Archive of SportingNews.com's old SOM Baseball forum

Neal,
Welcome.
I'm in your division, so I'll forego discussing your team in any detail.
Ballparks do matter. BPHRs are explained to some degree on the "how to read a stratomatic card" link on each of your player's individual cards.
In general, in a park like yours (Griffith), you can afford to carry pitchers that have BPHRs on their cards, because Griffith will negate them.
Conversely, as a general rule, you don't want hitters that depend too much on BPHRs, because they won't get those at home. That's why Flood may work better for you than Thomas. Pitchers like Boyd, Wilson and Drysdale are often seen on Griffith teams on a budget.
Here's a handy tool that may help you; you can click on the "ballpark effects" link to get an estimate on how each park affects a given player:

http://www.diamonddope.com/card_reader.cfm?tab=cardread

In case you did not know, each of the individual player cards have settings you can fine tune to hopefully make the game engine heed your wishes. Be sure you set those & your manager strategy before we start playing tomorrow.
If you have any questions, zip me an intraleague message.

Randy (JUMA)

The ballparks matter [b:da98a35e55]A LOT![/b:da98a35e55] There is a good description on the How to read a hitter's/pitcher's card on the cards themselves, but I will give a quick brief.

Each of the ballparks have ratings for singles and HRs for both Lefties and righties. E.g. the Polo Grounds is 7,7,20,20, the first two numbers being the L/R for singles and the second two L/R for HR.

On the cards you will see the >, which means a BallParkSingle (BPS) or # which means a BallPark HR (BPHR). When a result comes up with either of these symbols next to it, instead of the listed result, the BallPark rating of the stadium is used by rolling a 20-sided dice so a "# lineout" is now an automatic HR since the chances of a HR in Polo is 1-20. In Griffith, for example, which is a 8,8,0,0 the chance of a HR would be 0, and it would be an out.

You need to look at the hitter's and pitcher's cards with this in mind when building a team for your park. If a player has many BPHRs on his card, like Thomas or Gordon, you don't want to put him in a Griffith or Forbes since the HRs will essentially disappear.

It's 2:30 am, so my explanation may be a bit muddy, but I hope this helps.

I'm sure someone else will elaborate further. :D

(_)ß

No need to. I think you guys covered it nicely. :)