Lol... just had an14 inning win in same league. Great.

From my $80 mil write-up

”but not much speed, so I expect to be among the leaders in GIDP.”

so far I have grounded into 18 DPs in the first 10 games.

Not my usual 75+ speed team, but cmon guys at 65 speed...leg one out will ya??

$80m – Irv Young Americans

Huntington Avenue Baseball Grounds

.288 AVG, .361 OBP, .416 SLG, 89 HR

1421 IP, 1.04 WHIP

A lot of people chose Bill Bernhard for this league, which makes sense. I think I missed that because of my approach to leagues like this. I’ll divide half the salary by the approximate number of innings desired–in this case $40m / 1400 = approx $28,500/ip. I’ll bump that up a bit when I search, but I mostly looked at pitchers who cost less than $30,000/ip. Which gives me a more balanced team versus a brilliant starter and a weak one I could rest during the playoffs.

Is that a superior approach? Doubt it, but that maybe explains how I ended up with Irv Young as my most expensive player. Which sounds familiar. I think I had him at the $80m theme last year? Can’t recall specifically how that worked out. I know I was battling for the bottom of the cage most of round one last year and my teams collectively took a 2007 Mets-like swan dive at the end. But that can’t be Irv Young’s fault. Can it?

Irv played in Huntington Ave Baseball Grounds, so my park is neutral. Unless I build a team around a particular park’s strength, Yankee III or whatever, I’m probably better off neutral anyway. I found a decent fielding infield, and all four are new to me (Kevin Young, Dick Egan, Bill McKechnie, and Cliff Pennington). The only old favorites here are Mitchell Page and the extreme-low-walks versions of Tiny Bonham and Denis Boucher. I’ve used Buck Rodgers at C for low cap themes before, good arm for cheap.

This team was a pain to build so I didn’t mess with it much once I initially drafted it, apart from realizing there was a $300k exception. I typically only use mopups when I’m in an extreme hitter’s park or when the theme suggests extreme outcomes, so I didn’t draft one here, but I added Donnie Hill (my fav sub-$300 scrub) and Eddie O’Brien.

In my few WISC tournaments I’ve seen the most parity at the lower caps. Correspondingly, I expect this team to be fine but nothing special.

$90m – I Don’t Believe In Modern Love

Great American Ballpark

.292 AVG, .369 OBP, .475 SLG, 187 HR

1394 IP, 1.03 WHIP

Two Bowie references in a row! I could try for six, but my reasoning might grow obscure. (‘Crystal Japan’ for Koji Uehara?)

I built this with a deadball staff and immediately cleared it. The modern staff I then drafted didn’t seem significantly worse, especially as I chose relatively good HR/9 numbers (only 86 surrendered total), and the modern dudes should help my fielders.

But then I guessed that the majority would go modern with their staff, so why not try to hit homers? I like HRs as a strategy whenever the theme suggests I won’t face all deadballers. Thus Great American Ballpark with Reggie Smith, Bonilla, Bob and Davey Johnson, all A range fielders with some pop. Mitchell Page makes another appearance as well. 1885 Germany Smith might be a gamble at SS. Terrific range, terrible glove (.885 fielding pct), although that gets adjusted to .932 with normalization.

Daniel Hudson might be my best pitcher, which sounds worrisome on paper. But if I can outfield the deadball teams and outslug the modern ones, I might be on to something.

$110m – …Baby One More Time

Palace of the Fans

.316 AVG, .379 OBP, .469 SLG, 113 HR

1468 IP, 0.97 WHIP

This was the hardest (or most Toxic?) build for sure, but I also think this is my best team. It’s my best fielding team, anyway:

C Ivan Rodriguez

1B Pujols

2B Lajoie

3B Santo

SS Rey Sanchez

OF Speaker, Roush, Cy Seymour

I’ve been pretty successful lately with great fielders (both range and glove) combined with a hitter’s park.

Like many, I never considered for a second trying any distribution but one year. I typed in a list of desired criteria for each position plus a salary maximum, organized by last name then season, and made a list of players who had more than one qualifying season. Even narrowing it down like this it still was a struggle to put all the pieces together and get under the cap, especially as I couldn’t find a lot of bench players with consecutive cheap seasons. Bob Heise (bench) and Dave Black (mopup) were good finds.

Finding starters and relievers with two consecutive usable seasons wasn’t hard, but the exception was my long reliever. Drafting Rich Hill and Jose Fernandez ended up being the solution. Hill threw 29 innings in 2015 and 110 innings in 2016, and Fernandez threw 173 in 2013 and 52 in 2014, so I was able to split ‘em up.

Once I finished distributing the players by price and quality between the two squads I ended up with remarkably similar statistics for both. My round 2 team will be

$110m – Oops!…I Did It Again

Palace of the Fans

.314 AVG, .372 OBP, .467 SLG, 111 HR

1479 IP, 0.96 WHIP

If my first round team is as good as I think it is, I’ll be in good shape in the second round. Of course, I’m usually wrong with my preseason predictions, which is why I don’t make many.

Update: I started writing this before the tourney launched but didn’t have time to complete it. In the meantime, this “favorite” of my teams has been by far my worst, starting the season 3-8. 06/12 pm my teams went 5-1, with this team being the only loss. I’M SORRY I SAID YOU WERE GOOD. I DIDN’T MEAN IT. Y’ALL SUCK.



$120m – Yomiuri Giants

League Park (I)

.317 AVG, .370 OBP, .441 SLG, 66HR

1417 IP, 0.90 WHIP

My studs are

Joss
Uehara
Kershaw
Cobb
Robinson

2016 Kershaw is perhaps the single best bargain in the game, so that choice was easy. I didn’t think HRs was a winning strategy in this league, so I took Cobb and his ridiculous AVG#.

I went with Brooks Robinson over Furcal for two reasons: he’s a better hitter, especially as Furcal provides a ton of PAs but a poor OBP. Also, I’ve noticed that 3B fielding percentages drop off pretty rapidly. A D+ fielding 2B will have a FPCT# of almost .96, compared to closer to .925 for a 3B. Yeah, a 2B will get more chances, but I don’t like seeing all those 3B errors pile up.

Joss and Uehara had the lowest $/IP. Blowing a ton of dough on an elite closer is the dumbest waste of money I can think of. I don’t actually use the Closer setting, just Setup A and B. But if I can get Sean Doolittle and his .93 ERC# for $57k/IP, why would I ever draft a comparable Kimbrel at $101k/IP?

Filling in the rest of the blanks, was, as everyone has said, like hunting for bargains in an $80m league. Thus pitchers like Ralph Comstock and Charlie Smith, and the cheap 1893 Roger Connor and the partial season 1990 Willie McGee. Kershaw is too valuable to use as a long reliever in this league, so my rotation is Joss, Tully Sparks, and a tandem of Kershaw and Rankin Johnson. The cheapo Deacon Phillippe-o handles the long reliever role.

Uehara apparently began and ended his major league career on the Yomiuri Giants, which worked well enough since “Koji Uehara” doesn’t lend itself easily to puns.

$140m – Siegfried & Roy

Pacific Bell Park

.359 AVG, .430 OBP, .524 SLG, 109 HR

1436 IP, 0.83 WHIP

“Giant White Tigers”, ya? And hey, did you know Roy died of COVID-19? I didn’t, not until I was naming this team and Googling how to spell “Siegfried”. And just when we were recovering from losing Kenny Rogers. We hardly knew ye, Gambler.

(As a Mets fan, I will NEVER be over the #@$%&! other Kenny Rogers’s series-losing bases loaded walk in the 1999 NLCS)

It’s interesting reading the instant decisions everyone made upon reading this list, and how different those decisions were. I use the Giants for franchise squads a lot, mainly for their pitching: Mathewson, Schupp, Toney, tons of relievers. And while I’m not especially good at choosing ballparks, Pac Bell and Polo Grounds are both workable. I glanced at this list and said “Mathewson/Walsh/Cobb? I can build around that” and never considered other options.

1912 Cobb and his .407 AVG# is one of the great bargains in the game at a higher cap. My pitchers are all Giants plus Ed Walsh and the 28IP Jack McDowell. My hitters are split pretty evenly between Tigers and White Sox, with super sub Dave Anderson of the Giants available off the bench. Polanco and Kell are ace fielders with decent bats, and while Appling is a bit weaker SS glove than I normally like, he offers good range and a .372 AVG#. And Shoeless Joe/Cobb/Heilmann looks like a killer outfield.



$170m – One Seventy

Cleveland Stadium

.369 AVG, .433 OBP, .553 SLG, 157 HR

1394 IP, 0.78 WHIP

I’m surprised to see all the buzz around Silver King. Yeah, he’s a bargain, but I have no idea how to use him. I tried once in a theme league based around earning the most Silver King wins, and I fell into a fatigue spiral and ended up with my one and only 100+ game loser.

But at $180m, I don’t need to sacrifice quality to save money. Walsh/Pete Alexander, Kershaw/Toney, and seven relievers leaves me with $184m to draft hitters, which is plenty.

Platooning in a DH league is pretty comical. Looking back, I actually kinda wish I had gone even lower in salary and stuck to more full timers. As it is, Cobb, Lajoie, Speaker, and Hughie Jennings play every day. My platoons are

C Elston Howard/Eddie Perez

1B Mize/Teixeira

3B Boggs/Matt Williams

OF Al Simmons/Possum Whited

DH Ted Williams/Felipe Lopez

Lopez I drafted not so much for his deft switch-hitting bat (DH league! When am I pinch-hitting?) but because he plays five positions. Yeah, he sucks at all of them, but at least that’s some late-game rest for my starters.

I can probably outslug my opponents a bit, thus a marginal HR park. I prefer to build teams that can run themselves, especially with six squads going at once. I’m nervous about balancing playing time for Boggs and Williams, but hoping Sparky can figure it out.

Posted by barracuda3 on 6/11/2020 12:48:00 PM (view original):
I'll agree with what seems to be the majority here; if I have a guy on the staff who is clearly better than my other RPs, and has the correct # of IP (usually < 50 or so) and has IP/G > 1 (preferably > 1.2) then I'll designate him as a closer. Otherwise I don't bother using the closer slot.

I don't even necessarily care if they're significantly better than everyone else, but I use the other criteria. Ideally I just want a guy in the 40ish IP range, good IP/G, and pretty good if not elite. Hal Haid, Andy Rincon, guys like that. If you have the right number of innings and want to have some control over when Sparky uses them, it's a good way to know for sure how they'll get used. I don't necessarily need the most elite of the elite because they will also be pitching in some 9th innings with a 3 run lead.

But if the theme I'm building doesn't lend itself to rostering a guy like that, I won't force it, and I'll just go closer-less.

Question from a newb, looking at this thread.

is it established that high ko pitchers result in fewer errors? But they do not have effect on range of fielders?

Posted by tomhanrahan on 6/30/2020 8:33:00 PM (view original):
Question from a newb, looking at this thread.

is it established that high ko pitchers result in fewer errors? But they do not have effect on range of fielders?

I do not know for sure. But I have always thought that it doesn't matter - the error decision happens first. Can that be right? It seems weird to say. So maybe I'm wrong.

Logic would seem to be: higher strikeouts = less balls in play = fewer chances for error
Not sure of actual sim mechanics.

Posted by tomhanrahan on 6/30/2020 8:33:00 PM (view original):
Question from a newb, looking at this thread.

is it established that high ko pitchers result in fewer errors? But they do not have effect on range of fielders?

that's essentially my understanding, except strikeouts will affect poor range plays by fielders. a high K pitcher will result in fewer outs in play, so fewer chances for a poor range fielder to turn an out into a hit, and the opposite will occur for low K pitchers.

strikeouts don't affect plus range plays because those only occur on hits and hit/out is determined before strikeout in the decision tree.

Correct. Pitcher strikeout rate does not affect plus plays. I believe this was shown definitively in the following experiment:
https://www.whatifsports.com/forums/Posts.aspx?topicID=518215

Thanks all !

Contrarian, if you ever begin a test league like this again, let me know. I'm always curious how range works!

Now that we're a little past the 100 games mark, thought it might be fun to check in on my teams versus my predictions for them:

$80M: I Drafted for My Ballpark
Stadium: South Side Grounds

I basically started by checking common OL guys and keeping who worked and finding similar players for the ones who didn't. My offense is similar, though with slightly less pop than a default OL lineup for me. My pitching, however, is nothing like I'd ever voluntarily run on a competitive team. Maybe on an experimental one, but not if I was trying to win. That said, the pitching selections I liked would've all put me in ballparks I would've been wholly uncomfortable with. So, I started looking for players from specific franchises and years to get a ballpark I would be comfortable in. That left me with only 1909 Frank Smith as an option. Then I had to build a complementary rotation without spending more $ on anyone else.So I paired him with 1902 Jack Taylor. Though I haven't decided on a 2-man, 3-man with a tandem in the 3rd slot, or 3-man with a A/B in the 3rd slot, yet... Guess I'm running out of time to make that call... The most interesting thing I did here was at 1B, where I've tanked the position and am running a 9 man platoon of sub $300k guys. The 9 combine for 592 PA at .274/.371/.353 and cost $2.39m, which was way better than I could find in a single player (closest comps I found were near $3.5m), let alone having to spend cash for all those bench spots. The 1B mess will take some hands-on management as Sparky seems limited to being able to manage a 5-man platoon on his own.

Hitting: 5,001 PA, .282 / .348 / .371, $38.8M
Pitching: 1,254 IP, 0.99 WHIP, 0.22 HR/9, $41.2M
Prediction: . 88 wins +/- 6

My $80m team is 17-35 at home, 29-23 on the road. So basically we're playing like expected on the road (90 win pace), but at home we play like the 2019 Orioles (no joke, we have a 108 loss pace at home). This is made worse because my entire strategy was centered around that home ballpark, so this is an abject failure. A winning record is still (barely) within reach, and is what I'm really hoping/trying for with this team. That would put them at the low end of my win prediction, but I need to figure out how to get them to win at home....

Oh, and the 9-man platoon at 1B is hitting .266/.359/.322 with 446 PA. On defense they have a .985 FLD% with 19 E, 3 +, 8 - plays in 1,229 chances so far.

$90M: 2000 Pitchers for the Gloves
Stadium: Safeco Field

I spent more time here than anywhere else. I knew right away I'd be avoiding the deadball pitchers. The error rate effect of that alone would be too costly. I assumed there would be little to no deadball pitching staffs here and came very, very, very, close to submitting this lineup: [removed for space]

With the thought that with all modern pitchers HRs could play very well. Ultimately though, I went a very different route. On the off-chance that there were still teams with deadball pitchers, I worried this team would be DOA against them, and that I'd be banking on alignment luck. So, I decided to try to capitalize on the one thing I know about every team; they're going to make lots of errors. I wanted my lineup to put as many balls in play as possible, so I drafted based on contact rates with all of my hitters being deadballers with 94% rate or better. I chose deadball hitters to exacerbate the error rates of my opponents defense, and figured if they also ran deadball pitchers, I'd get an even bigger bump due to both the era normalization and the lack of Ks. My pitchers all have decent to great K rates and low OAV & HR/9 just in case anyone else thought like I initially did.

Hitting: 5,292 PA, .304 / .364 / .427, $39.3M
Pitching: 1,314 IP, 0.97 WHIP, 0.45 HR/9, $50.7M
Prediction: Feel confident about the pitching, decent about the fielding, and the bats are more dependent on y'alls gloves so: 90 wins +/- 5

This team is roughly what I expected, currently winning at an 87 win clip, have fluctuated between 86-93 win paces for last 50 games or so. Still feel confident in 90 +/- a couple wins. I don't know best way to gauge how well error strategy worked, but for what it's worth my team has committed 161 errors, my opponents have committed 192. That feels like something is going as planned...

$110M: 1
Stadium: Petco Park

I didn't think about this one too much. Took some favorites, looked for similar seasons from them in a year before or after, and moved on... filled in a couple slots with guys who go from stud to dud and vice versa, but ultimately, I didn't really put much into this one. Both of my teams are nearly identical in terms of quality of IP/PA, though the distribution in terms of quantity and salary into hitting/pitching changes slightly from one team to the next... so similar overall, though, that it was really a coin toss as to which team I put in for round one vs round 2. Only real choice I made was to find me a player I could use for Petco, even if that meant a scrub. Kirby Yates did the trick there. The crazy thing is how far your money goes at this cap... I mean Lajoie, Baker, Hornsby, Wagner, Speaker, Maddux, Alexander... who can you not afford when you get this high!? Basically I just plugged in a bunch of SIM MVPS and CYA...

Round 1 Hitting: 5,059 PA, .343 / .423 / .502, $63.5M
Round 1 Pitching: 1,271 IP, 0.98 WHIP, 0.50 HR/9, $46.5M
Round 2 Hitting: 5,708 PA, .328 / .422 / .481, $57.2M
Round 2 Pitching: 1,336 IP, 0.97 WHIP, 0.47 HR/9, $52.6M
Prediction: We're getting more into crapshoot territory... 85 wins +/- 5

Prediction feels right on the $$$. Right now winning at 83 win pace, pythags put us at 86 win pace... very competitive league with all 12 teams hovering close together and best and worst separated by 17 games. My offense feels like it's underperforming, 7th worst in runs scored and 5th worse by OPS. Yet we spent $8m (15%) more than league average on our bats. If those bats ever show up, feel really good here.

$120M: Koji Berries
Stadium: Bennet Park

My choices:

• SP — Joss, because the aggregate salary to the others is comparable but the $/IP is not
• RP — Uehara, and even then, that was a tough pill to swallow for an RP.
• LRP — Kershaw, duh
• Hitter — Cobb, because Ruth was too expensive and A+ range
• Defender — Piersall, as it allowed me to draft better 3B/SS options than Furcal or Robinson would've at a substantial discount.

After plugging in my sunk costs, the remaining looked to be roughly equivalent to a $70m league. I feel good about this one overall. I drafted a bunch of favorites to supplement my albatrosses on offense, whereas, on pitching, I already had 40% of a staff built, so I looked to find pieces that would complement the existing overpriced core and ended up with 1902 Cy Young and small cadre of relievers in the pen. This one should be fun and I expect Cobb to slay. Slightly nervous about my defense in front of two deadball pitchers, as I normally shy away from that due to the huge increase in errors.

Hitting: 5,572 PA, .299 / .364 / .447, $58.4M
Pitching: 1,358 IP, 0.91 WHIP, 0.21 HR/9, $61.6M
Prediction: Defense could bite me, but confident in pitching/hitting... maybe 89 wins +/- 3

This team is nowhere close, and I can easily pinpoint the offense as the culprit. The league as a whole has no offense with the league average OPS of .638 (.302 OBP). Cobb (.419) and Butch Wynegar (.307) are only two starters on my team above a .300 OBP, with backup 1B '04 Thomas (.190/.329/.250 slash being the only other on the roster above .300). That .299/.364/.447 RL has turned into a .245/.291/.334 in the SIM. I expected them to not do well against the studs, but I expected enough non-stud opponents to still be closer to RL than this. I mean, I took the pitching studs with the most IP and they only account for 40% of my team IP, so theoretically, I should see non-stud IP at least 60% of the time. And yet, our stats look like we only see studs. We have the 2nd worst offense to go with the 5th best pitching, and yet we spent a relatively balanced amount on hitting/pitching, and chose one of the friendlier ballparks for the hitters. I'm going with bad matchup luck here, and hoping for an uptick in wins down the stretch.

$140M: Brave Indian Cubs
Stadium: Jacobs Field

I started by looking through players and logging teams to try to find 5-6 teams I felt I could work with before narrowing down. I ended up with 6 teams after my first pass, and then checked to see what boxes they fit in so I could start putting an actual team together. Whoops, 4 from box 2 (Cubs, A's, White Sox, Pirates), 2 from box 1 (Indians & Dodgers), and none from the third. So, I figured it would be easiest to figure out what team I liked from box 1 and start seeing what team from box 2 I liked complemented them best, and then I'd fill in with whatever was left form box 3 and make adjustments to fit rules from there.

I had to only make one adjustment after the first pass, as the Cubs were over $60m and the Braves below $40m, both by roughly $4m, so I swapped a Cubs pitcher for a Braves pitcher, had a few $ left over and created a roster error by upgrading Speaker to a better season without even looking at his team and added a Red Sox in the process.

It's hard not to like this team, but at this cap, every team is filled with studs across the board since there isn't really a limit to the player pool. Hopefully the defense plays up my pitching in conjunction with my ballpark, and my offense gets more errors from everyone else's...

Hitting: 5,667 PA, .318 / .400 / .533, $68.8M
Pitching: 1,561 IP, 0.86 WHIP, 0.20 HR/9, $70.4M
Prediction: Too many similar rosters will likely make this play tighter, but I really like this team, so... Let's say 93 wins +/- 4

This was my most aggressive prediction, and funnily enough, the one I undershot the most. Even on the high end of my margin, I pegged a 97 win team. Right now we're winning at a 101 win pace. That said, we are outperforming our pythag, which has us at a 93 win pace, so that's right on with my prediction. Certainly, that deviation comes from my extra inning games, of which I've gone 12-4, with most of those being 14 innings or longer. We've already thrown 970 IP against a league average (us removed) of 931. The team with the fewest IP has thrown just 910. Meaning we've already thrown roughly 7 more games worth of IP than the team with the fewest, and almost 5 more than the average team. I did build this team around pitching and defense, so I do feel confident whenever we do get to those extra inning games and still feel really good about this team.

Variable Cap: 182 Million Regrets
Stadium: Target Field

I've played enough variable caps to know salary in and of itself isn't important, especially with some of the prices dynamic pricing stuck some of the best players with (shoot, I still have a boxscore saved from when my $25m team beat a $255m team!). That said, players who weren't quite full time seem to have gotten some beneficial pricing, or at least not been as negatively affected, by the dynamic pricing, so there are already bargains to be had in the sub 500 PA hitters. I already build many lineups around platoons and maximizing that value, so this theme fit that well. Salary was no concern, I already knew I could afford the best across the board, So I never even really paid attention to it, and I'm pretty sure I left some money on the table because I don't know how I could even use it to improve my team.

On the hitting side I am only running one full time player in the 1935 Arky Vaughan . SS, is a tough position to fill with a quality bat, especially with platoon players. These guys all hit and they all take their base. My goal here was to not make outs. They'll be going against some of the toughest pitchers in history, so I wanted to try to make sure we didn't concede any ground. All favorable matchups and a ballpark that should complement.

Pitching-wise, I went with two full time arms in 1913 Walter Johnson and 1910 Ed Walsh and the polar philosophy. I've got 1500+ innings of "we don't allow baserunners, and if we do, it's not a HR or an XBH." It's funny though, the guys that two leagues ago were "over-priced" were the bargains here and I've got both Kershaw and Uehara again, as well as Eckersley, and Kimbral.... funny what a difference $60m makes. And I still couldn't use all my $$$!!!

Hitting: 5,914 PA, .371 / .466 / .571, $81.7M
Pitching: 1,513 IP, 0.76 WHIP, 0.22 HR/9, $99.3M
Prediction: All these teams should be roughly the same given the limited pool of quality, so definitely feels like more of a crapshoot... 81 wins +/- 15

I know, I gave myself a huge margin window on this one. So far so good, with a 90 win pace, one of my more consistent teams. I had a weird extra inning kerfuffle that led to some nasty fatigue and pitch counts being ignored for multiple appearances, but it only cost me a few games, and we're back on track... I still feel really good about this one and the performance so far gives me more confidence in their continued success.

My predictions put me at 526 wins with a full range of 488 to 564. So, everything goes right, round two is on the table... things don't quite go right, sitting on the outside looking in around the mid-40s, which seems about right. I didn't do anything too crazy like I have most years, that should keep me from having those 90-100 loss seasons that tank my ranking this time around. Good luck everyone.

Right now we're on track for 509 wins and I'm just outside the top 24 after being inside the cage for most of the tournament (11 straight losing cycles to start the 4th set of 162 games will knock you back a bit, but I had my first ever schwarze on the way back up). The three teams that were fighting pitching fatigue have all cleared it, and I feel really good about the remaining 60 games for all the teams, especially if my $80m plays all their games on the road, the $110 and $120m learn to hit, and the other three just keep doing what they've been doing...

Predicted 530 wins and 3 playoff berths.

After 106 games apiece, I’m on pace for 536 wins and 4 playoff berths.

Hopefully that’ll be enough to make it.

Posted by ozomatli on 6/7/2020 4:54:00 AM (view original):

SP	Selections
Addie Joss	77
Greg Maddux	16
Pedro Martinez	3

The three who took Pedro were footballmm11, midknight, and... brianjw

It's fun re-reading these writeups at this point in the season... This particular post was interesting to me...

Current records of the three Pedro owners...

footballmm11 68-70
brianjw 67-71 (his other five teams are all 80-58 or better)
midknight 59-79

Posted by ozomatli on 6/8/2020 2:14:00 AM (view original):
It's funny because the sample size for Pedro-teams is so small that we'll never be able to find out with any confidence

I am going out on a limb and say Pedro was a poor choice.