2014 set sleepers

I would not want to impose on your time, but if you were willing to share more details of your evaluation methods it could be enlightening.

The ratings book is a tool in deciphering what players to use. If you would rather substitute one of these words in place of tool so that you can tell yourself that you are always correct feel free to do so strether (apparatus, device, mechanism, means, implement or even gadget).

It only gives you offensive numbers. It does not factor in injury rating, base stealing, base running, throwing arms or defense so if you only use the ratings guide to create your team you will not be very successful. It is simply a time saving tool to help point you in the right direction towards the type of players you may want to evaluate more closely.

If it was more than simply a tool all you would need to do is draft all the top whatever players based on the ratings guide and be done with it.

I agree with you--it is a tool to help, but certainly not a guarantee to success.

The weakest part of the book is it doesn't factor in the defense (the defensive ratings are there, but it doesn't tell you how many bases the player actually gives up in card chances on the X Charts). Another lesser issue is low use players, less than 150 AB or 50 IP, doesn't get into the top players at each position section--so you have to seek them out in the team sections--quite often in online play these are the most sought out players in the drafts.

For me it is a time saver worth the 15 bucks, and I prefer the printed version to the spreadsheet just to flip through at my convenience.

The way I rate a player generally is OBpct + total bases - total bases allowed on defense---then you need to factor in the bp HR for your home ballpark and to an extent the visiting parks also if your league leans to pitching parks or HR prone parks--I tend to ignore bp singles as they are almost always equal for both sides in a given park.

Ob pct is most important in the long run, especially in low bp HR parks.

NEW GUYS don't be intimidated, the great thing about Strat since its inception is just looking at the card tells you 90% of what you need to know, especially in a neutral park,, the only cards that can fool you somewhat are the ones with lots of split chances coupled with outs--like HR 1-2 fly b 3-20, and ones with lots of hits on the 2,3,11 and 12 rolls, but nothing in the center of the card.

I've played online 2 years now and I still can't put together consistent winning teams, just like the big leagues you need on base guys, then some power to get them in--I still have trouble putting together a consistent offense and if I do my pitching suffers, actually I have been much more successful with 100M and up teams. I won a championship with my 3rd online team--so rookies can have good teams, but on the whole I'm still not very good at putting together teams at 80m down--when I played the board game years ago we had no salary limits and I still think that way when drafting.

I would not want to impose on your time, but if you were willing to share more details of your evaluation methods it could be enlightening.

No problem. Like most, I started out by looking for the prevalence of, proportionately, 7's, 6s/8's, 9's/5's, 10's/4's on hitters cards; and absences of such on pitcher's card's. Also, like most, I looked for the prevalence of offensive production on a particular column on hitter's cards and the absence of such on pitcher's cards. If that column spread wasn't there on a hitters card, I looked for less common--but often equally productive--offensive patterns.

After that, and eventually along with that, I scan for the absences of negative results--strikeouts, GBA'--on hitters' cards and the presences of such on pitcher's cards. I then also scan for "possibility" results--i.e. ballpark hrs and ballpark singles beneficial to, nullified by, or detrimental to my particular park...on both hitters and pitchers cards.

Now, when I started playing, this process took me a bit longer than now. Not nearly as long as counting cards, but longer. Luckily for me, my brother and I played our own little 4 team league, so I didn't have many cards to learn. However, after I did it for a few months, it became easier for me to just scan each card in seconds and pick up all of the information I mentioned above. As I've mentioned on another post, it's like that scene in the Matrix where the characters can just look at the green symbols and see the entire Matrix. After seeing so many successful and unsuccessful patterns of SOM data, and after learning how much content makes a good or bad card, I can scan the cards pretty quickly, determine their quality and value, and decide whether i want them or not.

As I've said above, if you decide to read your cards on your own, it will take you a bit to get to this stage, so you might want to keep to your ratings guides while you do it. They will give you the information for which I and others read the cards. However, I can say that learning how to read the cards well and winning championships from your own player evaluations is both enjoyable and rewarding.

A simple, but effective, formula you can add to your rating disc spreadsheet

((0.689* BB units )+(0.722* HBP units)+(0.892*1B units)+(1.283*2B units)+(1.635*3B units)+(2.135*HR units))/(AB+BB units+HBP units)

A simple, but effective, formula you can add to your rating disc spreadsheet

((0.689* BB units )+(0.722* HBP units)+(0.892*1B units)+(1.283*2B units)+(1.635*3B units)+(2.135*HR units))/(AB+BB units+HBP units)

Shouldn't the value for HBP and BBs be the same?

A simple, but effective, formula you can add to your rating disc spreadsheet

((0.689* BB units )+(0.722* HBP units)+(0.892*1B units)+(1.283*2B units)+(1.635*3B units)+(2.135*HR units))/(AB+BB units+HBP units)

Shouldn't the value for HBP and BBs be the same?

It's complicated, but in the super advance computer max rules game, certain extreme low walk SP's (think Greg Maddux) actually take some walks AWAY from the batters card. The HBP is immune to this, and as such, deserves a (very) slight adjustment

The weakest part of the book is it doesn't factor in the defense (the defensive ratings are there, but it doesn't tell you how many bases the player actually gives up in card chances on the X Charts).

Totally agree, calculating fielding into my analysis numbers was the turning point for me. The difference up the middle between a 1 and a 3 is huge. I calculate a fielding OPS and fielding OBP and adjust the offensive numbers accordingly.

The weakest part of the book is it doesn't factor in the defense (the defensive ratings are there, but it doesn't tell you how many bases the player actually gives up in card chances on the X Charts).

Neither does just looking at the cards, you have to pull out the X charts and see that for yourself, no mater if you use the ratings book or the cards or both.

Neither does just looking at the cards, you have to pull out the X charts and see that for yourself, no mater if you use the ratings book or the cards or both.

What are these "X-charts" of which you speak? I have played SOM online since the beginning and have never seen any "X-Charts."

Neither does just looking at the cards, you have to pull out the X charts and see that for yourself, no mater if you use the ratings book or the cards or both.

What are these "X-charts" of which you speak? I have played SOM online since the beginning and have never seen any "X-Charts."

The fielding charts, the two blue super advanced fielding charts some times refered to as the X-charts because of the reading on the pitcher's cards for fielding checks. eg, SS-X.

I beleive you said you played the board game in your youth, surely you remember rolling the 20 sided die (or if you are really old school using the split deck) to determine if a fielding check results in an out, a hit, an error chance or a hit plus an error chance.

Error chances, of course, are resolved by rolling all three 6 sided dice and adding their total and checking the correct row for your fielder's error rating. This is all done internally in the online game, but the charts are still where the results come from.

With the results from those charts, people have created comparative tables, not official game ones mind you, that will show you the comparisons between every possible range and error rating for any position seen here:

http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/btf ... atfldg.htm

What those comparative charts show, is whether a SS that's a 2e34 is a better defender over the course of 162 game season than one who is a 3e8 by figuring the hits +errors and total bases allowed by the two players on a per at bat and per game basis. The math is way over my head, as the chart shows the low range high error player (2e34 above) is worse defensively than the high range low error player (3e8) and it shows the threshold for when that difference occurs based on how high the error rating for the better range player.

Got way off X-charts here sorry about that.