2018 BS Finals - The Last Druid is 2X Champ!

A 4e71 2B rates to make a successful play abut 40% of the time. So 2/3 is about 28%.

Also, cristano's analytical model has some serious omissions. But you are right, Marc, he, like I do, does very little day to day managing.

And Druid is excellent at adjusting to the mixed strategies required to win a particular league. There are ways to beat him, too, but it's a lot more work than finding a way to beat a cristano (or a BruceF) team.

And with the flaky prices that have been assigned to some of the new cards, analytical based lineups are the way to go.

I was going to keep quiet but the hindsight involved in Monday morning quarterbacking and post hoc analytics should be a perfect 20-20, yet in Marc's post from last night, I don't know that it was.

I agree that Cristano's self-created analytic model using Excel to predict a team's performance is a potent tool conferring upon him a unique advantage over the rest of us. But I'm not sure that he is the best GM in the game, nor am I sure that I am the best manager, roles that Marc appears to have somewhat arbitrarily assigned us.

I was not aware, as Marc asserted, that he previously stated that the best way to beat the Four Aces strategy was a "one-sided extreme powerhouse stadium." Poor me, I had to rack my feeble, analytically challenged brain to come up with my own solution to that problem. But I theorized that ANY extreme hitting ballpark should pose significant problems for the Four Aces, then verified my solution in the crucible of ATG league play. It was easy to do because, as Cristano noted in our last private exchange a few days ago, we get copied -a lot - so the 4 Aces strategy became a ubiquitous part of most 100M leagues after his very public success with it.

Now I thought long and hard about what park to play in this time and I chose Hilltop, in part to show Cristano that he was basically full of shit when he dismissed righty parks as a viable strategy in the BS finals, back in our infamous 2017 trash talking BS finals thread. Although when we choose parks in the BS finals, insanely enough we have no idea what division we will land in, unlike any other live drafts on this website, I had long since concluded that Hilltop would be the best stadium to combat the 4-aces strategy. Minute Maid leaves one too vulnerable to the Kerry Woods, Joel Pineiros and Don Suttons of the set, and if you include two or three lefties to reduce the vulnerability, they lose too much due to park effects. Hilltop allows extreme righty hitting but the 1-17 single for lefties allows you to play 2-4 lefties / switch hitters and still do well. The only downside to Hilltop is that 1-17 ballpark single against lefties, but I minimized that with Hammaker in my rotation and Sutter and Myers giving up no ballpark hits at all against lefties. In particular I wanted to combat hallerose as he was clearly going for the same strategy as last year's team. This worked to perfection as the money he spent on Kison and Swift for use mostly against me and Mesquiton, ended up wasted and he finished 7-17 against me, and those two ended up with stratospheric era's. Basically I could bat up to 4 lefties against hard righties, especially on the road, which completely negates their value. Also with my three lefty starters, and the preponderance of lefty starters in the league, I dismissed Lab's chances from the outset and his decision to bench Bonds in 15 games so that Bobby Adams could play 3b and Duncan dh, really confirmed that assessment. I would have kept Bonds at DH, have Duncan play second and move Sanchez to 3b against lefties, and that would have significantly improved his offense with relatively minor impact on his defense. In any event, the best decision I made in this finals was to play in Hilltop, stocked with appropriate personnel to take maximum advantage of what Hilltop offered me.

From his post, Marc appears to not have a great deal of respect for how I value players. To see where this is coming from, here is the thread where we had our discussion about Mays' value: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=642570&hilit=200M+Draft+Ranking+WAR. I respect the time Marc put into his WAR thread and his painstaking attention to detail, but the assumptions in his WAR model don't seem to take into account extreme park effects, at least as I understood it at the time, and the effects of ballpark homeruns cannot be overstated in assessing player value.

If I recall, Marc had Mays ranked 32nd in WAR value at 200M with a 1.69 WAR. Prior to his post two years ago, in live draft leagues Mays was an automatic late first round pick. Now, you can often get him in the late second or even third round, at least you could until I stopped playing high caps - rampant copying because of the transparency of live drafts occasioned my departure from those adventures. I do thank Marc - however belatedly - for his influence positively impacting Mays' availability.

Now Marc somehow assumes he values Schmidt more highly than I do. Just ask Salty, a long time live draft stalwart, how many of my teams Schmidt appeared on the first year after his 1981 season card was added to the set. Back then I could draft him in the fifth round or even later. After Marc's WAR thread, he jumped up a couple of rounds, which irked me to no end. I would assert that I was the first person in ATG to recognize how good a card he has and then work him to death. He was a mainstay of my Polo and Minute Maid teams for several years, especially at 200M and up caps. Eventually though I abandoned him. Why, you might ask? Well when you have played over 1800 leagues you begin to notice some odd patterns. One that I have noticed is that if you regularly overuse any player, he will get injured disproportionately in future leagues. With Schmidt being a 15 game injury risk, that became a real problem for all but the highest caps. So now I use him sparingly, and in the recent finals he never got injured (I rested him the last series to ensure that), and he performed as I expected him to (given that there were really only two other parks friendly to right handed power). Ditto for Mays and McGwire. I could say a great deal more about why Mays was an essential ingredient to my team, but I have no wish to convince anyone of that reality, least of all Marc.

So truth be told, the trio of Mays, McGwire and Schmidt were nearly indispensable reasons for whatever success I achieved in the 2018 Barnstormer's finals, and that is a testament to GM acumen and precise assessment of player value regardless of what Marc asserts as WAR gospel.

Clearly, Cristano developed a computer-based system to analyze players that is the best in the market

I am sure crissy has a super-groovy spreadsheet, but I'm not so sure that's the key to his success. cristano recognized that, as a class, the top Staring Pitchers are the most under-priced cards in the ATG8 set (does anyone else remember when Pete Alexander cost 12.90M?). I credit him with deploying a strategy that fully leveraged that value.

...and as much as it pains me to say this, I also learned something from his "i steal bases and you can't score" team. That motivated me to try some successful experiments with base-stealing teams and, and ultimately, redesign how I model speed in my player ratings. '09 Cobb has become one of my most sought-after players! These are strategic insights - impressive. Congratulations Bridesmaid!

The Druid always has something up his sleeve. I'm fascinated by his ability to leverage lefty-handed pitching in righty parks. The Wrong Stuff's 2nd championship campaign found creative ways to take advantage of the peculiarities of Hilltop Park. Hooray for the champ!

Who do you think helped spearhead the reductions in starting pitching pricing back in atg 3? Hint, it wasn't Cristano.

I am always amazed at how many of the good players assume that anyone that likes the same players as they do is "copying." As I recall, Chris_s walked into this site and almost immediately began fielding competitive Barnstormers teams. Why? Analytics.

I have, I'm sure, a vastly different analytical model than cristano, or chris_s, or others of an analytical bent. I doubt that any of us is "right" but some are closer than others. I can see, from the value people place on various strategies and players, glimpses of their analytical methods.

I think the BS finals league should have a cap that is the AVERAGE of all of the cap votes. It should be a league where nobody can just toss in a canned team that they have been saving. Not that anyone would be able to do that with the fierce competition for the top end and "bargain" cards. But understanding the card set should be a skill that is tested to the extreme in the Barnstormers Final.

We have been doing that with high cap AD leagues, we started at $235 million and lopped a million off with each succeeding league until we got to $210. It was interesting the adjustments in draft strategy that had to be made. We made an abortive attempt to do this counting down from $140 million, but it fizzled.

Craig, the problem is Moose has a Millennial approach to the Tour, sort of like the Dodo Bird Verdict: all have won and all must have prizes. It should be a marathon that rewards skill but the bonus points, the dropping of the worst record and the entire playoff format - especially the lotteries for the last three spots, all reflect his values which do not promote the best player winning.

I'd rather have the finalists play simultaneous leagues at all the caps used during the tour and who ever generates the most wins is the champion.

Who do you think helped spearhead the reductions in starting pitching pricing back in atg 3? Hint, it wasn't Cristano.

...so you were the one that undid my handiwork?

Bernie Hou, actually. But it was a Gang of Four that came up with the pricing changes. Me, Nev, Adrian Gabriel and Bill Janssen comprised that committee and Bernie then implemented our recommendations. I argued that starting pitching was overpriced in general, the committee didn't disagree and then Bernie made the changes.

I really hated that committee's process though. Bill and I were both tried to create prices that reflected the statistical value of the cards but ended up brokering compromises. Nev intractably insisted on his own intuitive, experiential approach to pricing and Adrian went all in on a usage based model. Nev though supported me on the pitching pricing reductions and that was enough to carry the day. Funny thing was Bill and I weren't friends but ended up as allies, while Adrian, Nev and I were friends, but those two were highly resistant to compromises and every point was hashed out ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

In a purely distal sense, one could argue that I inadvertently created Cristano.

That was a long time ago and I've forgotten most of the details. Myself and Childs were pricing the cards and invariably had to put up with Bernie's requests to "break" the pricing model. He pretty much let me have free reign on ATG3, but eventually caved to whining from the community after that.

We were atg3 v2.0. Atg 4 came out shortly after but the pitching pricing reductions stuck. I knew bbrool, (Childs) was involved in the pricing but didn't know that you were as well. Now it is a committee of five or six guys and apparently Garcia often overrules their pricing recommendations unilaterally after often sitting on them for quite a while as well.