$60M. I felt lucky getting the 2nd pick and drafting 2.24 ERA. when I saw this theme the first player I thought of was Ed Summers. as it turns out his ERA has enough suitable pitchers to give me 1250 innings for under $30M. my clear first choice.

0M
235, 267, 318, 363, hut, hut!

I was determined to grab AVG before ERA.  My thought process... There are almost 200 reasonable ERA choices for pitchers at this cap (2.00 thru 4.00), while there are less than 100 for hitters.  Also, at this cap, I wanted high percentage SB guys.  Since I had a low draft pick, I didn't even start to research until just a few picks before I was up.  I immediately found .267 with Vince Coleman, Chone Figgins and Bert Campaneris.  At .235, I added Julio Cruz, Tommy Harper and Omar Moreno.  That's 420 steals at an 80% success rate.  I have no slugging whatsover (Don Hurst leads my team with .389 slugging %).  The defense is above average for this cap.  The pitching is just so-so, with low-cap favorite Chien-Ming Wang (3.63).  I also found a 260-IP Pete Alexander at 3.63 for a modet $5.9M.  I only drafted about 1200 good innings (+140 mopup), so hopefully playing on Petco will keep my fatigue down.  Prediction: 80-82.


80M
Zombies with Range

This was the easiest team to build.  I knew I was going to run a 5-player platoon at one hitting position (RF), and have a 13-man pitching staff, with only 4 SPs totalling 800-900 IPs.  I decided to reincarnate my 1880's all-range team (Connor, McPhee, Denny, Glasscock, Hanlon, Hoy).  This should account for 150 or more "+" plays on defense while at the same time increasing my chances of reaching base via error.  My RF-platoon of Magee (.321), N.Cruz (.330), J.Jackson (.354), T.Phillips (.440 obp) and K.Williams (.345) cost about $6.5M in total and also gives me 4 good pinch hitters in any game.   I went with the 3 of the same bargain starting pitchers from my 70M team from round 1 - 2006 Maddux, 2006 Halladay and 2006 Wang.   With 1991 Jimmy Key, that's 858 SP innings at the cost of $21 million.  I have 9 relievers ranging between $1.2M and $2.4M, most with whips below 1.00.  These nine pitchers have a combned 490 innings.  I really like how this team turned out.  I have a decent offense, with lots of pinch hitters, a great defense and an awesome bullpen.  I can see pulling out some 8th and 9th inning come-from-behind late.  I will have to manage the relievers and platoon RF on a day-to-day basis to make sure players stay fresh.  Prediction 90-72.


90M
Can Speed Win in 2011?

This was the toughest team to build.  Despite coming up with the theme rules, my first attempt at building the team was wrong.  I had to totally re-do it.  I started by selecting my starting pitchers but kept changing my mind.  I wanted to get Maddux, Pedro and/or K.Brown. onto the team, but I didn't like how the offense looked.  So instead, I focused on the offensive players, again trying to get some good .300-hitting speed guys.   My lineup looks like this..  B.Roberts, Ellsbury, M.Young, A.Gonzalez, Rollins, Bourn, Gardner, Mauer.  That's 270 steals plus Adrian Gonzales, Michael Young and Joe Mauer to drive them in.  The pitching is not great, but not awful either... Hudson, Lincecum, Peavy, Halladay.  The bullpen is so-so... Romo, Crain, Bard, Madsen.  Crap, who am I kidding?  Compared to the teams I've seen, this team sucks.  I was just happy I got the roster built and it was legal.  Prediction: 75-87


100M
Ball, Meet Bat

I had a fairly low pick in this draft as well (18th).  I was hoping Luis Tiant would fall to me, but he got picked 2 picks before me.  In retrospect, I should've taken somebody like Vida Blue for the 300 innings, but instead I wanted to get the best player at an offensive position while keeping my salary low enough to get a decent 2nd round pick.  That's why I grabbed Mike Schmidt, even though I knew the top 3B had multiple studs (i.e., Beltre went in the 6th round!).  In the second round, I really wanted to take Tulowitski (easily best SS left), but was scared that I'd totally miss out on SP.  Instead, I took Lincecum over Spahn for salary reasons (another mistake).  After the early SS run, I knew I made a mistake passing on Tulo.  This draft was not going well for me.  Starting pitchers were flying off the board.  At this point, I made sure I was getting at least 2 more SP and grabbed Halladay and F.Hernandez.  I knew my defense wasn't going to be great, so I purposely grabbed strikeout pitchers (Greinke went one pick ahead of my Halladay pick).  For hitters, I didn't want to draft a lot of power.  Instead I focused on low-K high average/onbase hitters (Mike Schmidt is my only high-power hitter who K's).  So, I ended up with Berra, Hargrove, Schoendienst, Schmidt, Vizquel, Kuenn, J.Cunningham and Kaline.  The pitching staff is pretty average, but has a low HR allowed rate.  Also, my infield defense (2b, 3b, ss) turned out to be pretty good.... just don't hit the ball to my OFs.  Prediction: 86-76.


110M
San Francisco Indians

I essentially looked at the franchises that performed well in the 120M Franchisee Tournament that I ran a few months ago.  I then looked at the players from those franchises that performed well in that tournament.  The Giants provided those great high IP/G deadball pitchers that I like to use in relief (Toney, Schupp).  Plus, Mathewson & Hubbell.  Indians provide Addie Joss and some nice hitting.  I generally avoid HRs on offense since I know all the pitchers will be deadball pitchers... my hitters are:  V.Martinez, Tabler, Lajoie, Sandoval, Boudreau, Averill, Speaker, G.Harper, R.Youngs.  Prediciton: 87-75.


120M
'09 Mathewson

I first went with the most expensive versions of the guys I wanted but that left me with about 300K for my HOF.  So I decided to try something a bit different.  I drafted a platoon at RF, with L.Johnson (.309/.385/.404) and Browning (.355/.466/.445).  I also didn't want a ton of HRs, but I was stuck with A-Rod at SS.  And I reasoned that Bautista's A+++ defense at 3B (vs. Lave Cross) was enough to offset the fact that he will underperform in HRs.  So, my lineup is Raines (.405 obp, 70 SB), Fournier (.446 obp), Seymour (.377 avg), A-Rod (.358), Bautista (608 slug), Utley (.332), Simmons (.332) and the aformentioned platoon of Johnson/Browning.  The only real decision at pitching (the expensive S.King was never a consideration) was how I was going to use Derek Lowe and Randy Johnson (I needed one SP and one RP).  I decided that 2002 Lowe was better as a SP than Johnson, so Randy goes to the bullpen.  I am using the good seasons of all the other relievers.  My Hall of Famer is 1909 Christy Mathewson.  Of course, I have the best Maddux and Pedro seasons.  I'm a little light at innings (1370), so my mopups S.King and T.Mullane will have to pitch more than I want them to.  Prediction: 84-78.

$60M
.287 .278 1.66 2.17

I knew right away that I wanted to get .287 AVG for my first pick.  It is a good average for the cap and I get '89 HoJo with it.  Looking at the first round $70M theme, I believe 3 of the top 5 performing teams were from '89.  HoJo just tears it up at this level.  I was able to get some other great switch hitting speed options in Raines, Coleman, Willis as well.  I think that switching hitting speed is a key to success at lower cap levels.  My only regret is playing in the Astrodome instead of Petco.  I think I I am a bit light on PA's and IP's, looking back Petco would of helped on that.

Prediction  85+ wins

$80M
7 Man Rotation

Not much to say here.  I don't play a lot of OL's, just when I need some more credits to fund some progressives and tourneys.  I do have a lot of success at this cap in OL's and my team hasn't changed much at all.  Lots of speed and deadball pitching.  7 of my 8 hitters are the same, expect Dave Collins instead of Jefferies at 1B.  Swap some lower IP deadballers instead of my standard Joss and Bernhard, and we got a team.  

Prediction  95+ wins

$90M
The Big Unit, The Rocket and Pedro II

I really liked this theme.  I had a really tough time fielding a legal roster though.  I kept switching out players and changing connections that I always seemed to mess one up.  I went about this theme trying to maximize my choices and minimize my constraints.  That meant hiding a lot of the 2011 players that I had to roster at bench positions and RP's.  That cleared up space to pick who I wanted for my SP and hitters.  I did a broad search from 1991 to 2011 for players that fit my criteria, then looked through them to see if I could find a connection to 2011.  Surprisingly enough, you could find a connection most of the time.  Once again I went for my lower cap level strategy of switch hitters with speed and pitchers with lower HR rates.  I also picked Dinkelman so that I would be able to play at Target Filed and its -4 for HRs.  Overall I thought I got a pretty good team.

Prediction  95+ wins

$100M
2nd place for secondary postitions

First off, I did not read the rules carefully enough for this theme.  I either read over or didn't comprehend that you could only draft one player at each position.  I got real lucky with some of my picks before I found this out, so I was able to salvage an ok team.  When I nominated my players, I went boom or bust on my nominations.  That meant I put into the pitching pool some of the worst pitchers in the last fifty years.  I knew I did not want to get stuck with them.  My strategy was to pick the best high IP pitchers I could get with my first 4 picks.  That part of the draft went well.  I basically got my entire staff squared away with the first 4 picks.  That meant I could spend all of my upcoming picks on hitters.  I do not think my 5th round pick of HoJo was a great pick.  I knew I really wanted him, but with the draft restrictions I am sure he would of lasted a few rounds later.  I could of gotten I much better OF or 1B at this point.  I lucked out getting the HoJo 3B/SS and Pujos OF/3B switch without even knowing the rules.  If I could do it again, I would have gone the same route anyways.  After the 6th round, nothing much to note.  I picked the best players I could get and ended up with an ok team.

Prediction  81+ wins.  

$110M
St. Louis Indians

I knew right away that I wanted the Indians franchise.  They had Joss and Bernhard, two of the best pitching options period in my opinion.  After that I wanted to build a team around high average and low HR with some speed in there as well.  Fits in well with Cleveland's League Stadium II.  The Cardinal fit well into that catagory as well.  They also had some good pitching options in Kid Nichols and John Tudor.  Felt I built a good but not great team.

Prediction 85+ wins

$120M
The Babe and Tony Mullane in the OF

I always seem to suck at building higher level caps.  I am sure this team will not be an exception either.  I am thinking of trying to find a partner for next years WISC.  Splitting the entry fee, teams and time could be useful.  Time and money seem to be shorter on hand then before.  Not to mention that having a high cap expert for a partner wouldn't be a bad thing either.  So any of you WiS that are better at higher caps, send me a sitemail.  My resume for those that are interested : 2 for 2 getting into the 2nd round of the WISC.  11 WS and 6 TOC's as well.  Enough of shamelessly advertising myself, back to the building process.

When I nominated my player, I wanted to give myself an edge even if it was only a small one.  The only way I could think of doing this was by finding a player that mainly pitched but also had a decent hitting season as well.  My first thought was Cy Seymour, but he was to popular of a player and I think a lot of people know about his hitting seasons.  So on to the research.  Spent several hours trying to find a pitcher that met the requirements and that night be obscure enough to my fellow WiS.  So much for that.  Sounds like a lot of people already knew about Tony Mullane, but just chose not to use him.  I was determined to use him, so whether or not that is a good thing we shall see.

On the building process I tried to cut down on as much wasted salary as possible.  That meant trying to avoid wasted PA's on bench players.  Because of that I tried to target hitters with good seasons and around 550 PA's.  Once again I tried to avoid dependence on HRs as much as possible again.  We shall see how my hitters turn out.

On the pitching side, the question is Is to King or not to King?  I was one of the five people to go with King.  After that I went 95 Maddux and 02 Pedro.  I have never managed a King team before, so I am not too hopeful on that front.

Prediction 75+ wins (Hopeful)

I normally like writing up my strategies but holy hell this round's themes bored me to tears, I really didn't like a single one, so these will probably be fairly brief.

60m:

Really not too much to this one.  I hate having teams without at least one ace, hopefully at this cap '13 Christy will fit that bill, and he's reasonably priced.  3.55 ERA gives me Hooks Dauss, who was gangbusters for me in the Double Albatross league last year.  .272 gave a bunch of budget hitters even if there's no real cohesion to them.  .219 gives me A+ arm Ed Kirkpatrick to combat the steals teams.


80m:

I've done a number of teams with entire rotations of 100+ IP guys and I hate using scrubs on teams for waste of money, so this came pretty naturally to me.  Loaded up on the usual suspect value pitchers (Shore, Nehf, Kroh, Steele, Dizzy, et al), used my defense up the middle strategy I strive for with Glenn Hubbard, Marty Marion and ol' Lenny Dykstra, and grabbed some long time favorites for cheap offense (Brouthers, Webb).  Nothing to see here.


90m:

Had a few specific guys in mind to use here: '95 Maddux was the first guy I added, 2007 Bonds is too good a value to pass up for a theme like this, 2011 Punto's a nice bench bat and brings along a lot of useful guys so he can fill whatever hole would pop up.  Beyond that, more defense up the middle, lots of 2011 relievers.


100m:

I was really thrilled with how this was going for me until I misjudged when the final run on OFers would go off.  Because of that, I'll be testing the limits of WIS defense, playing Dick Dietz (C glove, A range) in the OF.  He'll be starting in RF and if it doesn't go too poorly he'll move to CF bumping Abreu's D+ range to RF.  Other than that gaffe, I like the top end of my offense, I think I've got as good a 1-2 in the rotation as any team in the league and, of course, there's Pedro.  Still pretty happy overall with how it came together.


110m:

I thought this theme would play somewhat similar to schwarze's franchise tournament from earlier in the year.  My Indians teams ran roughshod through that so I figured I'd co-opt that team for this.  The Red Sox complimented them well so it was a pretty easy marriage.  Having the DH threw things off a bit, would have loved for that to be gone but oh well.


120m:

I absolutely hated this theme for something like the WISC but actually came to like it more than I expected since I landed on an angle I think few people considered.  Hoping that there would be enough other hitters to use for it, I decided to go for a gambit and named Fournier, planning to put together a triples team.  Raines and Browning were already in the pool, Utley and Simmons add a handful and thankfully buddhagamer added Lance Johnson.  ARod and Joey Bats don't really fit but the options were obviously limited.  Really wish I could have gone to Mile High, had to settle for the next best WIS has to offer for triples, Bank One.

I thought we'd get more people posting here...

Better late than never, here's how my building strategies look after 25 games.

60M: Like schwarze, I thought there were many more ERAs that were workable than AVGs, so took hitting first. I made up a list of about 20 players at each position that looked not awful, and looked for which averages appeared on lots of lists. Not surprisingly, the middling averages (around .260) turned up the most, and I was very happy to get 2 of them. I didn't search for bench players before drafting, and was surprised how poor my bench choices were. So I've had some fatigue problems from not having backups available for mop-up duty.

80M: I guessed there would be lots of platoons run given that every player had to be used. My favourite platoon-busting strategy is an all-lefty rotation, so the RHBs get fatigued by the end of a 3 or 4 game series. I'm not sure that's why my pitching has been doing well so far though; but hopefully as the season wears on and fatigue gets to be more of a problem, I'll get more lefty-on-lefty matchups. I ran a test version of this team through an OL and the results weren't great; just 89-73 and first round playoff loss. But I saw some of the fatigue problems that other people are seeing now, and tinkered with the pitching to avoid some of them. It's still tougher facing people who know what they are doing though...

90M: Plan A was to get the best value players I could at 8 starting positions and 4 starting pitchers, then use 2011 players on the bench and bullpen to pair up with them. But I ended up liking a bunch of 2011 players enough that that wasn't necessary. So I paired Beltran with Wright, Fielder with Sheets, and Shields with Zobrist, for 3 big money pairings. And I wanted 2011 Verlander (though the forums now say Kershaw would have been a better pick) though the best pair I could find for him was Ni. I thought this league would be good for HRs and SBs, and drafted a fair few of each, and have been very disappointed so far. I don't think the SBs will turn around, but hopefully the HR will.

100M: I was going to draft all 8 hitters first, but when I got a good pick (5th), I decided to take one ace pitcher. Then the hope was to take good hitters, and hope that the bad hitters at the end of the pack would cause some runs, and there would still be non-useless pitching to follow. I thought on paper that the difference between great and OK hitters was bigger than the difference between great and OK pitchers. And without deadballers around, I thought high HR hitters, low HR pitchers and a HR stadium would lead to wins. Basically none of this worked so far. I'm hitting the HR, but also giving up a ton. And my ace pitcher, Saberhagen (1.90 ERC#) has a 5.57 ERA. I'm still hopeful that with a bit of luck I can get the "score 6, concede 5" strategy working for this team, but it could be a very long season.

I made a few drafting mistakes. There was such a deep pool of OF that I should have left them alone for longer and taken a better 3B and SP instead. And while Clark is very good, he has so few PAs that I felt compelled to use a fairly high pick on a platoon partner for him; it would have been better to get a good RP then, and I would have had I taken Berkman instead. Still, I'm getting some fun box scores this way!

110M: Again like schwarze, I looked primarily at what worked in the Franchise Tournament. I also tried a few builds with new franchises; I really wanted a Mariners team to work, but it seemed at this cap the early 20C players are much better value. I only took 1150 good IP, with lots of long relief/mop-up. The plan was to get Matty and Joss to give me leads, then Nehf, Sallee and Toney to close out games with leads, and kind of concede games that I fell much behind in. The upside is that Sparky often puts in bad opposing pitchers when I have a lead, and my hitters will destroy anyone else's Long B pitcher. So if it works, I get a 3-2 lead after 5, Sparky puts in a bad opposing pitcher, I score a bunch of runs, then I can put in my own bad pitchers to finish out a win. The downside is, well, I only have 1150 good IP, and am occasionally left with a very mediocre pitcher in a close game. I'll see at the end of the year which of them works best.

120M: I guessed that HRs would be suppressed  lot by all the Silver King's and deadball HOF's, so chose low HR hitters at every choice point. Weirdly, I've been hitting a lot more HRs than I expected already. I think some real-life inside-the-park HRs are turning into deep fly balls in the sim. I would have used the 700IP Silver King, but I tried that in an OL and it was no fun at all. He ended up winning the league for me, but I had massive fatigue problems along the way, and mountains of unearned runs. In a league that *won't* have two rookies in the same division, that seemed like a recipe for disaster. So far only 2 of the 5 SK's in this league have serious problems with unearned runs, so I might have been overly panicking. But I'm happy with this team; if I can get Derek Lowe's ERA under, say, 8, we should have a shot at winning a lot of games.

Been thinking about the really fun Lg 5 format and all the possible combos I coulda tried.  And you know what?  I wouldn't change a thing.  What are the chances that Joe Jackson and Tris Speaker would BOTH underperform so badly?  I think very small.  I feel like if this league were run again with all the exact same teams/divisions/stadiums/etc. my squad could only go up from here.  I mean, did I mention Pete Alexander's 0.84 WHIP coming out more than doubled?