Archive of SportingNews.com's old SOM Baseball forum

In the last 20 or so games all the teams in each division play each other. Is there any particular thing to look out for during this stretch? I have often lost a league lead or totally dropped out of contention at this crucial point. Any ideas what to look for, other than what pitchers I am going to face?

After game 126, all of your games are against division rivals (the last 36 games). If the race is close, you can try fine-tuning your team to maximize its performance against the 3 other teams in your division.

I haven't learned all the tricks of the trade yet, but here's one situation you might look for. My last team was in a division where 2 of the 3 teams hit LHPs hard. The rest of the league was hard on RHPs. So I went most of the season with 2 RH starters and 2 LH starters, but when game 126 rolled around I dropped my weakest LH starter and added a RH starter. (I looked for a trade first, but came up empty.) I also had a RH spot-starter I used in place of my LH starter in certain situations.

This was fairly successful--I was something like 61-65 after game 126, and finished the season 82-80 (still last place though--aaaargh!)