Strat-O-Matic Baseball 365

Is only having 3 left handed hitters on your starting lineup a problem?

Thanks, Naptime

It depends on your park, your opponents' (particularly division rivals') parks, and your opponents' (particularly division rivals') starting pitchers.

Firstly, as with the rest of your team, you want to tailor your team to your park. If you chose a lefty park like (particularly) Progressive, Camden, Citizen Banks, or Dodger Stadium, you will need more than 4 lefties in your lineups...at least against righties. If you choose a neutral park it's not inherently important to your tailoring. If you choose a righty park like Target or Rogers, you may want even less than three lefties in your lineups.

Secondly, scan the league. If one or more teams in your division have one of the above mentioned lefty parks, and/or there are many such parks in the league, you will need to be able to compete in their parks. You can do this by either having 4 or more lefties in your lineup or having lh bench players who can replace one or more of your righties in these parks. Some players good for these situations are Chisenhall, Boesch, Garrett Jones, Parmelee, Gillaspie, and Florimon.

Finally, scout your division rivals' and (to a lesser degree) your league rivals' starting pitchers. If your division rivals load their teams with sp's strong against Rhs and weak against LHs, you will also want to be prepared to play 4 or more lh hitters. Even a Target team in this situation should "arm themselves" to be able to do so. As in the scenarios above, you will be balancing prepping for your own park against prepping for others. These aren't magic formulas, just principles that have usually worked for me...not so much this year...

As a general rule I don't want more than 5 rh batters in my lineup vs righties. Vs. lefties I don't care. Experience has taught me that it makes you way too vulnerable to "hard" righty starters and roogies out of the pen. Ideally, I want even less than that, with a majority lefty/switch hitters vs rh starting pitchers.

Thanks for your help. I will search out my division and see what I can do.

Here is my team. http://onlinegames.strat-o-matic.com/team/1383386. Can you give me a grade on how I am right now with this team. You can see from here that I have too many righties. If it's not cool to go over my team during preseason than that is cool.

Thanks again
Naptime

Just to show you a substantially righty lineup can succeed and win, I'm posting my 2011 championship team the Osaka Dark Tennin. As you can see, it had 8 righty starters and one switch-hitting one to maximize its 1-11/1-17 righty-weighted park:

http://onlinegames.strat-o-matic.com/team/384224

As to your team, I'm hardly a pitchers park specialist, so I'll keep my advice brief for actual ones to amend or override. You may want to address Encarnacion and Upton. Much of their value comes from their ballpark hr opportunities, and they won't get many of those in your park. Unless you have power parks in your division and/or many power parks in your league, you may want to make a change there.


P.s. Take good looks at the 2011 Napoli, Lawrie, Morse, Craig, and Berkman cards. They were really cards/values of beauty.

Thanks for the help and advice. I guess with the right park it can work. We will see what happens in a pitchers park.

None of your righties are heavy so you shouldn't get into too much trouble with that lineup. Might not hurt to get a switchie in there, though.

Naptime wrote:Thanks for your help. I will search out my division and see what I can do.

Here is my team. http://onlinegames.strat-o-matic.com/team/1383386. Can you give me a grade on how I am right now with this team. You can see from here that I have too many righties. If it's not cool to go over my team during preseason than that is cool.

Thanks again
Naptime

The L/R balance isn't an issue. The potential problem is Encarnacion is a bad fit. You should get a high average doubles hitter instead. Arenado is not a good fit with low OBA and high double play chances. Machado if available is good. Also a 2 fielder with single digit errors can many times be as good as a 1 fielder with double digit errors