Strat-O-Matic Baseball 365

You were quick to correct the misinformation regarding hitters. Would you please be so kind as to do the same for pitchers? Because right now my belief (right or wrong) is that pitching got screwed (again)

thanks

Steve, I'm sure Mark will chime in, but I think it's going to be the same story - overall average salary is the same or has declined slightly.

What's changed is that (a) valuation is much more even, so there are no longer the ridiculously underpriced starters & relievers that you saw in ATG8 + (b) there are now constraints on reliever over-usage. ...so those avenues to reducing the cost of your pitching staff are gone.

That said, when you start looking over the set, I think you'll see that the vast majority of starters have seen price drops which will make quality pitching much more affordable. Tactics for building pitching staff will look a lot different in ATG9. IMO, once people get used to playing this set, I think you'll see that pitching definitely does not get screwed.

Thanks Riggo. I hope that proves to be the case

My perception about pitching is that, as with hitting, the super-elite players have seen steep price rises. Other pitchers, OTOH, have held about even, or have even seen their prices go down. The whole higher range of the *SP cadre deserves careful study. I've drawn some tentative conclusions about the thinking behind the changes--and that thinking has been very consistently applied. I'd be interested to hear what conclusions others had drawn.

With relievers, the best R3's & R2's have seen steep prices increases and the egregiously underpriced relievers such as Urbina have been raised significantly. But the pricing of elite R1 relievers-only has held pretty steady. I'm not sure I see a lot of bargain RPs at the moment, but they may be out there. Anyway, if you want a snazzy bullpen of tireless relievers, you're gonna have to pay for those relievers—and they will be less tireless. They won't pitch 250 innings for you. I'm among those managers--I think there are a bunch of us--who simply wouldn't use the super-reliever strategy, so this should make life easier for us. OTOH, I plead guilty to exploiting the "4 Aces" starter strategy, so there, I'll have to come up with a new plan.

Three things are for sure though. The super-reliever strategy is dead. So is the four-aces strategy, at least at the 80M and 100M level. And so is the "Ryne Duren and friends" strategy. All of these involved distortions of the game in different ways, so I think that's a good thing.

We'll all need to explore some new strategies on building up a pitching staff, but that will inject a welcome infusion of fresh thinking about the game.

The key for me is that the pricing changes have been very consistent--and the very badly misplaced pitcher prices have for the most part been identified and corrected. So the game will be less about looking for the anomalously priced players and more about coming up with an effective team-building strategy--while looking for a new set of (less egregious) bargains. These are sure to be there, at least in the context of the team one is shaping in the league one is in. Overall, I'm very pleased with the changes.

As others have said, it's a whole new ball game. And it's cool to be beginning Barnstormers now with the new set, so we'll all have the experience of exploring the revised set in a range of different parks and at different salary levels.

RiggoDrill wrote:Steve, I'm sure Mark will chime in, but I think it's going to be the same story - overall average salary is the same or has declined slightly.

Riggo, can understand that, but of course characterizing the distribution of changes using an assumption of a homogeneous distribution (ie, referring to a mean) is just not meaningful or a correct way to describe the distribution when it has not been applied homogeneously.

Think of it this way...I'm a physicist so I'll use the weather as an example of incorrect application of "average":

At my location, the weather service tells me the wind, on average, never blows!
Why?
I mean crap, Half the year it blows straight out of the west at 50 MPH, and the other half of the year it blows out of the east at 50 mph!
Granted, that's a difference between scalar and vector math, but same principle of misapplied statistics.

So, saying that on average, stuff hardly changed, is hardly correct. And that is not a value judgement on the changes--just a factual statement. Overall, it really is a new game, which will be good.