by gbrookes » Thu May 13, 2010 9:42 am
LOL! Looks like my guesses were pretty much wrong, at least in terms of a huge emphasis.
Clutch ($) hitting - some good, some not. This doesn't seem to explain things, since there are many hitters who are NOT clutch ($) hitters. Although I did notice Adam kennedy. He is a favorite of mine already for 2009. He DOES have clutch hitting. I had him batting 6th for two of my teams. Both of those teams are in the playoffs in 2009. I think he works very well in the 6th spot. Maybe in any spot. Curious where you had him hitting?
Base running - good enough, I believe, but not crazy good. I am curious though, how often did you have base running set to aggressive? I set it at aggressive all year long and never change it. Overall, it seems to do good things for my teams! The extra runs from not being a passive base runner (as I believe HAL is sometimes) more than offset the odd out on a running play, in my view.
Singles park - no, not at all. Metrodome. But some of your hitters (like Ordonez and Pierzynski) hit lots of singles. I think that aggressive base running with lots of singles produces a lot of runs, and may produce those key runs in close games (runner taking the extra base to get, or help get, the winning run).
I am really fascinated by the one run win question - what are the factors that lead to a high percentage of 1 run wins? I am not saying I have the answers yet - just guesses. I hope to study this a lot to see if it is really just luck most of the time, or whether there are actually some trends and strategies that make a difference to the percentages of 1 run wins. Not sure yet how I am going to tackle that question. I can check into 1 run games for teams that had great records or bad records, but I'm really not sure how I propose to analyze that yet! Yeah, I am a little obsessed with strat baseball!
:)
Geoff