Magic Teams

I’m spending a lot of time thinking about opposition ballparks today.

If you are in a pitchers park, would you expect to do better if the competition were all pitchers parks? All hitters parks? A mix? A mix but not within your division?

What about for a hitters park? A slanted park?

It seemed for a while in the past, ballpark ratings appeared irrelevant. Now I wonder if they should be a more primary consideration.

One possible explanation for a team repeating success across several leagues might be this:

The team is designed to win in a pitchers park, but not to the extreme of being unable to compete in the other parks (I would argue that the opposite is unlikely to work as well - teams generally designed to win in a hitters park usually do not fair well in places like AT&T).

Here’s an example:

https://365.strat-o-matic.com/team/1494807 (Went the distance, to boot ).

Note 50 wins at home, with the best road record in the league (44 wins).

So a pitchers park team will obviously do well at home (AT&T), but will also benefit some on the road from any bump in the hitters park slants, and maybe even more so in a tilted park like Wrigley, esp if the lineup is heavy on RH batters.

The three Globe Life teams and the four Wrigley teams might be suggesting there’s something to this. Like the AT&T team above, the three teams piloted by me all had the best road records in the league.

I've thought about this also. Maybe the best strategy is to have a pitcher heavy team in a hitter's park and vice versa?

I don’t know if “pitcher heavy” is the right way to express what I’m saying.

Maybe a better way to say it, is to have low BP HR (hitters park) pitchers, and high SLG, low BP HR (pitchers park) hitters, and put them in a neutral to pitcher friendly type park. You don’t have to necessarily tilt the salary construction, but you do need the right personnel.

The Wrigley - Nationals type teams seem to work well here too, because you can neuter LHB and load your own team up with righties who benefit best from the slant. The LH friendly parks like Miller and Dodgers just don’t seem to muzzle righties to the same degree. I’ve seen several managers run out 7-8 RHB lineups and do just fine (incl many of the teams I’ve posted here).

some folks have 4th & 5th starters for keeper leagues that pitch at home or away depending on the park

I think you have to avoid having too many players that are only good in a certain park. But you also have to optimize the value by making sure their value is higher in their home park. A high average guy with little power is not a good fit for a power park; you definitely would not want a low average guy with 5 base hr and an 8 BP for a pitcher's park. A high average guy with 4 base power, 7 BP and a lot of doubles is going to play anywhere. But that's a lot easier to get at higher salaries, so it's getting some cheap guys that don't die on the road is the problem. Similar thing with pitching. If you have a low-power, pitcher's park have guys with low hits with a bit of a power problem...but not too extreme. I kind of like a guy Bour too for AT&T who has good base power (6.5) but whose bat of course translates to a power park.

I think you have to avoid having too many players that are only good in a certain park.

BUT, if you’re going to have too many players that are only good in a certain park, have them be good in a pitchers park. To me, that means high SLG, few BP HR. Batting average means little to zero in my analysis.

High SLG is the best of both BP worlds: you can do it through HRs or you can do it through doubles, or if you pay up, you can do it through both.

What is the power source of a Magic Team?

A. Lucky dice.

I don’t think you need lucky dice to win (although it helps), but you will not overcome unlucky dice. It’s not just the bad season from Aaron Judge. It’s also the outs in “must have” situations that go largely unnoticed. There’s enough bad dice that everyone gets to drink from this well, it’s part of the game. In fact, if you would have said to me earlier “Look at these two identical teams - one made the playoffs with 98 wins and the other missed the playoffs with 88 wins. Why?” I probably would have said the second team was just a victim of bad dice.

Maybe that’s the case, but...

B. Value added individual player selections.

Protecting inexpensive high BPHR pitchers in an AT&T type park is common enough to be considered cliche. But. Does that mean using inexpensive LOW BPHR pitchers is an inefficient use of salary?

So what we need to do, is figure out just what exactly “value added” means. More on this in a minute.

C. Salary construction.

I think it’s always worthwhile to pay attention to this. A 4-4-4-4-4, 5-4-1-1-1 ($32 mil) pitching staff will generally be a good, safe bet. But sometimes, like this year, you might get away with 3-3-3-3-3, 4-3-1-1-1 ($25 mil). Adding $7 mil to your offense can be kind of a big deal. Think adding Hoskins or JDM to the lineup you already have.

D. Team suited to the ballpark (opposition ballparks).

So where we find ourselves now is answering the question “How do you build a bulletproof team?” How do you construct a lineup that can be a big net positive on the road?

Let’s say you were going to join a league where the other 11 parks were going to be identical, but you didn’t know if it might be 11 AT&Ts or 11 Yankee Stadiums. What would you do? Would you build a “neutral” park team? What does that look like? Then, what if you had to field the same team against the opposite type park you faced the first time?

Marc hasn’t been posting lately, but since he does pretty much the opposite of what I do, a luckyman team would likely be a high run scoring hitters park team with value pitching. He would target a bunch of high salary batters who will score in any environment.

I’m arguing for a high scoring pitchers park team, targeting high SLG, low BPHR batters with the same hitters park value pitching that Marc would use.

I think that - absolutely - both ways can win. The difference I think is in getting the personnel you’re after. Understanding the question “Who can produce in ANY ballpark environment?” might be the key to building a Magic Team.

E. Other

I think it’s always a cop out to add “All of the Above.” But unfortunately, even though it’s not perfectly balanced between A-B-C-D, it’s probably at least a little of All of the Above.

I guess I am inclined to focus on hits in a pitcher's park just because teams that I have had in pitchers' parks with 200-300 hits than the opposition invariably do well. Your first magic team had 150 more runs than the opposition--yet hits, walks and homeruns were almost even with the opposition. Presumably, more double plays from good defense and inhibiting runner advances by having a good catcher and extremely good outfield arms is the explanation. But there is another facet that bears mentioning and that is the way you covered the weaknessee of your pitchers. They had too many runners for thsir home ballpark...but you made up for that by having extremely good defense and by the fact they had high gb(a) and having a good catcher and good outfield arms. That protected them in the home ballpark. And then in power parks they are well-suited to those anyway. So in essence you have made those pitchers worth more and that is the whole ballgame--maximizing value.

I am not sure about the high base slugging with low bps theory. Your magic team had the right pitching for a power park and you had 37 BPs from your offense. That's a decent number, enough to compete with. You just can't go in with pitching and hitting totally orientated toward your own park or you will do poorly on the road. Really good teams tend to have these kinds of sophisticated balancing acts.

I have no idea,but a major factor in my worthless opinion is the level of competition. Auto leagues versus private leagues has a huge gap I believe.

Mcsoupy keeps telling me he’s going to jump in here...I hope he does, since it was him that really started this whole experiment.

I don’t know that autoleague vs private league matters at all. According to mcsoupy, I believe he said at least seven high pythag teams failed to repeat their previous strong performance and make the playoffs a second time. I think you might be underestimating just how difficult this Magic Team thing is.

If autoleagues were just soft, “good” teams would always repeat. It appears, however, they do not.