crimson, if you believe in finding "the hot players" your understanding of this game is about as deep as the kiddie pool.  You just said "a great team one season doesn't make it a great team the next" - 99% of the best owners in this game would disagree with the general idea of this statement in the context of OLs, which appear to be pretty much all you play.  That doesn't mean good coaches don't always field different teams, since it's much more fun for most of us to retool each time around rather than copying and pasting.  But a good team is a good team.  Period.  The end.

I wasn't going to get involved in this conversation, but I do want to ask you a question crimsonblue.  I will try to keep the events in a neutral manner and back up my argument with intelligent data.  I am not out to offend anyone, I just want to try to make a clear explanation.  

Do you believe that each AB is an independent event each time?  

I do believe it, many other folks believe it and that is what WiS tells us as well.

The WW does have uses, but limited.  Dropping your 200k's for a 1.2M player; dropping quantity for quality for a playoff run; dropping a hitting C for a A+ arm because you see that you are going to be facing a running team in the playoffs.  Those events are going to give you a statistical advantage.  

Dropping a player that is "cold" for a player that is "hot" is not going to improve your team.  The cold player's next AB is independent, he does not remember his last AB or any of his season's ABs.  The same goes for the "hot" player's ABs as well.  All that is happening when you hit the WW for this purpose is that you are losing 10% of that player's salary, which has a correlation of how well that player is going to perform.  

As for proving your theory with getting to the WS the last two times, that means nothing.  Start winning the WS at higher % then maybe I will concede there is a correlation between WW use and championships, until then you haven't proved anything.  Two events is not a sample size for anything.  

I agree completely with Profcake.  Each AB is an independent event, so hot and cold streaks are only the owner's way of perceiving how various random sequences are playing out.  If the WW allows an owner to upgrade a "slumping" player with one who performs more according to expectations, this is the luck of random events, not a genuine upgrade.

Having said that, I think there are certain owners, mixtroy among them (and for all I know crimsonblue could be one of them as well), who are especially adept at using the WW.  But although mixtroy will insist that he gives a quick ax to slumping players, I think he is really very adept at making midcourse corrections to his team according to their needs (e.g., drafted a team for high OBP, finds they need a little more power, speed, pitching, whatever).  In other words, he is really correcting drafting "mistakes."  He may jettison one of his lowest-performing players, but my guess is he often replaces him with a player who has slightly different strengths and weaknesses.

Does mixtroy actually gain a competitive advantage by working the WW so often?  Probably yes, because in searhing for upgrades, he is assessing his team's relative strengths and weaknesses more often than other owners and he can adjust to his competitive landscape faster and better on the fly.  We all learn more about our teams' strengths and weaknesses as the season progresses and we have a better sense of our competition, the ballparks we're playing in, catcher's arms, types of pitchers, etc.  Mixtroy is simply the rare owner who is good enough at making these midcourse correctios that he can compensate for the 10% penalty for secondguessing himself.  Crimsonblue may be anotherof these owners, or he may have gotten lucky a couple times.

But keep in mind that you're not really finding opportunities on the waiver wire because, in an OL especially, you had the entire universe of players available for drafing.  You simply have more knowledge of your team and your competition to take advantage of a much more limited pool of opportunities to correct your initial "mistake."   Think of it as shopping for a house and you look at houses A, B and C.  You buy house A and, a few months after moving in, you're not happy with it.  Then you're delighted to see that house C just came back on the market and, even though the owners raised the price by 10%, you snap it up.  You may be delighted with the ultimate outcome, but the bottom line is that you still paid 10% more than you needed to in order to correct your initial mistake.

I would be interested in the following theme idea: OL rules, with 2 exceptions.  Owners, when signing up, have to declare whether they will (a) agree not to use the WW at all or (b) play with a salary handicap. 

For owners who think WW is a strategic mistake, you would be handicapped by not being able to use it, under any circumstances.  If you draft a power-hitting team and end up in a division with all Astrodomes and Josses, too bad, you're stuck with your guys.

For owners who think WW is a strategic advantage, you will have the ability to optimize and re-optimize your team over time, but you'll have to pay for that right.

Would anyone be interested in such a theme?  How much should the salary handicap be?  I'm thinking at least $3M, perhaps $5M, but would be curious to hear from the owners who heavily use the WW - how much would you be willing to pay to have that advantage over other owners?

I'd be interested.  I don't use the WW enough to have an enlightened opinion on what the handiucap should be for WW users, although $3 to $5 MM sounds like the right range.  Hopefully you'll get a good mix of owners who don't use the WW much (like me) and WW devotees like mixtroy and crimsonblue who would be willing to accept the salary handicap to work their magic.  I used to use the WW more, especially before the last update, when I would drop a position player in order to upgrade elsewhere if I had a good AAA player with stamina.  Now good AAA players with stamina are too few and far between. 

I agree with crimsonblue on one issue.  Although I still think of each AB as an independent event, when I look at several of my teams' full seasons of games (or anyone else's), WLWLWL and LWLWLW sequences seem more infrequent than they should be.  I've never reconciled these two conflicting opinions since I don't know probability formulae well enough to quantify whether that is actually true and, if so, to what extent.

Streaks on an even coinflip are not entirely the same as streaks you might anticipate seeing when you play teams in chunks and not all teams are equally talented...

I'd also be willing to bet that the average streak length in this game is much lower than you might expect.  Long streaks are more memorable, so they stick out.  But I'd bet the average streak length for an average team is less than 3 games.  Unfortunately I don't have any active teams remotely close to .500, and I'm way too lazy to go through the schedule game by game for another team.