New Players: Model of Skill Acquisition

Steve,

You weren't supposed to notice the injury thing until later...we're still at advanced beginner stage here!

Valen,

You have to wonder if the people playing in these tournaments are even aware there is SOM Online player pricing. What goes into their drafts and team constructions then? For this reason, as an alternate view of our online universe, I like seeing these drafts because it gives a completely different perspective than the one I usually put on my own drafts.

It's different, but not so much so that it appears completely baseless. I think I have a nice little team there. I was going to be surprised by the injury thing later...an advanced beginner mistake sort of thing.

Not taking the injury in to consideration is something many beginners fail to do.
And there are 2 sides to the injury coin. One side being the risk they represent. The other being the bang for the buck you get if you are lucky enough not to get burned by the injuries.

And you are right about using their draft preferences to give insight in to the relevant pure value of the cards. Probably right about the star tournament people not being aware of strat cap and salary assignments. Given the bad job strat has done in the past of promoting the online game would not be surprised at all to find out many there have never played the online game.

No doubt any card normally taken high there with a relatively low salary here would have to be considered a bargain here. Could be a very valuable resource to keep an eye on.

Wouldn't it be interesting though if you could link someone there to an online strat identity and compare how their drafting there is different or the same as it is here in say an $80 mil league.

I'm hoping this might be where Marcus jumps in...!

In Star tournaments, you just pick up players to form the best team, so no cap. As someone said earlier, injuries never go beyond the remainder of the game. Also, players with less than 300 PA or 250 PA are not available. All starting pitchers can throw at three games rest (all starters are *SP so to speak). Also, because there is no consideration for getting the most out of your money, every team drafts at least one or two lefty-killing hitters like Sanchez, Mercer, who more rarely play in 12-team leagues. Hence, strat players are more cautious at using lefty starting pitchers; they usually get pounded. But most Star teams draft a lefty or two in the bullpen. So, overall the ratio of lefty/righty hitters is closer to 20%/80%. vs 28%/72 in SOM-online.

The league that most compares to Star tournament is a 200M league that goes through a draft process.

But by far, the biggest difference in Star is coaching the team play-by-play as opposed through HAL system. I know very good face-to-face Strat players who could never become elite players because they never completely understood Hal's coaching system. Picking up 5-6 relievers when you fully control them is much different than understanding what Hal will need to make the bullpen most optimal.

For 80M league, SOM price structure is much closer to truth than Star tournament draft list, but like J-Pav says, I like consulting the site and look at the discrepancies between Star drafts and SOM taking, all the differences listed above into account.

A basic advice I would give to beginners is to avoid 500 k players altogether. Most of them are so bad that they are really costing your team a few millions, perhaps more if they play regularly. Unless you understand how to read cards, stick to the 0.51M-0.75M for utility players or cheap relievers and up to 2M for bench players used in platoons or who backup a lot because of frequent injuries (up to 3M if you expect your utility player to play almost every game because of a team with very high-injury prone players).

I guess another related, but more fundamental advice, that I would give to advenced beginners is:spend wisely. Spend the money on players who play/pitch, and spend least money on players that play rarely or pitch useless innings.

While obvious, this advice is more difficult to implement than it seems. You know you'll need at least 9 hitters, perhaps a bit more if you use platoons. But the difficult question is how much pitching do I need? To answer, look at the quality and at the endurance of your starters, the quality of your defense, and bear in mind the effect of your stadium and those of your divisional opponents, and try to ask yourself, how many quality relievers do I really need?

A few (easy) examples:
a)I got in the draft three stellar *SP (7) pitchers, including Kershaw and Scherzer. I play in a low-hitting stadium and my opponents' stadiums are roughly neutral. Answer: I won't need a lot of innings of my relievers. So I might as well found a fourth stellar pitcher, to make certain that I will really need only one good reliever. Spend the rest on cheapies relievers (say 2 on cheapie specialists and 2 on mop-up function). So your pitching pyramid might look like:

SP1-10M SP2-8M SP3-7M SP4-6M SP5-0.5M
RP1-3M RP2-1M RP3-0.7M RP4-0.6M-RP5-0.6M,
that's 37M or so on pitching.

b) I miss on my high quality SP. I play in Coors, and my defense is so-so. Answer: you'll need a lot of innings from your relievers. So you might spend high money on at least two relievers, settle on cheapie starters who are good value for your stadiium.
SP1 3M SP2-3M SP3-2M SP4-2M SP5-1.4M
RP1-5M RP2-5M RP3-2M-RP4- 1M- RP5-0.6M,
so 25M on pitching. But that strategy works only if you can spend the rest of the money on offensive players. If you can't, you might change the configuration of your pitching sqaud, go with better starters, but then, drop the second 5M reliever for a 3M reliever since you won't need as much innings from your bullpen as you expected.

Both make perfect sense in my opinion, despite being very differently.

I'm not sure where my info goes (ie. Michael Eraut's stages) but...

While I am all for having good defense on my teams, I will use infielders with bad range over outfielders with bad range. (As long as they have the offense to produce results...)

My thinking is a 3 or 4 rated infield defender gives up a hit and for the most part, it's a single.
But when a 3 or 4 rated outfielder gives up a hit, it usually goes for extra bases.

Yes I do realize there are other factors coming into play. But when you want that 1 or 2 rated infielder and you don't get him, you have to think "outside the box."

visick

Great stuff here! If I may I'd like to share a little of my "rookie journey".

I Guess I learned my "injury lesson" very early. Here is my first ever online team. Now, I'd played multiple cd-rom keeper leagues for many years, but as we know playing the computer or board game is a much different dynamic than the online game. I looked for cards I liked that seemed like good values. I knew nothing about injuries, as most cd-rom leagues don't use them.

http://onlinegames.strat-o-matic.com/team/823038

This team is a good lesson in what NOT to do. Naturally I ended up with a lot of high injury guys. Also made a ton of moves (not all cuts, as this was a 24 team league with a lot of managers using their free trial, so as a result there were a LOT of trades, more than I've seen since!) My team led its division for about 3/4 of the season, but then the injuries hit. I made it worse when someone cut Markakis and I just HAD to have him. I cut Snider and gutted my bench to make that last move. Of course both he and Kemp hit the injury lottery right after that

A few teams later, I was still not happy with my starting pitchers results overall, so I jumped to the conclusion that hey, might as well go with cheap starting pitchers since the expensive ones don't produce anyway. It sounded good at the time, and seeing certain isolated cases of a cheap starter putting up some good numbers fueled this belief even further. It took me awhile to learn that pitching stats are relative, and when it comes to starting pitching, in the long haul you get what you pay for.

Of course, you CAN win with cheap starters, just as you can win with high injury players. But those are stories for another day

I learned real fast with the 2012 teams (my first strat online) that it didn't matter how good my starters were--they all got bombed--I frequently had pitchers like Arroyo (1.31M) getting the same results as Medlin or other 5M + pitchers on the same team--I couldn't keep expensive starters in the game as they frequently gave up 5 run innings. I had Peavy go 14-20 and give up 69HRs on one 2012 team (though it was Cellular)--on the same team Arroyo and Hefner had winning records and better ERA's.

I started going with mediocre starting and three very good relievers, and had much better results--spent roughly 23-25M on pitching and more offense with my last few 80M 2012 teams and most all made the playoffs. I had one team make the playoffs with less than 15M spent on pitching.

This season (2013) seems to favor the pitching a bit more as the HR power is down overall, there are not many serviceable low price starters in 2013 set to me, so higher priced staffs seem to work this year--I've spent 30M + on pitching every team this year.

The bottom line is (to me) different sets require different basic formulas of spending, as do different parks.

Milleram and I messaged quite a bit last year as we learned together. At the time I agreed about the lower priced starters, but I have gone 180 degrees on this one. Now I rarely spend less than $34 on pitching, with emphasis on SP's and "bargain" relievers.

At the time I agreed about the lower priced starters, but I have gone 180 degrees on this one.

I play mostly ATG these days. But back when I played more 200x in the early 2000s one of the things I had to learn is the player pool could change completely year to year. One season the mix of high price pitchers is the way to go and the next might be better going low. As my balance of teams began to shift to ATG with fewer 200x teams I had less and less feel for what the best approach was for me given a new player pool.