Strat-O-Matic Baseball 365

The ridiculousness of ATG player cards based on as few as ONE at bat during the carded season has got to end. It is turning what could be an exciting exercise in building teams of ALL TIME GREATS into an exercise in WINNING WITH BASEBALL FOOTNOTES. Here are some examples of the most egregious cases:

Matt Sinatro (1982) a 9l catcher with an 11% chance of hitting a HR (including bphr) in his card against LHP. Take a look at his historical stats and you realize that Sinatro had exactly 16 plate appearances against lefties in 1982, resulting in one HR. http://www.baseball-reference.com/playe ... &year=&t=b

John Tamargo (1980) a 5r catcher with a 36.6% chance of getting on base versus rhp on his card. This is based on a sample of 39 plate appearances . http://www.baseball-reference.com/playe ... &year=&t=b

Or my favorite by far,

Ken Smith (1982) a journeyman pinch hitter with a 75% chance of getting a walk on his card versus left-handers!!! This astounding on base card is based on his ONE plate appearance against lhp in 1982!!! This card is a crime against the history of baseball.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/playe ... r=1982&t=b

I could add Dale Murray and a host of other outlier cards that are seen in heavy rotation in the ATG tournament, but I haven't the time. For the love of baseball, let's end this travesty and cull cards that are not supported by a representative number of plate appearances in a season. Or if you insist on keeping them then let's base these cards on career stats at a minimum, that way we can get a more realistic representation of Ken Smith's greatness based on all of his 63 plate appearances between 1981-1983.

Sociophil

I say, have an Unleashed Pool, including those cards, and a regular set.

The reason for Tamargo is that we have the 1980 Montreal Expos team included in the set. And every full team has at least two catchers. Tamargo had the most at-bats of the Expos' backup catchers. Backup catcher to Gary Carter is like being vice-president -- you phone the pres every morning just to see if he answers the phone. Carter played in 154 games that year, leaving his backup with very few opportunities to strap on a chest protector.

Bill

Sinatro and Smith are similar to Tamargo. They come to us via the 1982 Braves complete team (don't forget the original idea behind ATG was All Time Great Teams). Most of the team's plate appearances went to a core of regulars, leaving only a few at bats to the backups. Thus, to fill out the SOM rosters we have a few "outlier" cards (or "unleashed" if you prefer); no problem as far as I'm concerned. Set up a league with 110% max plate appearance requirements, turn Smith into a pinch hitter, Tamargo into a backup for Pudge.

Bill

Sinatro and Smith are similar to Tamargo. They come to us via the 1982 Braves complete team (don't forget the original idea behind ATG was All Time Great Teams). Most of the team's plate appearances went to a core of regulars, leaving only a few at bats to the backups. Thus, to fill out the SOM rosters we have a few "outlier" cards (or "unleashed" if you prefer); no problem as far as I'm concerned. Set up a league with 110% max plate appearance requirements, turn Smith into a pinch hitter, Tamargo into a backup for Pudge.

Even if the cards are in the ATG set because they came with complete teams, their existence points to a flaw in the SOM rating system if it can produce a card like Smith's on a single data point. While a league rule might fix the problem in a league, it does nothing about their use in the ATG tournament. If SOM can add cards, they can certainly cull cards too and I think culling these outliers serves to make the game better.

Sociophil

Phil, I've advocated for a while now for a true ATG MLB set, along with an ATG Unleashed Set. Ken Smith, Gates Brown, that Roger Freed card Delivery Boy always wants, and other outlier cards, along with Japanese cards like Sadaharu Oh if community wants them, pre-1894 cards like Ross Barnes when it was really a different game, in short, outlier MLB cards and non-MLB cards (including pre-1894 cards) all go into the Unleashed Set, leaving a truer ATG MLB set for those who want it. I think it's a winner for folks from all spectrums of play here, and it is already an option in the 20xx leagues.

As far as Ken Smith goes, the normal policy for SOM now is for LHB with fewer than 15% of their PA's against LHP to get severe card downgrades. But this policy came into effect after 1982. It would be nice to have this applied retroactively to Ken Smith.

But as I have campaigned for over the past several years, the simplest fix is merely to have a league setup option to force season ending injuries at 100%, 110%, 125%, 200% or 10,000% of usage for both batters and pitchers. This would apply to all card sets. No more need for unleashed cards, etc. Jarrett Parker has 23 HR and 36 RBI for me in the first 39 games of a 2015u season. Now that's realism! Bryce who?