Strat-O-Matic Baseball 365

I just concluded competing in my first Baseball Daily Game. This was a team based league (with two additional draft choices). My Toronto Blue Jays finished the league with the most wins (96), but all that was for naught as I lost the Semi-Finals in 6 games.

Those who follow baseball know that the Blue Jays got off to a horrible start (6-17 in their first 23 games). However, since this league started on May 1st, I benefited from the Baseball Daily season overlapping with the Jays rebound (20 - 10 during their next 30 games). Now that the Jays have cooled down, I would probably not do as well if this league were replayed. In fact, pitchers Marco Estrada and Joseph Biagini have been in recent slumps, which I believe contributed to my first round playoff exit.

I also benefited from getting a decent season from:
a. Mat Latos (W/L 11 -8, 3.80 E.R.A.), even though Latos was released from the Blue Jays this season, and had an abysmal 2017 season which really never got reflected on his card, even after he was released.
b. Aaron Sanchez (W/L 11-7, 3.78 E.R.A.), even though Sanchez has been injured during most of the season. I never lost him to injury during the replay.
c. Josh Donaldson (89 runs scored, 27 HRs), even though Donaldson had a 6 injury rating through most of the season. He ended up playing in 154 games.
d. I also benefited from decent seasons from players who haven't even had that much playing time with the Jays, most especially Mike Ohlman, their backup catcher to Russell Martin.
e. A number of the Jays low priced relief pitchers also had good seasons, most notably Ryan Tepera (69 games, 131 IP, E.R.A 2.75, 1.01 WHIP). I admittedly used Tepera as a super reliever during the league. Even though I benefited from it, I wouldn't shed any tears if SOM modified all their games so that relievers became less effective as the number of pitched innings increase. I do believe that such a modification would make the game a little more realistic.

Would I play again? I probably will, but it would only be in a league where roster moves would be limited. This league did require a lot more day to day attention that the other Online leagues.

I played in the same league with the Orioles, but I didn't manage to get over .500.

I was puzzled by the SOM engine. A few things that I didn't understand:
[*] While Schoop had .280/.330/.520 pretty much all season in real life, his card never crossed the 30% on-base mark and never reflected truly his power until very recently. Unsurprisingly, his final stats are well below real-life performance (he finished with .280 on-base and .450 slugging). On the other hand, Machado saw a very rapid deterioration of his card right from the start of the season and his card stayed the same since roughly april 28th. In this case, bad stats reflect real-life, but I felt I had the worst of both worlds.
[*]on the plus side for my team, I saw surprising improvement on Britton each time he got on DL--how can a card get better as days advance even though the guy is on DL puzzles me. Maybe SOM thinks the longer the stay on DL, the better the player will be when he comes back??
[*]I find that the difference between a 5M SP and a 1M SP is way too thin when season starts. Basically, no pitcher has double nor triples allowed on their cards, and the homerun difference is minimal. The only thing that differentiate them is the amont of singles, and even then we talk of a 5% difference in most cases. The logic is very different than for hitters. The good side is that many teams could rely on a newly created 0.5M pitcher when the regulars would be in a slump. I had Verrett and Mike Wright with 15 wins altogether while Jimenez and Gaussman were shiped in the minors--not sure that this mimics correctly MLB.

So overall, just like any SOM product, I had fun, but the product has many flaws, too many for me to be a regular user.