Archive of SportingNews.com's old SOM Baseball forum

I've never played the mystery card formats before. How do I know what year I received for each player? And also how can I be -275000 dollars? Any help is greatly appreciated and thank you in advance.

Ed

The card years are not revealed until after the season and playoffs are over. In the mean time you can deduce what card year you might have with a little detective work.

The easiest way is thru player injury. Cards with 600 PA (hits + walks only) or 200 IP can not have an injury of over 3 games. If you get a 4+ game injury you can eliminate those cards. Also if a hitter is injured on a HBP vs a RH pitcher you can eliminate all cards that don't have that injury result. These are the main ways to do it. Other than that just watch the over stats and L/R splits and try to figure it out that way. Not knowing for sure, and trying to figure out if the card that player has is worth the salary, is the fun of the game.

In the draft, if someone else already picked the player you have listed, you generally get an undrafted player with the next highest salary at that position (example - you have a SS with $2 million selected but another team got him. After the draft is complete, you then normally get the next SS down the list, maybe one at $1.75 million). But, sometimes you will actually get someone who had a higher salary than the player you missed out on. Then, it is possible to actually be over the cap.

To my knowledge, you could actually stay over the cap all season. But I don't think you could ever make any waiver picks or make any moves without then meeting the cap requirement.

Simple question, complex answer. Hope that helps.

Chuck