Magic Teams

Freeman's comments resonate the most with me, at least so far.

Remember too, you only have to win one league at a time. Whether or not a team can repeat is really of little importance. However, it can be worth knowing that it’s completely possible to build a winning team that does not in fact win (unless given the right conditions). Sometimes it’s not you, it’s the environment. Sometimes it’s not the environment, it’s you.

I guess the purpose of discussing Magic Teams is figure out if you can minimize the environmental impact on your team by building a bulletproof “road” roster. So far I’ve offered hitters park pitchers combined with pitchers park hitters in a pitcher friendly park (or, six or more RHB [or LHB] can be put in a slanted park).

Are there any other suggestions out there?

J-Pav,

We have discussed in the past that my preferred strategy is a hitter heavy line up in a pitcher friendly ballpark. Spend as little as possible on pitchers, but they have to be low whip high BP HR's to maximize their value. I do believe that this translates better when you go on the road than a HR based team playing on the road in a pitchers park. Yes you can get killed if the BP HR's start rolling on the road, but you still have a low whip pitcher, that should limit the number of runs scoring per HR, while BA and Slg. from Doubles translates into any ballpark.

I'm not playing enough these days to see how well it works in this environment. I will say the low overall OBP from the last few years, tends to make my strategy tougher, because OBP is much rarer and usually more expensive in recent seasons.

Mark

That makes a lot of sense - I may have to give it a go one more time and try it your way.

Evaluating my finished leagues for more clues, I have found nothing which suggests ballparks matter much in the way of rings, home wins or road wins. It seemed like every league had a unique park win the championship. Having put the microscope to it I was really expecting some trends or at least hints of trends to start confessing. The thing I found most surprising was that road records are important, but not the be all end all. Many best record road teams failed to make the playoffs. Same for best home record teams.

As freeman pointed out, there’s this delicate balance that appears to be necessary. You only need to win “just enough” at home, and “just enough” on the road to be successful. Building for your ballpark and winning 50 at home certainly helps, but it’s no sure ticket, so thinking a little bit more about balance seems a good strategery.

It looks like I need to spend more time on personnel and less on ballparks...

I borrowed/stole most of your ideas for my team in Fenway and working out ok so far--18-9.

The general cliches are to just “win 5 of every 9” (for 90 wins), or “win 2 out of 3 at home and play .500 on the road” (for 94 wins). Statistically you’re better at home, but your road record (17-10 as of today) is phenomenal.

https://365.strat-o-matic.com/league/439090

Lots of baseball left to be played still, but definitely the hot start you want...

72 games within your division....I was able to make hay in the division as 2 of my divisional foes had no lefties in the pen and another only had a loogie....so I used waivers to change up my outfielders to take advantage of that....

Okay J-Pav, I finally got a pc after spending the last 3 years on only using my phone, and it is hard to get to the posts on the phone.

I ran an experiment back in 2011 or 2012 where I put the starting pitching all at the top (the same 4 or 5 pitchers) and I didn't really care about the 'hitting' per se, to see if there was any correlation to getting some of the top pitchers and then just getting solid hitters but taking what i could get since the entire hitting lineup was after the 10 or 11 pitchers taken in the draft.

Of the 7 teams that I did this way, 6 of the 7 made the playoffs with 3 Championships. I repeated the experiement the following year but I did it with the hitters only. Now, many people go after certain positions (SS, 2B, CF) where it was hard to get the exact same lineup, which made the experiment a bit difficult to perform. I did end up with the exact same team (hitters) 3x but only 1 of the 3 made the playoffs.

So, then i tried picking teams that had 'extreme' performances... not just making the playoffs but teams that had 95+ win seasons and repeating them to see if the results were the same. Those teams hit on a 80% rate round about and then, as J-Pav creating this post, I tried copying teams that won championships, with 88 wins or higher, and i found that those teams made the playoffs more frequently.

I have also done experiements where i tried to get players that were typically considered the 'value' players and comprising the team largely of them. This, i found, to be the best indicator as to how well a team will do.
Well, so far this year, my first team had a 98 win season, so i'm repeating it 3 more times to see if i see the same results...

MOre to follow. BTW, the team won the championship...

Okay, through the first week, here is how the teams stand:

First team: https://365.strat-o-matic.com/team/1509478 98 win team, nearly 100 runs +/- differential.


Second team: https://365.strat-o-matic.com/team/1513876 12-9 so far

Third team: https://365.strat-o-matic.com/team/1514053 15-6 so far

the teams are almost identical, so it will be a decent experiment. I changed the ballpark in the 12-9 team to see if that made any difference one way or another.

I have two other teams that I've put together where I am keeping the pitching the same, but I will be tweaking the hitting to see if I can score more runs. So, all in all I will have 4 additional teams largely the same.

I will post to this forum the results from all 4 in addition to the original 98 win team.

mc