I won't comment on the older teams, harder for me to grasp how good they were.
But I like very much the team mpcharette built.
http://onlinegames.strat-o-matic.com/team/1382398 Schorling Park (NeL) 113-49 $200 mil DH ATG8 +315 run differential.
Ruth is an obvious 1st overall pick. So if you start a team with him, you start ahead of 1-3 wins above everybody else--even though mpcharette didn't play his best card!
In his low-hitting ballpark, Pedro is the best pick among pitchers even over Maddux. So, thanks to automatic draft list, he gets the best player and the best pitcher for his ballpark. Not a bad start to have.
Offensively, I have Morgan and Cobb as 2nd-rounders given his ballpark, Mauer and Shoeless as 3rd-rounders, Cash and Jeter, Sisler, Ramirez, Henderson and Boggs are all in my top 75 players to get, so he made some solid picks and got most of them.
What I find most interesting to analyze is his pitching squad and compare it with his divisional rivals. Besides Pedro, the rest of the rotation is good but not great. When I set his ballpark as home field, I have Marichal as a solid #2, because of his card improvement over playing in a low-hitting park (that mpcharette was able to put Marichal in 66% home games add a few wins on his team, that's the benefit of having a *SP in a 5-men rotation, you have some flexibility you don't have in a 4-men only or a 5-men (non*) SP rotations). I have Slim Jones as an average #3, although he was probably a top #3 in 2014, before the addition of the recent cards. Santana and Russo are really crappy pitchers, but they were kept for the minimum work---6 innings max, quick hook. Santana did have an outstanding performance at home, but they did not outperform their cards otherwise. mpcharette relied instead on some aggressive bullpen by having 5 outstanding-to-very-good relievers. His team relied on 463 innings from his top 5 men in relief. Add to this that he had mostly right-handed pitchers to back up his crappy left-handed hitters, that probably exploited poor platoons that his opponents were having.
A final advantage of having such a deep bullpen is that his pitching squad probably never pitched in a fatigued mode. I have this theory that pitching a fatigued mode, even at state of F6-F5-F4 (that is not F0) can badly hurt your team.
One of his divisional mate, Simon31, also used his bullpen aggressively, but he had only two outstanding relievers (Gagné and Percival). Gagné finished with a bad era over 6.00. He had one awful performance of 11 earned runs in two innings, but even if you exclude this performance, Gagné's ERA still stands over 5.00. But when you look at individual games, you see that Hal forced Gagné to throw in a fatigued state and I suspect that this hurt Gagné's performance badly. Also, using his bullpen aggressively forced Hal to rely way too much on Fryman and Arroyo (almost 200 innings together, lots of losses and blown saves).
Another divisional mate, mducharme, had the opposite problem. He completely disinvested his bullpen (well, he had Wilhem, but in my view, you pay Wilhem for quantity, not quality, and quantity pays in 80M leagues, not in 200M. In any case, Wilhem only had 43 innings). He did use Myers as a reliever, and Myers didn't hurt him (20 saves, 3 bs). Still, overall his starting pitchers ERA was a bit below 5.00 (a good performance for 200M league), but the way he used his bullpen wasn't able to improve on that.
Wed Sep 13, 2017 10:07 pm