Strat-O-Matic Baseball 365

You are in an 80 mill DH League, and you have selected Navin 1924 as your home field.
You got most of the players you wanted per the autodraft (lots of RH hitters with BP HRs), but after the draft is run, your initial excitement wanes a bit. In your division are a Sportsman38, a Comiskey27 and a Braves38. In the other divisions, there are 2 balanced neutral parks, a Hilltop11, a Forbes57, a Forbes65, a County57, and two Dodger65 parks.

So the question becomes, given the large number of small ballparks, both in your division and in the league, how much do you change your hitters to address that (if at all)?

There are over 3,000 hitters available. If you can't get a competitive team for the road in an 80 million league after figuring out your must have players from your park, I think you aren't very good. It is a non-issue, by far the most important item is your park and who the most likely foes in the playoffs are. The rest of the players don't matter.

gkhd11a wrote:There are over 3,000 hitters available. If you can't get a competitive team for the road in an 80 million league after figuring out your must have players from your park, I think you aren't very good. It is a non-issue, by far the most important item is your park and who the most likely foes in the playoffs are. The rest of the players don't matter.

MtheB, I have to agree with Charlie. With the huge player pool, and in an 80M cap with a DH, it is a well bounded problem. The beauty (curse?) of ATG vs a single season is there is nothing preventing you from implementing your strategy. Of course, that strategy may be flawed, but you own it and can't blame a draft or bad luck.

My answer is none of the above because such tailoring is the act of competing. I mean, that is the whole idea. It is indeed a math problem. And your home stadium is the dominant consideration. But you can determine how dominant numerically.

That is,
You can precisely determine the weights of lefty/righty/single/HR stadium bias for the season
You can do a good approximation of the weights of L/R pitchers, singles, HRs, and their hard/reverse likelihoods for determining a best fit lineup
You can do a good approximation of the weights of L/R hitters and their hard/reverse likelihoods for determining a best fit pitching staff
You can do a good approximation of your own weaknesses and that of your opponents, ie throwing arms, CA/P arms and holds, high amounts of platoons, whether you are better with a solid 1-9 or studs/scrubs, whether pitching staff is likely to need bullpen help, how to orient starting pitching for reg season vs playoff flexibility, etc.
I say approximations because you don't know the final rosters until they are final, which is part of the fun cat and mouse game.

So in that scenario, you simply do the math and determine the environments you will compete in and weight your approach accordingly. But everyone gets their fun in their own way and that is perfectly fine. Some may not want to do all that--but it is possible to do that and after a while, it becomes instinctive.

That is why in that thread on the stadium change, whoever that was doesn't understand that the act of competing is doing this part of the dance. Changing a park like that is no better than tanking, colluding, or any other abridgement of competitive purity.
Otherwise, if we all get to compete under our ideal conditions, then it is just a coin flip and that is not worth $20.

gkhd11a and FrankieT--
good points, thank you.
,switching stadium after the autodraft should be prohibited precisely for the reasons FrankieT states.
Actually doing the math as he describes, takes quite a bit of time, and if someone is able to change their park after the fact then you have to start all over again.
My sense is that as you play 50% of your games at home, maximizing your winning percentage there is the priority. By weakening your team's advantage at home, to address other teams/stadiums on the road, may be robbing peter to pay paul (whoever Paul is).
Even in this scenario, with a plethora of small ball parks, I would keep all my right handed BP HR guys.
this discussion/poll does not address pitching parameters, with all the small ball parks, and depending on the ratio of opponent LH-RH hitters, I would probably look to add a bunch of RH starters that only gives up BP HRs to lefties, which would not hurt me at home or on the road.

If you got your guys in a bomber park, stick with them unless you want to add 1 or 2 high OBP guys to get on base in front of them.

But if it's the opposite, you're in Petco and the rest of the division is Polo, then you need to add some power to your lineup or you'll get eaten up on the road.

egvrich wrote:If you got your guys in a bomber park, stick with them unless you want to add 1 or 2 high OBP guys to get on base in front of them.

But if it's the opposite, you're in Petco and the rest of the division is Polo, then you need to add some power to your lineup or you'll get eaten up on the road.

This

egvrich--
spot on

I have found that usually tailoring your hitters to your park environment still works out the best, even when the away parks are very different environments. I would argue opponents' rotations is a bigger factor in swapping out hitters after the draft than ballparks, but typically with so many different strategies in play I rarely see enough 7R+ kind of pitchers to really change my line up.

For me it is my starting rotation that I swap out in its entirety at times after the draft, based on opposing line ups and parks. If you chart out your 4 man rotation in the schedule, you can find some very different average park dynamics based on home/road weightings etc. and really take advantage of that with a pitching that might not seem to be the best for your home park, but matches up well with say the #3 rotation schedule.

childsmwc--
excellent point and I concur on that.
I have found changing my hitters to address parks on the road, and sacrificing home field results, rarely works to my advantage.
but the starting rotation is an effective way to address other stadiums and/or the LH/RH power/smallball factors that are to be encountered.
thanks for sharing that

Being able to adapt his roster to the rest of the teams and ballparks in the league is precisely why The Last Druid aka Petrosian was a master at this game. I'd have what I believed to be a great team well suited for my ballpark, and if we were in the same division, he'd kick my a$$ every time!