I have entered nearly 30 teams now, but I am mystified and frustrated regarding how to construct an effective offense. I am especially mystified concerning how hitters with similar salaries in the same lineup can produce such different results. For example, some 6 million dollar hitters will produce results close to what you plan for, while other 6 million dollar hitters in the same lineup produce results that are WAY off. And I mean like 50-100 points below their actual splits. (And I'm only using 6 million as an example---the same thing happens with other similar salaries as well.) When this happens to three hitters in the same lineup for your team, it pretty much wrecks your offense and you can't produce enough runs to be competitive. So my question is "how can you effectively construct an offense when you don't know which similar salaried hitters will produce close to what you would expect and which ones won't?" This is becoming very frustrating to me and consequently I'm getting discouraged with this SIM since it seems like little more than a crapshoot to me. What am I missing? HELP!!

A player's hitting isn't the only thing that comprises their salary.  There is some randomness in the sim, but it's not a crapshoot.

Looking at the $/PA for the top 500 OFs in the Sim with a salary between $6 mil and $7 mil, the highest is $15,828 for '55 Ted Williams and the lowest is $8794 for '05 Carl Crawford.  Not all $6 mil players are created equal (at least according to the Sim valuing system).  I'm not saying that $/PA should be your main draft criteria, but trying to show that Cost and Value are different.

Thanks for the tip, pinto fan. That ''05 Carl Crawford is one guy I was talking about. He hit .220 for the season on one of my teams. One of MANY that have been like that.

Luke Easter hit .197. BJ Surhiff .147...etc etc

Posted by tribe_fan_09 on 1/1/2014 7:14:00 PM (view original):
Thanks for the tip, pinto fan. That ''05 Carl Crawford is one guy I was talking about. He hit .220 for the season on one of my teams. One of MANY that have been like that.

You're welcome.  And just for the record, it's 'pinot', as in the wine; not 'pinto', as in the bean (or the exploding car).

Keep at it; look forward to playing with you in future leagues.  It took me a bit to get the hang of the Sim (read EVERYTHING you can about Normalization), but it's a lot of fun and there are a bunch of great guys participating.

i have struggled with this to tribe_fan_09 some of the best info i have gotten is to look at the normalization numbers for the players your thinking about the closer those numbers are to their actual numbers i have found the better they perform on a constant basis hang in there. echo what pinotfan says read all normalization numbers on every player your thinking about and compare them with what your trying to build as a team. good luck

hey another thing that might help go to your teams MANAGERS CENTER and click on LEAGUE LEADERS scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on VIEW THE STATISTICS LEGEND here you will find all the explanations of the catogories you find in the actual stats page of each player i feel you have understand the legend of statistics to understand the normalization numbers good luck again

Posted by pinotfan on 1/1/2014 8:34:00 PM (view original):

Posted by tribe_fan_09 on 1/1/2014 7:14:00 PM (view original):
Thanks for the tip, pinto fan. That ''05 Carl Crawford is one guy I was talking about. He hit .220 for the season on one of my teams. One of MANY that have been like that.

You're welcome.  And just for the record, it's 'pinot', as in the wine; not 'pinto', as in the bean (or the exploding car).

Keep at it; look forward to playing with you in future leagues.  It took me a bit to get the hang of the Sim (read EVERYTHING you can about Normalization), but it's a lot of fun and there are a bunch of great guys participating.

Haha…As long as I've been on the site I had been misreading your name as pintofan. I wondered why you liked crappy cars so much.

Thanks to all for your advice!!!

Learning how to draft players and constructing a competitive team is probably the most difficult thing in this game for a newcomer learn.  But you say you've had almost 30 teams, which makes your story interesting interesting.  As was already mentioned, a player's hitting isn't the only thing that comprises his salary, as their are many other facets to consider, including his number of PAs, his defensive capabilities, stolen bases, his batting average, OBP, etc.  For example, a $6mil player with exceptional defensive abilities will not be as good a hitter as a $6mil guy who plays poor defense.  Given the same number of PAs, the poor defender will provide much more offense than the defensive guy.  Another thing you have to consider is that you should be sure to draft players who 'fit' your park.  In other words, try to draft players whose strengths are compatible with your park, because a lot of inexperienced owners will simply draft a player, put him in bad park for his hitting skills and then claim that "My players are under performing".  Yes, players do under perform, but they are much more likely to under perform if they're not in the right park.  For instance, you can't expect to draft a 25 HR hitter, put him in Petco Park, and expect him to hit those 25 HRs. And you wouldn't draft a big time doubles hitter to play in Dodger Stadium, because, put simply, he will not hit the amount of doubles that you'll be paying for and that his stats would suggest.  

tribe_fan_09, maybe someone has mentioned this, but when you next use the Draft Center, click on a position to draft and before entering names or draft criteria, go to the bottom of that page and change the "Search Interface" to "Advanced" - this allows you to use the more complex criteria to draft. 

Second, remember that your players, good as they may be in general and in their own time, are up against the best players (at least in Open Leagues or OLs) of all time baseball. So hitters hitting regularly against Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson or most of all Addie Joss (about whom do a search in the forums search engine) are not going to hit well compared with their usual performance. 

At the same time the WIS database has some so-called "cookies" - Howard Johnson 1989, Bip Roperts, Cy Williams etc. that are used over and over, plus the WIS as currently constructed in its pricing per player structure has a bias in favor of the running game. So the most effective offenses are often base-stealing teams, to an absurd extent. An A plus arm catcher is minimum standard for survival against such teams (many use Gary Carter 1975 as a low price way to deal with this). Anyway, cookies are players who outperform their Real Life stats in WIS simulation leagues more often than not. 

Finally, and most important of all is "normalization", which, grossly oversimplified is how well players perform against all-time baseball average performances. To find that out, when you click on a player's name, look at their real life stats, tehn  click then on "advanced stats" and look for the # type stats which tell you how well they perform against all time periods. 

ps also look at your ballparks - the real world Houston Astros for some years in the 1960s and 70s could not figure out why their good hitters were not hitting better, and one answer was of course the Astrodome, while the early Coors was notorious for inflated hitting stats. 

If you already knew all this already, I apologize, but i remember being a beginner here and it is very frustrating to not find a way to generate a good team. Plus I like to leave no dead horse unbeaten. 

Thanks for the info... What I still don't understand is why two guys who are very similar in most aspects can produce so differently...and how you are supposed to know when u construct your team which will do "ok" and which will struggle to reach the Mendoza line.

If you are really looking at two guys who are very similar (comparable AVG, OBP, SLG, AVG+, OBP+, SLG+, AVG#, OBP#, SLG#) then you should expect similar performance from them - over a large enough sample size.  In other words, the answer to your question is "you should expect them to perform similarly, and there are no hidden clues in the stats that will tell you which one is more likely to over/under-perform.  But that "large enough sample size" is important.  One season (~650PA) is not nearly enough for random variation to wash out. 

Don't underestimate the effect of randomness.  Most newbies on this site (and heck, some very experienced users) vastly underestimate how much variation is produced by random chance.  It's very easy in Excel if you know some basic functionality to set up a spreadsheet that simulates a .300 hitter.  The outcomes are highly variable.

For example, I just set up a spreadsheet that simulated 75 trials of 200AB for a .300 hitter.  The "performance" of that hitter ranged from .210 to .380.  There is absolutely nothing responsible for that other than random chance. 

If you know how to look at the performance history of players on this site, that will give you some idea of what you can expect from them.  But remember that randomness, park, opposing pitchers can all radically affect those expectations.  And I wouldn't trust any performance history with fewer than 50 seasons worth of data.

where do you find the normalization of players because i have played a couple seasons and i too have had the same problem. With regards to speed is it better to have a team comprised of offensive power and speedy leadoff and #2 hitters or a completely speedy lineup. Another problem that i have ran into is that many times is that i draft a team which has a good offense but below average pitching or good pitching and below average offense. Is it better to just go all in one or the other or have i just been using a bad combination. Also are there any good pitchers which have constantly shown a productive outing for a decent price?