsel (121), and 1925 Max Bishop (87 in just 497 PAs).

$80m: Homer at the Bat
Yankee Stadium III
.263 AVG / .349 OBP / .515 SLG / 310 HR
1360 IP / .237 OAV / 1.06 WHIP / 0.81 HR/9

Everyone hits homers, and I drafted only 21st-century pitchers, keeping HR/9# as low as possible.

Seems like the strategy most owners would use, though. It will be fun to see how many homers we hit, but I don’t know if anything really separates this squad from the competition.

$100m: 1919 Giants (+/- 8)
Polo Grounds
.318 AVG / .381 OBP / .463 SLG / 95 HR
1429 IP / .230 OAV / 1.02 WHIP / 0.24 HR/9

Fun theme! Although I only tried out one team, I still spent more time on this build than on any other.

Why the 1919 Giants? I wanted to combine the pitching of the 1910s Giants with the hitting of the 1920s teams. After comparing rosters on Baseball Reference, I decided it would be easier to choose a strong pitching team and twist the hitters than the reverse.

Even so, it was easy to lose track of the impact of each twist decision, enough that I needed a spreadsheet to get through it.

I hoped to take both 1918 Toney and 1916 Schupp, but couldn’t draft enough innings with that combo. Eventually I stuck with Toney’s decent 1919 season and went with

1918/1920 George Smith
1917/1921 George Kelly
1916/1922 Ferdie Schupp
1915/1923 Benny Kauff
1914/1924 Ross Youngs
1913/1925 Earl Smith
1912/1926 Heinie Zimmerman
1911/1927 Frankie Frisch

This would have been a very different build without the $300K exception. As it is, I’m rostering 9 sub-$300K players–7 hitters, 2 mopups–and only 7 usable pitchers (eek). Excited for this team, as long as the pitching holds up.

$110m: NYG/STL/BAL/PIT/HOU
PNC Park
.321 AVG / .402 OBP / .486 SLG / 139 HR
1458 IP / .201 OAV / 0.96 WHIP / 0.46 HR/9

The first 3 decisions came quickly:

1920-1940 NYG (hitting, defense)
1941-1961 STL (pitching)
1962-1982 BAL (pitching, Paul Blair in CF)

After comparing a few 1983-2003 options, I went with the Pirates, who supplied 4 useful pieces in LHPs Zane Smith and Randy Tomlin, RF Andy Van Slyke, and C Jason Kendall. Adding 1993 Mark Dewey pushed the combined salaries just above $20 million, which freed up cash to spend elsewhere.

As a Mets fan, I considered the 2004-2025 Mets, but I should have known better as they mostly can’t hit. (This year’s dreadful team is an extreme example.) The modern Astros instead supplied my missing pieces, including Justin Verlander, 3B Alex Bregman, and DH Lance Berkman.

$125m: Rollin’ In My Six-Four
Great American Ballpark
.324 AVG / .392 OBP / .582 SLG / 315 HR
1455 IP / .198 OAV / 0.93 WHIP / 0.38 HR/9

As I anticipate facing a lot of platoons, I’m countering with 3 SP tandems: Brad Keller/Howie Pollet, Schoolboy Rowe/Clayton Kershaw, CC Sabathia/Jim Hearn.

Otherwise I drafted power hitters to play in Great American Ballpark, the most homer-friendly stadium allowed by the theme.

$140m: U and I
Shibe Park
.342 AVG / .420 OBP / .515 SLG / 169 HR
1467 IP / .201 OAV / 0.91 WHIP / 0.21 HR/9

After a few false starts, I got this one going by first drafting Babe Ruth, then filling the remaining slots using the following strategy:

1) I looked up a resource on most common first letters of last names.
2) I concentrated initially on uncommon letters–Quirk, Zimmer, Yastrzemski, Otero, Eichhorn–and gradually worked toward more common letters.
3) Using this method, I built the $80m team first, seeking bargain players who also offer useful higher-priced seasons.

Ruth is my full-time $140m DH. If I make the second round, he’ll platoon in LF with Wilton Guerrero, which is funny to picture.

Here’s the team, alphabetically:

Adams, Babe
Bender, Chief
Connor, Roger
Davis, George
Eichhorn, Mark
Ford, Russ
Guerrero, Wilton
Henry, Bill
Isringhausen, Jason
Jackson, Grant
Kauff, Benny
Lansing, Mike
Martin, Chris
Nehf, Art
Otero, Dan
Phillips, Tony
Quirk, Jamie
Ruth, Babe
Simmons, Al
Tudor, John
Urena, Richard
Valentine, Bobby
Werber, Billy
Yastrzemski, Carl
Zimmer, Chief

barracuda's writeups are perhaps my favorite part of my favorite part of WIS.

And despite being a Boston native and huge Red Sox fan, I did not know about their using Braves Field in the 20s-30s. I did know about them using that park in the 1915-16 World Series (and interesting trivia, the BRAVES played THEIR home games in the 1914 series at Fenway...)

Always great to pick a new piece of knowledge. Well done, sir.

Posted by contrarian23 on 6/28/2026 4:02:00 PM (view original):
barracuda's writeups are perhaps my favorite part of my favorite part of WIS.

And despite being a Boston native and huge Red Sox fan, I did not know about their using Braves Field in the 20s-30s. I did know about them using that park in the 1915-16 World Series (and interesting trivia, the BRAVES played THEIR home games in the 1914 series at Fenway...)

Always great to pick a new piece of knowledge. Well done, sir.

I only happened to live in Boston as a teenager, 13 to 17. In those days Braves Field was Nickerson Field at BU and we would go to New England Teamen games in the NASL and to Boston Breakers (short-lived) games in the USFL there.

Posted by contrarian23 on 6/28/2026 4:02:00 PM (view original):
barracuda's writeups are perhaps my favorite part of my favorite part of WIS.

And despite being a Boston native and huge Red Sox fan, I did not know about their using Braves Field in the 20s-30s. I did know about them using that park in the 1915-16 World Series (and interesting trivia, the BRAVES played THEIR home games in the 1914 series at Fenway...)

Always great to pick a new piece of knowledge. Well done, sir.

Thanks for the kind words.