drop/add verses trading

OK, first an admission. Although I've warned against making all but a minimum of add-drops, I confess that when I was first starting out in ATG I did make some add-drops when I felt I'd made a mistake in team design. However, now that I've had some experience designing teams, I just tend to invest every $$ of my salary cap and ride with the team I've assembled. However, I agree that early in your ATG career, making a limited number of add / drops might make sense.

But here are a couple of examples that make the case for holding onto the team you've got, though they come at the issue from opposite directions. In the first case, I have a current team (now at the 87 game point) that got off to a tremendously good start. I couldn't quite believe how well this team was playing. But lately, the team has experienced a really bad stretch, going 4-11. Now this is OK because the great start means my team still has a good record, and it's easy to remain calm in this situation. BUT--what if my team had started 4-11 (which would be perfectly possible, since this is the same team.) It would be easy to panic and tear the team apart at that point, just as it was poised to take off when the dice-rolls improved. But if I'd made wholesale drops, then my current overall good result would never have been achieved. In short, if you're going to have a bad stretch with a good team, it's much more challenging to the manager if the bad stretch comes early in the season rather than later. But that's no reason to panic.

The other example is a team that got off to an awful start (10-18; later 29-40). It then rose to .500 ball for a fairly long stretch. However, heading into the last third of the season, it went on a tremendous tear, going 30-15 and ending up with 90 wins. Then the team won the playoffs and a ring. If I had torn this team apart when it was going badly, I doubt if it could have won on championship.

The moral is that it's perfectly possible for even a very good team to go through a bad stretch. And sometimes the best cure for a team that is under-performing is simply patience.

Here's an example. I swapped out Wells, Frisch, Leibold, Myers for Dahlen, Yost, Donlin, Wagner.

I am rather surprised that Wagner was not picked up by someone preseason. I do not think I remember a league where Wagner was still out on FA market by the time games started.

And have to wonder why you did not make this change of shortstops preseason when there was no cap hit.

Sorry -I should have specified it was Billy Wagner. Myers was getting destroyed. I picked up Dahlen for Wells. Had Honus been available, I definitely would have used him over Wells.

Even at lower cap levels I am very surprised Billy Wagner would be available. So you went through the entire preseason with Billy Wagner available for the bullpen and did not pick him up and nobody else picked him up? He is one of the top relievers in the set and the cost of him verses an underbelly reliever is not much so to me it makes no sense that there would be 12 owners pass on him and the season start with him on FA wire.