Do years change when you trade players?

[Detroit-Tigers]

If I trade an underperforming player does his year change when he changes teams?

[JONCHUCKERY]

No...the year of the player remains the same whether on your roster, traded, or released and picked up by someone else.

[Outta Leftfield]

[quote:d02bedd353="jmc316"]No...the year of the player remains the same whether on your roster, traded, or released and picked up by someone else.[/quote:d02bedd353]

Correct. And it pretty much has to be this way or managers would constantly be swapping pairs of underperforming players (or players known to be in bad years) in hopes of getting lucky with the trade. Or else, they'd drop and pick up the same player to change the year.

The result would be chaos....That's why the year never changes once the season starts.

[Detroit-Tigers]

So most people just end up dropping players once they identify ones with underperforming years?

[Outta Leftfield]

[quote:b6deb8b4fa="Detroit-Tigers"]So most people just end up dropping players once they identify ones with underperforming years?[/quote:b6deb8b4fa]

That's right--most of the game (once the season starts) is about identifying whether players are in good years or bad years. There are many ways to infer what a player's year is: overall performance, platoon data, rare events like HBP or triples, how HAL handles pinch hitting, etc. Sometimes injury reveals occur, when an injury, let's say a groundball double play vs RHP, shows with a certainty that you've got at particular year by a player. Other times, you can just eliminate some years through the injury reveal, and so you've got to pool that info with all of your other data.

All of this info helps you decide whether to keep or drop a player--and whether to pick up a player dropped by another manager. It can be quite interesting--and the managers who win consistently become quite adept at reading the cards.

I think it's a great game--and a real test of managerial skill. It's possible the 90s edition will turn out to be the best yet. Hope you enjoy it.

Much of the strategy is spelled out in the sticky thread above called Tips for the Newbies, 80s edition. The basic strategy of year or card identification remains pretty consistent through the 70s, 80s and 90s.

But it's absolutely true that the year never changes once a season starts. That's the whole basis for the game. And at the end of the season, once the finals are over, the real years are revealed, so you find out whether you goofed or not in dropping or picking up players. Sometimes you get some real surprises.

[hallerose]

OL is exactly right. Even before I ever draft or pick up a player, I try to identify which of this 5 years I will keep and which ones I will drop (there are very few players with 5 "keeper" years). You also basically know then if you have a 100%, 80%, 60%, 40% or 20% chance of getting a keeper year. Besides the injury reveal, these are literally dozens of ways (basically ever stat and usage tells you something because Hal knows which card is chosen and you have their 5 cards) to go about trying to identify which year you have. By the end of the year, I normally only have 1 or 2 surprises when there is the reveal.