Posted by crimsonblue on 11/13/2011 1:35:00 PM (view original):
In MLB over the last 50 years the home team has won 53.9% of the time. In the Sim where people have the ability to construct and taylor their rosters with almost any player in MLB history why doesn't the Sim home advantage even approach this number. My theory and I've had this happen many times. I'm playing a guy using Fenway. The guy searches high and low for doubles hitters, and puts 330 doubles on his roster. I usually have between 230 and 260 if I fill all 8 positions just by accident. Sure he's got an advantage there. BUT, I've usually got 200 more SB's and 65 more Hr's than he does. A balanced team may actually be more cost effective!! There is a definite give and take. Hence, his sought out 60 or so doubles advantage doesn't win at a much higher percentage like he thinks it should.
This is a good point, crimsonblue. I recently built a triples team and it is performing pretty well. I was checking my team stats last night and I was a little surprised to see that the team isn't actually hitting all that many triples, even at home, but they are doing a lot of different things pretty well. At the risk of stating the obvious, I think the first priority is to build a strong, balanced team that exploits as many different attributes of your ballpark as possible, even if only fractionally, as well as utilzing a ballpark that minimizes your weaknesses, even if only fractionally.
Only then does your second priority become capitalizing on one or two particular strengths as much as possible. To use an extreme example, you could load a team with Babe Ruths at Coors in an OL and spend $79 million on offense and $1 million on pitching, and you'd hit a lot of home runs and have a lot of fun, but you wouldn't win too many games because your team would be a one-trick pony.
Let's say that you're measuring your team against competitors in 10 different offensive categories. Common sense tells you that, given a choice between a team that outperforms your competitors by 30% in two of those offensive categories and outperforms them by 0% in the other eight categories (+60% total looked at in a very simplistic way) or a team that outperforms your competitors by 10% in all ten categories (+100% looked at that same simple way), you want the team that is +10% across the board, not +30% in a few areas, so that's what you would look for in a ballpark. Of course not all offensive categories are created equal, so you have to weight them accordingly. It is obviously more important to have a team with a good overall OBP, for example, rather than a team that is simply good at hitting doubles.
When I built my first Coors team, I loaded it with sluggers and I didn't win. Now I usually have pretty good success with a team that is built around Coors as an offensive park in general, not just a HR park. My offenses have a lot of speed, high OBP and they overindex in singles, doubles and triples and they often include very few, if any, pure sluggers, my pitching is constructed to throw a lot of innings respectably without fatiguing and I use shutdown deadball closers, and my teams do OK. I think these same concepts apply in different ways to any park, like the Astrodome, Dodger Stadium, the Baker Bowl or Kauffman that cater heavily to specific team strengths.
And of course these principles become even more applicable when you remember that you play half your games on the road.
11/13/2011 10:40 PM (edited)