Tue Nov 24, 2020 7:04 pm
Kevin, as Jay said, you had it right from the get go.
As has been well chronicled here, the process of discovering all the carded players belonging to a given birth year must be a manual one and it's a bit tedious, but that's only a problem if you are time-constrained or don't enjoy the work.
Most of the guys in this league have at least a fair amount of experience playing ATG leagues and for them, when they scroll down a list of players born in a given year on baseball reference, some names will surely jump out at them as being players they've used in ATG or considered using previously. Nonetheless, everybody will want/need to double check each of the listed players with positive career WAR from any year under serious consideration against the ATG9 database. I have been doing that in the card set browser, and then as Jay suggested, did it right on the site while building a prospective/experimental team with a year I will likely choose if it is available when I pick.
In order to build a 26 man team under $85MM, you're going to need to identify most if not all the fringey players at your disposal, and what I am asking is that once you do that, you share a full list so that everybody knows which players are eligible for the league without having to each go through the exercise 12 times.
Once you turn your focus to a single year, it is not difficult to find all or nearly all the possibilities. I am 99% sure I have found every carded player for my prospective birth year. And FWIW, while it probably isn't the case universally, I was able to build a full 26 man roster under the cap with just the birth year I chose. I also gained a sense for the couple/few complementary pieces I would try to get with the death year and/or through trading.
One other takeaway I will share is that in order to stay under $85MM I had to use the cheapest available card for several of the top guys of that year. That got me thinking that it would be interesting to do multiple builds with the same group of players at different (progressively higher) caps. If everyone feels the same way that is something we can explore after we get going.