What's wrong with this team?

I really like this team, but the record doesn't bear that out.

http://365.strat-o-matic.com/team/1427381

Two terrible OF arms, too much money spent on the pitching staff (47% of your budget when at this cap in this park you should be well under 35%), giving up almost 15% unearned runs (too many errors), too few XBH (barely 25% of your hits are for extra bases), too few IP by Sambito, almost $700K in transaction costs down the drain, playing in a relatively neutral park.

There's nobody on that team that I consider as a "must have" for a $60 million league, although I am not a connoisseur of the cap like the groups that play that cap year-round. But your team has hit almost as many singles as you have allowed hits, so you should be playing in Forbes 57 or Royals 80 instead of Busch 78 to magnify that edge.

Looking at your league, your team is 4th in runs allowed and 7th in runs scored, so you should be a little over .500. So you've had a little bad luck, too.

The rest of your schedule is mainly division games, with a few games against tail-enders in the other divisions. But you've gone 4-20 against the two other division leaders, so that probably accounts for most of your poor record; if you were 10-14 (about their average result) you wouldn't have made this post.

Rburgh
I agree with all of that, but I would have expected to lead the league in fewest runs allowed with that staff rather than be 4th.

Sabermetrics analysis of your team. Defense, clutch and running have been approximately taken care

Name..................Total Run generated....salary
Davis, Tom ,,,,,,,,,,, 97,3 ,,,,,,,,,,, 4,34
Flick, Elm ,,,,,,,,,,, 82,4 ,,,,,,,,,,, 5,33
Ashburn, R ,,,,,,,,,,, 81,0 ,,,,,,,,,,, 4,86
Smith, Red ,,,,,,,,,,, 64,4 ,,,,,,,,,,, 3,42
Parent, Fr ,,,,,,,,,,, 48,9 ,,,,,,,,,,, 2,99
Masi, Phil ,,,,,,,,,,, 46,6 ,,,,,,,,,,, 1,55
Aikens, Wi ,,,,,,,,,,, 44,8 ,,,,,,,,,,, 1,72
Egan, Dick ,,,,,,,,,,, 40,5 ,,,,,,,,,,, 2,72
Burns, Geo ,,,,,,,,,,, 21,2 ,,,,,,,,,,, 0,77
Hinchman, ,,,,,,,,,,, 9,6 ,,,,,,,,,,, 0,87
Dougherty, ,,,,,,,,,,, 4,9 ,,,,,,,,,,, 0,62
Gonzalez, ,,,,,,,,,,, 3,2 ,,,,,,,,,,, 0,56
Orta, Jorg ,,,,,,,,,,, 2,8 ,,,,,,,,,,, 0,53
Ramirez, R ,,,,,,,,,,, 1,8 ,,,,,,,,,,, 0,5
Schult, Ar ,,,,,,,,,,, 1,6 ,,,,,,,,,,, 0,58




Sounds like Davis has a supervalue for your team, but some busts, Parent, Egan...Ashburn has good offensive stats, was hurt by his clutch and his arm (you have 10 fewer outfielder assists than league average, and I suspect Ashburn is the biggest culprit). I don't have time to do pitchers for now.

Thanks for taking the time to do that Marc

Two of the 3 teams that have allowed fewer runs than you have done so by spending like amounts of their budget on pitching and playing in similarly or more pitcher friendly ballparks. The third spent about 35% of their budget on pitching in one of the Griffiths that allows no ballpark homers. And you defense is poor - no OF-1's, as well as 2's on the left side of the infield and a 4 at first. Not to mention, as I said all the errors; the average team in your league has made 105 errors, you've made 122.

Also, you should consider that, of the 4 bomber parks (Ebbets 55, Polo 57, Baker 11, and Tiger 75) in your league, your division has 2 of them. So I think your expectations were too high.

I should mention that I think throwing arms , with the exception of RF, are about the most over rated aspect of this game

Have to agree about arms Steve, also errors are only a problem if the team isn't scoring. Nev, who continually won discounted errors almost entirely, and I've seen many teams (played a few myself) lead the league in errors and runs scored and end up as champs. I think it all depends on the kind of team you are running, if it's a pitching based team, errors are a major factor! I also think your team has plenty of XBHits, so far it just seems a bit unlucky, and maybe needs one more power hitter besides Davis and Aikens based on your division rivals. But what do I know, my just above .500 record does not provide me with enough expertise to hand out much advice.

Mike

About defensive errors: like (most) everything else, they are factored in the salary, but I've got the feeling that SOM might not have priced them correctly, especially in the outfield. Some errors add a base to a hit, others come from bad throws, they are the equivalent of a wild pitch--actually even less considering that the lead runner and its trail runners could have been safe nevertheless had the throw been accurate. These errors cost less than if you allow a baserunner reaching a base with an error, which is the type of error you encounter most in the traditional-face-to-face format and cost the equivalent of a single or worst. In the online format, many errors come from throwing the ball, and I read somewhere that SOM does NOT add errors in the system---in other words, the errors we see from throws, which are a pure addition of the on-line game, are substracted somehow from the traditional errors we have when playing face-to-face.

If errors are priced accordingly to the traditional system, and if SOM indeed add new type of errors by removing traditional (and costly) errors, then having players with high errors ratings become a good investment, and having lots of errors is properly correlated with having more buck from your money. Of course, I wouldn't go as far as playing a ss-2e71 in the field, there is probably a ceiling effect that is set by Som when adjusting the salary for errors (for example, you pay for a 2e30 but you get a 2e71), but other things being equal, I would certainly choose a lf-1e16 over a lf-2e8 over a lf-3e0.

About arms, I think they are somewhat overrated in 20xx, but I'm not so sure in ATG. So many more 1-15...1-17 runners than in 20xx

Team ended up really not too bad. Missed wild card by 3 games but was in it down to the final day. Pedro was a hard luck loser. Perhaps should not have dropped Drysdale for Shawkey but their performances were comparable anyway.
I agree with whoever said too many errors, but I still think Red Smith was a steal at his salary. Bottom line , I think the team was just a tad unlucky

http://365.strat-o-matic.com/team/1427381