Rant

[rossarino]

http://fantasygames.sportingnews.com/stratomatic/team/team_other.html?user_id=252749

[apolivka]

Well a couple of things to note. Pretty much every guy on your team (except Grace) had a lot of negative clutch. Usually I don't put a lot of stock in that, but it's kind of unusual for _everyone_ on a team to be "a choker", so that might have cost you a few close games.

The other was your bullpen. In a 100M league, I'm always leery of super cheap relievers. Your #4,5,6 guys out of the pen really stunk it up with 5+ ERAs at the Astrodome with excellent defense behind them. I think you might have had better luck with a pen that spent a bit less on your R2 middleman/setup guy and a bit more on the back end of the pen. Garces is a terrible match for your park anyway, so you would have been much better off with, say, Johnstone or Chouinard and using the extra money on the rest of the pen. You were probably in, and lost, a ton of 1-run games, and I think the makeup of your bullpen did contribute.

But, all that being said, you were pretty unlucky. You outscored your opponents by 70 and are one game over .500. That's pretty hard to do!

You actually had some pretty darn good offensive performances. But, you had some horrible pitching performance from guys who I've seen do quite well like Painter and Hermanson.

[Palmtana]

As to your original concerns about DP's and SB success. You cut some SP's during the season so it's hard to get a good read but your 300 inning guy, Millwood has a +2 Hold (which isn't good or bad) and Garces (173 IP in relief) has a +9, which is bad, although +5 is as much as HAL allows. Your opponents must have been waiting for him. Your other relievers are negative. Who did you cut?

DP's? Millwood has none on his card. Garces has none. Hermanson has 4, which is about average. Lowe 8, which is nice. All your other relievers have none except Magnante (2).

[durantjerry]

Just about every time I have a team under achieve relative to expected W/L, it can be traced to a poor performance by the bullpen. I'm usually bad in XI, bad in one run games and they have a bad record. It can be bad choices or bad luck, but that's the way it goes. Performances vary. I just saw a post where Fuld was on a 40 AB hitless streak and I have a team where he is hitting .320 with a .420 OBP.

[rossarino]

I was 22-24 in 1 run games and 5-6 in xtra innings. The difference was a 4-20 against durantjerry's team and 8-16 against another team both in my division even though I adjusted my pitching before division play at the end of the season specifically to address the issue. I guess that's realism for you. There is only so much you can do as manager sometimes. You have to let the players play! A question on the player variances. In my limited experience the variances seem less exaggerated in the ATG sets? Are the game engines different?

[durantjerry]

Now I see the problem. You had to play me! LOL.