good SSs for 2008

[keyzick]

I've had great success with Mike Aviles...he's a 3, but I always make sure I have a 2 or better at 2b, so that I'm really not too hurt by his lack of range, and he always delivers a .300 average with double-digit HRs.

[dharmabums]

Keyzick, I'm a bit confused about the connection between the ranges of the SS and 2B. Aren't the cards independent? How does having a better range on one player make up for lack of range for the other? Isn't it a matter of how many chances come to each position independently on the cards? I'm trying to understand how to balance defense/hitting, especially for the middle defense, and this thread has been very helpful. Thanks.

[Jeepdriver]

dharmabums, you answered your own question. If you're going to play a '3' at one of the middle IF positions, it's best to have a good range for the other fielder, simply because of fewer hits, etc allowed. Having two '3's' for instance would create too much a liability.

[AeroDave10]

I'm not so sure, Jeep. I think we are sometimes guilted into having good defense at the positions that receive the most chances. I'm sure the man with Secret Formula (J-Pav) will agree on this.

If I have an average to below average defender at one of those "important" positions, I don't see how his offensive and defensive production level should impact my decision of who plays the other 8 positions. Mike Aviles' defense does not impact anyone else's defense. He may impact the pitchers ERA on his team's staff, but certainly not other fielders. If Aviles is considered a good value for my team, then I don't understand why potentially good value guys at 2B like Dan Uggla, Jerry Hairston, Ian Kinsler, or Mark Derosa should immediately be crossed off my list because of some self-imposed defensive requirements.

Personally I'm not going to automatically put 1e8 Aki Iwamura or 2e8 Freddy Sanchez at 2B because 3e19 Mike Aviles is at SS. I think dharma was correct in his assumption of viewing each player independently.

[keyzick]

Just to clarify what I meant - yes, obviously each fielder is independent of the other.

With regard to using Aviles is that I don't want to hamper my TEAM defense too much, especially up the middle, so I try to have at least one of those 2 positions be a 2 or better.

So yeah, it does affect what type of defense I choose at the other 8 positions - not because one affects the other, but they all affect the whole.

But to your point Dave, I do understand the logic of "if one guy's a value here, why can't another guy be a value there". However, I will say that how I view Aviles as a value at SS is in part due to his offense, but also knowing that his weaker fielding will be offset (to the TEAM) by stronger fielding at 2b. So the overall team defense is not compromised.

I do occasionally have 3's at both middle infield spots, but more as a result of missing out on primary choices, than by design. IMHO, it takes a LOT of offense to offset two defensive players that are 3's or worse up the middle.

[J-Pav]

[b:d25c20a2eb]keyzick[/b:d25c20a2eb] and [b:d25c20a2eb]jeep[/b:d25c20a2eb] have it right. Although the players are independent, over a full season their share of defensive dice rolls sum up to the total team rolls. So you could play a 4e35 at SS and not adversely affect your team if those miscues are made up for by the other eight defensive positions.

The problem is that player cards are more than their defensive stats. If you had a 4e35 SS and 1e8s at all the other positions, you might make up for the x card runs you surrender, but you probably won't get your team runs scored up to the 800 necessary to compete offensively.

So you change Kotchman to Howard, etc etc and before you know it, you score 800 runs but your ERA balloons to 5.00. This is another reason I think The Secret Formula is so effective - the sum totals of offense and defense are addressed to optimize balance, and most often that means spending up at 2B, SS and CF. If you don't choose to take this route, you MUST compensate for it in other ways (which are too numerous to list here), one of which is upgrading your defense at the other positions accordingly (while sacrificing the least possible offense for the price).

Regarding Furcal, what seems to be lost on everyone is how difficult it is to score runs from the SS place in the batting order (and play great defense to boot). After Furcal, the drop off is so steep it's hard to exaggerate. A good back-up plan is to grab Theriot, then have Roberts or Hudson at 2B to take some of the rolls off Theriot (just as [b:d25c20a2eb]keyzick[/b:d25c20a2eb] and [b:d25c20a2eb]jeep[/b:d25c20a2eb] describe).

[dharmabums]

I guess, as a newbie, I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the differences between baseball in the field and in strato-matic. The notion of "team defense" is one of those spots where there is a difference and it might be confusing me a bit. I can see how the ranges of different players being important in how they play with each other, for baseball on the field (for example, a good double play combination). But in strato-matic, I could pick 9 guys with almost no range, if I wanted to, and it wouldn't matter for how the individuals played. Chances on individual cards are still just chances on individual cards. I would just have to be willing to give up the cost of lousy "team defense" overall, and the extra number of runs I would need to make up on offense.

Also, J-Pav, thanks for the note about Furcal. I've been gun-shy on the higher injury rated players since the beginning of my first team (a 2008 league in which you are leading your division). I had Jason Kendall get injured for 18 out of my first 30 games, even though he's an I1 catcher. As soon as Vernon Wells and Carlos Lee started getting injured for that same team, I traded them away thinking I didn't want anymore of this nonsense. Now I can see that might not have been a good idea. But I've also started drafting only low injury rated players, because of that experience. I've gotten a different notion about how to approach this from this thread. Thanks all.

[keyzick]

Too get a better idea of how often the fielding ratings come into play, check out some of your dail boxscores, and look at your opponents individual at-bats. That will show you how many times an "X" was rolled, and the result. Obviously the more 3's and 4's (the range) would translate to those X's becoming hits rather than outs.

[J-Pav]

[b:3d83baf3d1]dharma[/b:3d83baf3d1]:

This might make for an easier mental picture -

There will be approximately 12,000 dice rolls per season, half of which are when you are in the field.

[url=http://andrew-stevens.tripod.com/index/stratfield.html][color=darkred:3d83baf3d1][u:3d83baf3d1]13.91%[/u:3d83baf3d1][/color:3d83baf3d1][/url] of those rolls (835 rolls) will come from the "X chances". Over a season you can estimate:

SS will get 23.2% of that 835, or 194 "X chance" opportunities. You can see why that 1 range is so important when you convert that many chances to outs, and how difficult it is for the rest of the team defense to support a SS with poor range.

2B will get 20.0% of the 835, or 167 X rolls. Also very important. You can see how a 1 range at 2B almost turns your 3 range SS into a 2 range total middle infield. Even a low error 2 at 2B makes the total more manageable.

C, 3B and CF* will get 10.0% each, or 83 X rolls apiece. You can see how the drop off here makes it extremely more difficult to make up for a weak middle infielder no matter how well that player contributes offensively.

1B, LF*, RF* and P will get 6.71% each, or 56 X rolls apiece. Do managers even [i:3d83baf3d1]consider[/i:3d83baf3d1] the impact of pitcher errors?

[color=darkblue:3d83baf3d1]* Note: This is not taking into account the actual [i:3d83baf3d1]value[/i:3d83baf3d1] of OF arms and errors, which suggests the CF is actually more important defensively than the C or 3B guy.[/color:3d83baf3d1]

If you look through the lens of any single game, you can expect about five "X chances" (and sometimes even none!) which tricks the eye into believing the X rolls are meaningless; however, three or four mishandled X rolls equal one or two runs per game! Over a season, estimating that every extra two hits means a run for your opponent, you quickly begin to see the importance of good defense and how it impacts the overall [url=http://strato.berce.us/][color=darkred:3d83baf3d1][u:3d83baf3d1]bottom line[/u:3d83baf3d1][/color:3d83baf3d1][/url] (see the fielding rating comparison under the "extras" tab).

Regarding injury players...

This is a discussion for an entire thread (and there have been many, many discussions over the years)! I wish I had [b:3d83baf3d1]Marcus[/b:3d83baf3d1]'s luck to get so many PAs out of Furcal! He gets 600, and I get 350! Still, I'd rather have Furcal and a back-up over most any other choice at SS.

Remember, this is a math puzzle - sometimes you get the tail where the injury guy pays off in a big way, and sometimes he goes down for 15 games in game 159 of an otherwise injury-free season. You get a little more than you pay for with a high injury player, but you risk a little more too.

[MARCPELLETIER]

re. Furcal's PA.

My own estimate for Furcal is that he should be injured roughly 5*9=45 games.

These includes the games he started off and got injured, so the overall expected number of games played should be around 122 games. And this is pretty much what I got. He had seasons of 113, 129, 133 games.

Most teams I have have high on-base (usually finishing first in the league), though, and Furcal is usually lead-off (at least vs rhp), so he does get inflated PAs as a result.

But don't get me wrong: having Furcal is no easy ride. It's challenging to come up with a valuable bench that doesn't cost your team too much. This year, I thought that Izturis was the perfect card to back up Furcal. Because he could play outstanding middle infield, I felt I could go with an injury-prone second baseman (say Hudson), or a second baseman with bad fielding (Kinsler) and maximize the use of Izturis by having him as a replacement player for second base too.