Archive of SportingNews.com's old SOM Baseball forum

I will soon begin my 6th team and I continue to search for the optimum individual player and team settings. It seems SOM/Hal does have a brain, because there are times when the right moves are made, needless to say, bad moves are made as well, for example: pitcher steals, players stealing 3rd/Home, leaving a pitcher in to bat when he should be pulled for a PH or worse, letting the pitcher bat, only to replace him with a RP at the start of the next inning etc. [b:1f47ed53dd]Here is my point, does it make any sense to leave all player settings unchecked and have the team set to Normal for Hitting, Bunting, and Stealing? [/b:1f47ed53dd]I sense that it is possible our settings and SOM/Hal's calculations/brain are in conflict, thus, wrong moves are made. Therefore, if you leave SOM/Hal to think on its own, SOM/Hal is calculating odds and should only bunt, H&R and steal when odds are extremely favorable. Of course, letting SOM/Hal to think and act entirely on it's own takes the fun out of managing, but we all want to win. If you feel that what I'm suggesting will have a catastrophic result, can someone tell me the optimum player and team settings?

Some guys in the mystery card game leave their lineups blank to start out, thinking HAL will play the guys with the better cards, which is I guess similar in theory to what you propose. Some of course believe whole heartedly that this works, but I am always very skeptical when it comes to "gimmicks" like these. I don't see why you would leave the settings blank, as you give up what little control you do have over game management. You will see many posts showing HAL's failures, and he(she?) does fail on occasion to do what seems to be logical given the situation and settings, but I think the settings do work in general. I can give you many team examples with regards to H & R and stealing, which you want to set to "Normal" with no individual settings, where I have used the team and individual settings to get the results I wanted. Even on these teams, I'm sure there are individual failures, but as a whole, the settings worked the way I wanted almost without exception. The times where I have forgotten to use the individual settings for my pitching to start a season have yielded the results you would expect. The RP I want lifted quickly gets left in too long, facing too many hitters and gets hit hard. I just don't see it as something that would help. Maybe you could pick a neutral park and give it a go. Optimum settings do not exist IMO, as they depend on what you are trying to achieve. For example, with regards to stealing, I almost always use "very conservative" with my "19" steal guys set to "steal more", because I want to have an 80% steal success rate and I don't want the fast guys at the top of the order thrown out before the big bats get to hit. However, when using these settings you will never steal more than one base per game as a team and it is tough to get more than 50 SB's individually, and that is with a very fast team. So if your goal is to have stealing being a big part of your offense and want to steal more than 100 bases, this setting will not be your "optimum" setting.
Here is an example of what I'm talking about with regards to stealing in a "one per team" theme league.. Ichiro & Gardner set to "steal more":
[url]http://fantasygames.sportingnews.com/stratomatic/team/team_other.html?user_id=346283[/url]

Thanks for the help. I will continue with my settings. By the way, what did you mean when you said: my "19" steal guys"?

The letter steal rating is not applicable in this game. There are numbers on each card that represent whether or not a player gets a good lead. The fastest guys get a "19" or a 1-19 chance of success to start out before hold ratings and cathers arms are factored in. For example, Ichiro is 19-13 good lead vs bad lead. On the team I posted, Ichiro stole 41 bases without being caught. I used the most conservative team setting, so I'm assuming his running with a bad lead was minimized by the "very conservative" team setting even though he was set individually to "steal more". Someone else can elaborate a little more or point you in the direction of a post that explains all of it. Also see the SOMO help section.