Strat-O-Matic Baseball 365

It seems to me that division assignments are more important than draft or park choices, which means HAL rules more than she should.

In future, I suggest that the final round be $200M, where draft and park decisions are much more important. Just my thoughts.

Fascinating to see how you guys put teams together.

Best of luck to all,

Hank

Hal is a she ?!?

200 Mil is at the "extreme end" of the caps. That would not be considered the "normal" league. For a long time and to this day, 80 Mil is considered the "standard" cap and was what was used for newbies and the automatically generated "auto league". If you look now, you will only see "Auto Leagues" at 80 Mil. I've always personally felt that 100 Mil was even more "popular".

I believe that 200 Mil is a crap shoot - you get a bad draft and you are sunk. Even with Live Draft, this is just too much cash to be a realistic representation of skill. Only due to recent opinions has the 200 Mil event finally made an appearance in Barnstormers and it will be in next years list of events too.

But for the Finals, I'm afraid it would never take hold. But hey, a 4-1 or even a 3-2 vote by the board would overrule me. But I think I know the board well enough that most of them are of the same opinion.

MM

Moose - how about considering divisional seeding for the playoffs and last event? Can that be done? To Hank O's point it seems that would be one way to reward those that kicked *ss during the regular season portion and would eliminate the top ranked managers from being grouped together.

Not sure I follow you. Give me a practical use scenario for division seeding to clarify this some more.

The "randomize" feature of entering leagues was the greatest gift ever given to Barnstormers. I used to assign people by random draw to divisions, example Players 1-4-7-10 to East, 2-5-8-11 to Central - etc - but this only delayed getting this off and running because you had to WAIT for everybody and it caused DAYS delay.

I thought about asking SOM to develop a "check box" for a league that would HIDE THE IDENTITY of all players in the league except maybe to the league creator. This would remove the possibility of those that may be league shopping for easy opponents. (Not that this could EVER happen )

But being back on point, if your division seeding causes delays in entering - that is WAITING on people - I doubt this would work.

Traditional seeding in tournaments is:

1-6-7-12
2-5-8-11
3-4-9-10

The current seeding penalizes the top seeds.

I would argue that the current seeding is "fairer" than the traditional, Bruce, where the top ranked team's closest competitor is 5 ranks below him in the final round. If we ignore the 10-12 ranked teams who came into the final round by a different route--winning a semi-final championship--the league consists of teams that finished:

EAST 1-3-9
CENTRAL 2-5-8
WEST 4-6-7

You could argue the 2nd ranked team has it easiest because his next-ranked team is 3 steps below him, while the 1 and 4 teams face opponents only 2 steps below their final standing, but the 2nd ranked team is trailing in the Central by 6.

The 9th ranked team is definitely screwed on paper because he's 6 steps below his closest competitor. The fact he's leading the East by 5 at the moment takes some sting out of that, I would think.

#8 is 3 steps below his nearest competitor; he's currently got a 4 game lead in the Central.

I've got it easiest as #7 in the West, only 1 step below the next rank team in the division and trail by 1.

Sigh.

Seeding or randomness ? I like randomness - it takes less time to get a league filled since we aren't waiting on specific people to load into a division. I could also get SOM to move people around in a league, to fulfill the seeding requirements, once they have "randomly" jumped into a league.

Either way, this is something that I have very little interest in since I will never make the top 12 (9).

However, I will post this up as a topic of debate for the Barnstormers Board of Directors and if they feel one way or the other on setting up the "seeding", then I will let them hash out the details. I'll just go with the majority. As far as I can see, this would only be for the finals, as the semi's is filled by a randomization of the 36 players.

MM

I've put "Finals seeding" on the Boards list of things to look at. Hope to hear a consensus soon.