Fri Jul 01, 2016 9:34 am
This is a strange game, but I kind of like it. Yeah, there are problems but the standard online game has gotten far better since I started playing years ago and I expect that the daily game will improve, too. There are glitches, to be sure, and some things to figure out about how the game works even when it's working well, but that seems like part of the fun. (I note that there have always been crazy cards--anybody remember when Pedro Feliz was the greatest power hitter in the deck, a regular #1 draft choice, for less than $2m? Put him in Coors and he'd hit 80 dingers.) The concept--starting with projections, or last year's performance, and slowly updating to reflect real-life performance is really, really cool. I mean, I'm sitting here with Jose Bautista, a great hitter for years, who sucks wind right now and has for half the season now. But he's still Jose Bautista, and while he's hitting 230 he's not yet Logan Morrison. And if he hits 450 next week he's not Ty Cobb. I'm interested in the updating and see all of the problems, but the concept is great--it makes the game interesting and challenging, and makes the game a little more like fantasy, requiring paying attention to what's happening with your team and in real world baseball each day.
The drafting strategy is really complicated, in a good way. I just submitted a team, and found it really hard to choose whether to seek the bargains and to put them at the top of the list (will they look like bargains a month from now?), or to invest large dollars in star players who may be underperforming now but may improve dramatically. I don't want to dismiss anybody's concerns, but just wanted to say that there's good stuff happening here, too. And I wish I'd drafted Dull!
