Archive of SportingNews.com's old SOM Baseball forum

Much to my suprise I have noticed that the higher the cap the more defense makes a difference. In a 200m league that will be completed tonight my team has the leagues fewest errors and allowed the second fewest runs although my team ERA is only 5th best. My team leads in fielding pct by a wide margin [28 fewer errors than the next team].My team stands with 94 wins in league of highly rated players. Now I understand that a line up with Bonds & Ruth should compete but its the defense that seems to make the difference. I have always tried to draft good D but really see it as an edge the higher up the cap ladder that you go. Has anyone else seen simular results.
Bill

I would agree with this. At the 200m and live draft level, there tend to be less holes on the teams. You need everything you can get to maximize your team. At the lower levels, liberties are going to be taken with certain aspects of teams and you can get by with a less stacked team.

Shhhhhhhhhh. :wink:

I think your team in an anomaly.
Defense doesn't matter :wink:

I posted an earlier comment about the 2012 Detroit Tigers, then deleted it because I didn't have much to say except that, based on what I've seen watching several of their games in person or on TV, their team defense (except for Austin Jackson in CF) stinks. This team's only formula for success is either a) outscore your opponents - not happening too often so far - or b) a near-perfect pitching performance from Verlander every 5th day.

[url=http://espn.go.com/blog/sweetspot/post/_/id/24871/tigers-infield-defense-a-big-problem]Tigers infield defense a big problem[/url]

In this Strat-O-Matic world we live in, most of us realize team defense is very, very important. But it's hard to quantify or categorize its effects unless you watch a lot of games ... or in our case, roll the dice and see how often a positive/minus defensive event results, and how it can effect the outcome of the game. That's what I look for when I use the replay feature here.

I've seen SOM teams with fantastic W/L records that didn't care about defense at all. But it seems like teams that have great range and make fewer errors usually do better than "you'd expect them to" based on their hitting and pitching stats would indicate.

I realized this as well in my only go around with a 200M cap. I went in thinking it was probably mostly about an awesome line up and that even stud pitchers made little difference. I was surprised at how much team D and a solid staff impacted the over all results.

I still hate Josh Gibson b/c of that league.