General Winning Team Concepts ?

It seems to me that their are two distinct "concepts" towards building a winning team. The first is identifying players who are "under-priced" . The second is assembling players whose stat combinations work well together.

My questions for the vets are do all team building decisions fall one of these two categories? And if not what are the other categories.

Secondly how much impact does the various pitcher roles and team strategies have in the outcome of a season?

Undervalued but important, during pre season free agency, evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your divisional opponents and to a lesser extent the rest of the league.

I've been in leagues with 10 small ball teams and others with 10 slugging teams.

Build your team to beat the league you are in, not just to meet your predraft strategy.

Glad you started this thread as I have much to learn on this subject.

As Robert stated pay close attention to your competition during waivers. Do they have an obvious strategy to optimize an unbalanced park? That one really caused me to waste money reacting later after they went 18-0 at home to start the season.

I am sure there are exceptions but some reasonable balance seems advisable for a rookie manager. The teams #1 in offense sometimes miss the playoffs due to their 6.5+ staff ERAs.

Start at $100 million or $80 million caps. Play DH leagues for a while since HAL can be freaky in non DH leagues. When you graduate to those, don't freak out if HAL blows a game for you with a crazy move, it happens to everybody.

If your team starts badly, DON'T swap out players. Well, maybe one or two. Instead, tinker with your lineups, your bullpen settings, etc. Find something that works for you.

DON'T try to make HAL play the Tony LaRussa style of bullpen management. HAL doesn't get it right. Instead have one good reliever, a couple of so-so relievers, and a mopup guy.

Basic parks you should be familiar with:

Bomber parks - too many to mention, double digits for all the ballpark hits and HR's. Bullpens are king, offense is the crown prince. But your bullpen should have one stud with an R3 or higher fatigue rating, one guy half his salary, and a couple of specialists.

Polo 41 - walks and homers are king - get lots of them and don't allow them.

Minute Maid - the best RH park by far.

Lefty parks - there is a whole spectrum of these, from Yankee 71 to Shea 71 to Penmar, then Sportsman's 41 and finally League 34. Learn one or more of them. The BS final this year is a primer on lefty parks.

Singles parks - Forbes 09, 54, 57, or 65, Griffith 24 or 41, Royals 80. High average, good clutch, and speed are kings. Pitchers who don't allow ballpark singles are big here - Tiant, Score, Ray Sadecki, Nolan Ryan, etc. Read the help section on "how to read a strat card" if you don't understand what I am talking about.

Pitchers' parks - Petco, and others of the same ilk. 3-6 cheap platoons with high OBP, 3 or 4 high average hitters, maybe a HR hitter or two if your division has a lot of bomber parks. Your pitching staff should have all S8 or S9 starters and you should spend very little on your bullpen. I won a ring with a $0.70 million reliever as my closer in Petco. BruceF and cristano think that's routine.

Learn who the "value" players are - study the BS semis and finals to see who gets used - everybody that makes it that far knows who they are. You can find links for several years worth of BS teams in the Barnstormers forum. They are well worth studying. Don't try to copy the teams exactly - there is no set formula, and your division and league opponents can cause you major problems if you try. But see what names keep popping up in the ballpark type you want to use, and draft them.

Learn how to set up an AD card - it's harder than you think, particularly at $140 million and higher caps.

Stick close to a 65-35 salary split (65% hitting) for a while. I have seen guys try to run 50-50, and they have trouble scoring.

Experiment with a BruceF/cristano staff of $37 million plus for your starters and scrub relievers. Experiment with two stud, 2 dud starters and a big pen.

Once you get comfortable with building 65/35 teams, experiment with one of my staffs of $5 million and under starters with a cannon reliever backing them. Heck, I won a ring in an $80 million league with no starter over $0.53 million. I don't recommend you try that; it was a decision heavily influenced by the ballpark mix in my league - there were lots of ballparks with low HR numbers, and those $0.50 guys generally have lots of ballpark homers.

Your lineup should have roles. Even in bomber parks, you want one or two high on-base guys setting the table for your big boppers.

There's a lot of stuff to learn. Join one of the Franchise leagues or one of Andy's alternate history leagues - they let you do a deep dive into portions of the card set and then compare what you found with what others found.

What a great post rburgh!!! Thanks

In 80M-110M league caps, while there are many ways to reach the sky, there seems to be a few "formulas" with regards to the pitching squad.

A) 4 stellar *S8-*S9 starters plus 0.5 scrubs. As scrubs, you could have 1-2 extreme right-handed relievers and 1-2 extreme left-handed relievers, plus a R5 reliever that you set up at "don't remove before F8".

B) 4-5 stellar S7-S8 (with asterisk or not, depending on your choice) plus one extremely good R2/R3 closer that you put as both setup man and closer plus scrubs

C) Cheap low whip S5/S6 (I like it in the 2M-3M range, but perhaps it could be tested in other ranges) plus one stellar R3/R4 (Hoyt, Murray, the R3 Sutter etc) that you put as middle man/set-up man plus one or two adequate relievers (perhaps one in the 2-3M range and the other in the 1-2M range, one with short stamina to finish games, the other with longer stamina as a #2 guy) plus scrubs

D) Extremely cheap S5/S6 with 3 stellar relievers---never tested this, but I've seen succesful teams using it. You might as well go with 6-7 SP that have strength on one side (say 3 SP who are 6R or better, 3SP who are 6L or better) and set your starting pitchers on a daily basis.

If you feel confident to make the playoffs, you could right off the bat adjust your starting rotation to optomize it for the playoffs. For example, in the A or B formulas, your 4th SP could be in the 5M-6M range rather than in the 9M range (as the 4th starter will only pitch two games in the final two rounds).

Personally, I would stay away from R1 except perhaps in 60M leagues---there's too much offense, too much risk to have the Fatigue level be low and have offensive readings because of it.

Except if you play in higher caps league, I don't see the need to buy more than three very good relievers. No team can escape the fact that there are between 200 innings and 400 innings of extremely low importance (with huge leads or bad leads) and there's no need to have someone else than a under 1M reliever take that load.

Great info so far!

CARD VALUES / RATINGS DISKS!

The cards will perform close to what is ON the card, not necessarily the stats or Balance Rating the player posted. So for single season card sets, get the SOM ratings disk, for ATG look at the bar charts provided on the card display or go to one of the community sites available (i.e. Diamond Dope).

Here's a great example - Ken Smith, 1982 ATL, $2.09M
Real life stats, .293 AVG, .383 OBP BAL E
Card count - OBP vsL .750, OBP vsR .390....Look at his card, nothing in his stat line or BAL would indicate a .750 OBP vsL.

Smith had 1 PA in 1982 vsL and got a walk.

It's an extreme example, just trying to illustrate the idea.

Couldn't agree more with RBurgh about relief strategy. HAL makes every manager nuts, particularly in the bullpen. The "SUPER"-reliever approach works, with the right settings a big salary for a lights out reliever of R3 or higher will work. But asking HAL to be on top of a 6 or more reliever pen won't work.

Could somebody please expand on the "super reliever" term a bit? I believe some of my opponents are using them now and my current team (Cobb-Delahanty-Weaver-Greenberg) are beating them up some. My cheaper pen isn't fairing any better for sure.

Are we talking R4-R5 $4M+ relievers and trying to get HAL to put them in the game inning 6-8?

Could somebody please expand on the "super reliever" term a bit? I believe some of my opponents are using them now and my current team (Cobb-Delahanty-Weaver-Greenberg) are beating them up some. My cheaper pen isn't fairing any better for sure.

Are we talking R4-R5 $4M+ relievers $and trying to get HAL to put them in the game inning 6-8?

Even more severe than that, if you have a DUO of Super Relievers (R3+) in a $80M DH cap they can come in consistently in the 3rd and 4th innings and pile up 250+ innings EACH of sub 4.00 ERA, thus the term SUPER RELIEVER.....ESPECIALLY when you have them in a DUO feeding off of each other in a $80 cap!......NOT so effective in caps $120++ or low cap no dh.

Another reason you see so FEW $80M DH leagues. In an $80M no DH league HAL seems to pinch hit for them a LOT so they are NOT so SUPER anymore