Why You Should Read This
Winning isn't easy! You're up against veteran players who know how this game works well. However, everyone can be beaten, and I'll share some easily actionable tips in this thread.

After reading this, you won't be guaranteed to win a World Series or 100 games, but you will understand a bit about how the game works and be able to make informed decisions when building and managing your team.

What We'll Cover

1. What players are available
2. All the types of leagues you can play in
3. What to expect at different salary caps
4. How the game decides what happens during each at bat
5. WTF is normalization? and why all numbers are not created equal
6. How fatigue works
7. Which stats matter (and which don't) when drafting your team
8. Choosing a ballpark
9. Managing your team effectively
10. Extras (AAA, Waiver Wire, Trades, Injuries)
11. A reminder about statistical variance

What We Won't Cover
Ultimately, this game is a lot of fun because of experimentation. Winning is fun, but getting started and figuring it out is the best. This thread will get you 80% of the way there — the rest is up to you. So, we won't go over:

1. How to win 100 games every time
2. Every detail about everything — The WIS Help Section actually does a solid job
3. Some of what's in this more detailed thread that contrarian23 put together a while ago, or this FAQ thread. Most of what's in those is still relevant today.

Good luck, and have fun!

What Players Are Available
Every player from 1885 to now is available to be drafted as long as they reached 25 innings pitched or 50 plate appearances. For players who come from seasons where fewer than 162 games were played, their stats get pro-rated to 162 games. So if Babe Ruth played in a season where there were only 81 games, all of his stats (HRs, etc.) would be doubled. Thankfully for opposing pitchers in WIS, he never did.

If a player was traded during a season, you'll see multiple versions of them — individual versions from each team and a version that has their combined stat line from all teams they played for that year.

If a player was both a pitcher and a fielder in the same season, WIS picks one based on (usually) which they did more of and the player can only be drafted into that role.

All the Types of Leagues You Can Play In
WIS is great! There are a ton of league types. Here's an easy way to classify them:

• Open Leagues — The standard "starter" league. These generate automatically and have no restrictions + an 80M salary cap. There's also a version of this league specifically for veteran players called the Champion's League. It has the same rules but no new owners.
• Theme Leagues — Incredibly varied. People create any theme they want and advertise the league to other owners in the forums. Most (but not all) veteran owners prefer Theme Leagues over Open Leagues.
• Progressive Leagues — Multi-season commitments that include a live draft where you use different seasons of your drafted players each season. A lot of owners build great bonds through Progressives. Progressives have their own forum.
• Career Leagues — Like a Theme League, except with players' career stats rather than individual seasons (i.e. Babe Ruth instead of 1920 Babe Ruth).
• Tournament of Champions — If your team reaches the World Series, it gets entered into a playoff-style, 32-team tournament with WS teams from other leagues of approximately the same salary cap. Winning these is hard to do but awesome!

What to Expect at Different Salary Caps
Each player in the database has a salary assigned by WIS and each league has a salary cap. All teams in the league have the same amount of salary to build their roster from.

Caps range from 40M to 255M. All caps are fun and present different challenges. Higher caps let you draft expensive superstars like Babe Ruth, but there are fewer players who are good enough to be useful. Very low caps might mean you've never heard of the players you're using before, but there are a ton of options to choose from. This is a controversial opinion, but I think higher caps are a great place to start as a new player since you'll need to make fewer decisions.

It's important to note that higher caps mean players (even Babe Ruth) will underperform their real life stats. No one is hitting .400 when they go up against a rotation of Clayton Kershaw, Greg Maddux, and Pedro Martinez, and Pedro's not going to have an ERA under 2.00 when he's up against Ruth, Bonds, and Ted Williams either. At lower caps, the opposite is true — real life scrubs have a chance to drive in 100 runs or throw a no hitter.

Choosing a Ballpark
Each ballpark has effects that influence what happens when a ball is put in play. There is the Park Factor and the Effects.

The Effects influence whether a ball is more or less likely to be a certain type of hit. A positive rating for doubles means that it's more likely that a hit becomes a double. WIS assumes all hitters are pull hitters, so HR LF impacts right-handed hitters, and HR RF impacts lefties.

The Park Factor influences whether a ball is likely to become a hit in the first place. A higher Park Factor will lead to more hits.

So, a park like Petco Park will dampen hits overall, but a much higher percentage of those hits will be triples.

You should choose your park based on your team's strengths and weaknesses. If your team has a lot of modern pitchers, you should be in a park that's negative for HRs since they give up more HRs than deadball pitchers. If you draft a team with great defensive Range, you should pick a hitter's park so that your defense will be more likely to help you out than your opponents' will be.

Choosing the right park can add 15 or even 20 extra wins to your team — this can be the difference between making the playoffs and not.

A Reminder About Statistical Variance
I'll tell you a quick story. I've played in a lot of Tournament of Champions' and have made the finals 70 times. My overall win% in the TOC is over .600 and I've won 40 of them overall, which is the most on the site by a decent amount. BUT my record in TOC Finals Game 7's is 1-9.

Yup. Ten times, one game has decided whether I win the tournament or not, and I've lost that game 90% of the time. This alone has "cost" me $900 in WIS credits.

At the end of the day, this is a simulation and random chance will come into play despite your best efforts. You'll have times when the best player on your team his .200 the whole season, or your team goes from leading the division in the first half of the season to tanking in the second, or you give up 11 runs in the 9th inning to lose by 1. This can be frustrating, especially if it happens on multiple teams you're running at the same time or in a row.

The reason it happens is because one season is a small sample size of data for a complex simulation like WIS. Single seasons will do better or worse than the average season, even against the same competition.

The good news is that each at-bat starts from 0, meaning how your player or team has done so far has no bearing on how they'll do next time. There are no "bad versions" of players — your Babe Ruth is the same as my Babe Ruth, every time. Dropping a player to the waiver wire won't fix the issue because there is no issue — there's just bad luck sometimes.

Bad luck tends to stand out more than good luck does in our minds, so it may be harder to ignore, but stay strong — the tips in this thread will help you minimize your bad luck :)

Note

I'll be filling out the rest of these over the next week

Are there any other topics anyone would like to have included? I'll save a few more posts just in case