How Bad Can You Be?

So is it possible you could take some relatively successful 90 win teams that were built for an extreme park, dump them in an opposite park and change it to a 90 loss (sic) team? I think the answer may be yes.

Remember the distinction regarding what we're trying to do here. We at least THINK we are building a winning team, but in fact we are not. I have no doubt we could sabotage a lineup with a bad park, lots injury guys with no back-ups, all 6L leaning hitters, a 5 at 1B...but that's not what I'm asking for. I'm asking for reasonable unreasonableness.

I actually have a pretty good idea what we can do here, but now it's Christmas Eve and all these high maintenance family people are demanding attention. Don't they GET IT??

So my idea can be a Christmas surprise for the community later on...

Merry Christmas all!

I see on my lineup I forgot to include a DH. Oh well, the 8 guys I listed have all good for a losing record.

I think the question has got morphed a little during the discussions.
If you think you are building a winning team and are not then logical to assume it is either pure luck or you are forgetting something important.

Most likely thing forgotten is selecting the right players for the park.

Other things I think of off top of my head....
Getting sentimental and choosing roster with your heart and not the card.
Selecting players based on real life stats instead of care makeup.
Perhaps more subtle reasons ...
Selecting the wrong team and individual player settings. This is a tough one for me due to the challenge of determining exactly how Hal interprets aggressive/conservative, etc. Does steal more mean steal third and home? How do the team and individual settings interact?

Those are mostly mistakes players can sometimes make, as opposed to the actual reasons behind manager mistakes and team failures I mentioned earlier. The original questions about managers were: what would teams on the 45% wins side look like and why?" and "assuming top managers win 55% of the time, does this mean the "average" manager wins only 45% of the time?" So, we need to determine what is an average manager and why he makes the mistakes he does, not just the mistakes themselves, to answer these questions.

As to the mistakes Valen mentions:

Getting sentimental and choosing roster with your heart and not the card.
Selecting players based on real life stats instead of care (sic) makeup.

As I mentioned earlier, most players shed this tendency early. New players to SOM online with SOM experience never even bring it at all. So, it's not a significant factor in team failures of most average or below-average mangers.

Selecting the wrong team and individual player settings. This is a tough one for me due to the challenge of determining exactly how Hal interprets aggressive/conservative, etc. Does steal more mean steal third and home? How do the team and individual settings interact?

These are concerns, if not "problems", for almost all managers. Every successful manager is continually trying to improve his use of team and individual player settings. No manager would honestly feel he has that down. So, while this problem applies to average and below-average managers. It certainly isn't endemic to them, nor can it be isolated as a separating factor in their failures.

What does determine the "average" player and separate him from the above average ones are the various "shares" he has of the following qualities, as well as how those "shares" interact to shape his SOM play. These inform and cause the damaging mistakes he makes.

1. SOM experience
2. SOM on-line experience
3. Intelligence
4. Learning curve
5. Usage (or non-usage) of Ratings Guides
6. Variation in league type experience
7. Luck

So is it possible you could take some relatively successful 90 win teams that were built for an extreme park, dump them in an opposite park and change it to a 90 loss (sic) team? I think the answer may be yes.

Remember the distinction regarding what we're trying to do here. We at least THINK we are building a winning team, but in fact we are not. I have no doubt we could sabotage a lineup with a bad park, lots injury guys with no back-ups, all 6L leaning hitters, a 5 at 1B...but that's not what I'm asking for. I'm asking for reasonable unreasonableness.

I actually have a pretty good idea what we can do here, but now it's Christmas Eve and all these high maintenance family people are demanding attention. Don't they GET IT??

So my idea can be a Christmas surprise for the community later on...

Merry Christmas all!

Well here is one of my crappiest 2013 teams. $80M non-DH. I experimented with some guys I hadn't used but wanted to try (like Yelich). I made a few trades so not all the player movement was dumping. The #1 thing that jumps out is the awful home record. This team tanked from the start and never recovered.

http://onlinegames.strat-o-matic.com/team/1387016

This $80M DH team just won the championship after tanking early rebounding from 30-40. I did make a lot of dumps trying to find a decent 1B and cut Cuddyer after a 15 game injury. What jumps out is the good home record, but also the record against LHP. In the finals I got matched with a Progressive team. Took the first two there by a combined 17-0. http://onlinegames.strat-o-matic.com/team/1387623
In conclusion, to avoid being bad, I would say making sure your team is a great fit for your park has to be first priority. That's kind of obvious.

To Valen,

I was kind of running with splinter's I can read the cards assertion, because as vets, I think we CAN read the cards better. Flipping that notion upside down, we should be able to select the cards to avoid equally well. But isn't it weird how quick we all come to the same conclusion that "Well, with a tweak here and a better ballpark, that lineup's not all that bad!" It's almost like we can't see bad cards. So maybe, the I can read the cards thing is overstated.

I ran with this last year when I built several winning teams from the undrafted player pool the day before the season started (using all $0.50 cent selections in the autodraft and then dumping them all for the leftovers).

And yes, Houston Astros guy has a problem if his SOM expectations need to be met with unrealistic Astro production!

To l.strether,

Would you say it's almost a requirement that, over time, you must eventually graduate from clueless newb to informed vet? I think part of my original thinking was somewhere out there is the guy who has been sticking to it, but just can't get over the .500 hump. But maybe the left side of the curve is truly only newbie fresh meat. You learn and move up on a trajectory: maybe it's .510 or .520 or .530. If you can stick around, YOU then benefit from the new newbie blood entering the arena that is now less informed than you are...

As an aside, average is also in the league make-up. It's unsettling how close to .500 the top managers are when it's a tour semis or championship league. I think last year we had one semis league where there were no 90 win teams and no 90 loss teams. Further, some guys only participate in keeper leagues and such, where their winning percentages are skewed by the company they keep.

Anyway, I wouldn't get too hung up on a pure definition of average. I think where I was heading before we found ourselves in the weeds was that if you hold on to $80 mil worth of reasonable players, your average consistent results should never be worse than .500 (assuming again a reasonable progression through the learning curve). I really want to say that the key variable consistently present among losing teams is shedding salary. Don't do that.

To scumby,

No way would I forecast your team would end up being below .500. To me that's a season of bad bounces (okay, and $4 mil of shed salary, but still) that would play out more favorably if the season could be rerun.

Would you say it's almost a requirement that, over time, you must eventually graduate from clueless newb to informed vet? I think part of my original thinking was somewhere out there is the guy who has been sticking to it, but just can't get over the .500 hump. But maybe the left side of the curve is truly only newbie fresh meat. You learn and move up on a trajectory: maybe it's .510 or .520 or .530. If you can stick around, YOU then benefit from the new newbie blood entering the arena that is now less informed than you are...

I would say definitely. If you don't, you either hang around to be hapless fodder, or you smarten up and leave...with the latter being the wiser choice.

As an aside, average is also in the league make-up. It's unsettling how close to .500 the top managers are when it's a tour semis or championship league. I think last year we had one semis league where there were no 90 win teams and no 90 loss teams. Further, some guys only participate in keeper leagues and such, where their winning percentages are skewed by the company they keep.

Well, when you get the best players playing together in any competitive activity, the average median is going to change. The rate would also change for keeper leagues. Considering most players in our league play a lot and have played a lot, I would bet the median average player--not the mean--in regular leagues would be a bit over .500...much better than a HAL quick-picked team.

Anyway, I wouldn't get too hung up on a pure definition of average. I think where I was heading before we found ourselves in the weeds was that if you hold on to $80 mil worth of reasonable players, your average consistent results should never be worse than .500 (assuming again a reasonable progression through the learning curve). I really want to say that the key variable consistently present among losing teams is shedding salary. Don't do that.

I'm not hung up on the "pure" definition of average, I was and am just fascinated by your question about the "average" SOM player. Figuring out what that "average" player would be would significantly inform our knowledge of what an SOM player is, what qualities and knowledge he needs to have for success, and what he needs to do to attain it. I think I've taken some pretty productive steps towards that goal on this thread. I'm sure others could add to them.

I disagree though that holding on to 80 mil worth of reasonable players would average out to a record of 500 or better. As I (and you) have shown earlier, the resulting record is immensely dependent on each individual player, their SOM skills, and their particular. And there are way too many of such variables to ascribe losing teams to shedding salary alone or seeing shedding salary as their main cause. This is particularly true since good managers often shed salary judiciously, so it isn't even an inherent contributor to an unsuccessful team.

I disagree though that holding on to 80 mil worth of reasonable players would average out to a record of 500 or better. As I (and you) have shown earlier, the resulting record is immensely dependent on each individual player, their SOM skills, and their particular. And there are way too many of such variables to ascribe losing teams to shedding salary alone or seeing shedding salary as their main cause. This is particularly true since good managers often shed salary judiciously, so it isn't even an inherent contributor to an unsuccessful team.

I agree that good managers (and really, probably even bad ones sometimes) can shed salary judiciously. It would be helpful if we had some real examples to back this up too, by the way. But I bet for every one you can offer, I can offer ten where it was a disaster.

So if I understand you correctly, if I offer ten winning teams who average 3 drops, and ten losing teams who average 14 drops, you do not accept that drops correlate well with losing?

So if I understand you correctly, if I offer ten winning teams who average 3 drops, and ten losing teams who average 14 drops, you do not accept that drops correlate well with losing?

You do not understand me correctly. I said: a team's success is immensely dependent on each individual player, his SOM skills, and his particular knowledge. And there are way too many of such variables to ascribe losing teams to shedding salary alone or seeing shedding salary as their main cause. This is particularly true since good managers often shed salary judiciously, so it isn't even an inherent contributor to an unsuccessful team.

So, I never said that dropping 14 players wouldn't be less judicious and productive than dropping only three. I emphasized the value of judicious drop/adding. I said there are way too many variables to ascribe losing teams to shedding salary alone or seeing shedding salary as the main reason losing teams fail...and that is true.

As to your original contention, unless the examples you and I provide are exhaustive enough to be exemplary of true success (and failure) rates in player dropping, our examples would be merely anecdotal, as they most likely would be. We do, however, agree that judicious player drop/adding can help a team succeed. Even if such drop/adds are in a minority, we cannot say that drop/adding itself leads to team failure; we can only say that poor drop/adding-- whatever that may be--leads to it,

To Valen,

I was kind of running with splinter's I can read the cards assertion, because as vets, I think we CAN read the cards better. Flipping that notion upside down, we should be able to select the cards to avoid equally well. But isn't it weird how quick we all come to the same conclusion that "Well, with a tweak here and a better ballpark, that lineup's not all that bad!" It's almost like we can't see bad cards. So maybe, the I can read the cards thing is overstated.

I ran with this last year when I built several winning teams from the undrafted player pool the day before the season started (using all $0.50 cent selections in the autodraft and then dumping them all for the leftovers).

And yes, Houston Astros guy has a problem if his SOM expectations need to be met with unrealistic Astro production!

To l.strether,

Would you say it's almost a requirement that, over time, you must eventually graduate from clueless newb to informed vet? I think part of my original thinking was somewhere out there is the guy who has been sticking to it, but just can't get over the .500 hump. But maybe the left side of the curve is truly only newbie fresh meat. You learn and move up on a trajectory: maybe it's .510 or .520 or .530. If you can stick around, YOU then benefit from the new newbie blood entering the arena that is now less informed than you are...

As an aside, average is also in the league make-up. It's unsettling how close to .500 the top managers are when it's a tour semis or championship league. I think last year we had one semis league where there were no 90 win teams and no 90 loss teams. Further, some guys only participate in keeper leagues and such, where their winning percentages are skewed by the company they keep.

Anyway, I wouldn't get too hung up on a pure definition of average. I think where I was heading before we found ourselves in the weeds was that if you hold on to $80 mil worth of reasonable players, your average consistent results should never be worse than .500 (assuming again a reasonable progression through the learning curve). I really want to say that the key variable consistently present among losing teams is shedding salary. Don't do that.

To scumby,

No way would I forecast your team would end up being below .500. To me that's a season of bad bounces (okay, and $4 mil of shed salary, but still) that would play out more favorably if the season could be rerun.

Thanks J-Pav. I had to go to my 14th 2013 team to find one that was bad much less under .500. Thanks for the astute observation. I posted the 2nd team to demonstrate that shed salary is not always fatal. Sometimes there is nothing you can do.