Thu Feb 09, 2017 12:46 pm
Looking back over my notes, the thing that I notice most about 2016 was the crazy amount of notes I made.
Having started this post so late in the year, I realize that the interest in 2016 is fading quickly as the new card set is almost upon us. And worse yet, is that I don't have anything magical to add here. I struggled quite a bit throughout the year, suffering from the worst of HAL's taunts: whoever I saw have an outstanding performance on another team regressed to the mean with an equally atrocious performance when I had him on my team. This makes trying to pick up on the trends and themes very, very difficult. So when it comes to deciphering 2016, trust me when I tell you that I would probably much rather hear what you have to say than vice versa.
For the sake of the conversation, I'll throw out a few things here.
I found pitching to be very important, as the first posts in this thread hit upon right away. My best teams early on were the ones where I was able to have three or even four high dollar *SPs. Most of the successful teams I looked at, for the most part, finished very high in pitching (lower ERAs, lower WHIPs). Where they finished offensively ranged from high to irrelevant.
Having grown tired of missing on starting pitching, I began going with four stud batters. Harper, Trout and Goldschmidt were staples on these teams, some having all three of them. These teams often made the playoffs, but failed in the post season. Still, it was fun to experiment with cheap starters and solid long relievers for awhile. While everyone chased pitching, this was actually a pretty easy method to adopt.
As was pointed out early in the year, the best cards were the high dollar cards. But the best of the best were the high dollar pitching cards. If you examine the successful tour teams, you'll see the number of times either Arrieta or Greinke appear in a Championship is alarmingly high.
The salary construction of a Championship staff tended toward $7, 6, 5, 4 on average, but you'll see a lot of $10, 6, 4, 2.
When you're looking for patterns, in hindsight it's not hard to see that sometimes you tortured the data into giving a false confession. Here I will add the usual disclaimer that in any given league, any type of team can win for any infinite number of reasons. But if you're trying to help someone along in the learning process, knowing that doesn't really help much. So, here's my attempt to quantify what I saw this year:
Offense: Have four hitters who's total salary is around $30 mil. The other ten should be under $18 mil.
Pitching: Have three SPs who's total salary is around $20 mil. The other seven should be under $12 mil.
That's it in a nutshell.
Now, this is kind of a stretchy generalization, I get that. But you really needed to have some top salary players on your team, however, you could get them. Once having done that, the chess match for the 17 low dollar players could really set you apart. Obviously, well chosen platoons enter the picture here.
But the biggest point I want to make here, and this has been touched on by others, is that regardless if you played in a pitchers park or a hitters park, slugging (total bases) was probably the one stat I was able to isolate that showed up an inordinate number of times on winning teams. If your doubles (particularly in a pitchers park) and homers (obviously in hitter friendly parks) were north of 500 when combined, your team likely competed as long as your pitching was getting it done on the other end.
It's no surprise that the high OPS teams corresponded well with the high run scoring teams. But what was a surprise to me is that strong defenders with slash lines making for a winning eye test very often did not correspond well with winning championships. A lot of times, it seemed to me, that a slash line more like .230/.310/.465 was preferable to something more like .290/.340/.350.
Anyway, that's what I was seeing as this year unfolded, but I welcome any contrary opinions.
