(Very) initial thoughts about the 2000 player set

I just reviewed the hitters who are part of the new 2000 mystery game. I was struck by the number of players with very significant injury risks. It appears positional depth will be even more important with this set. There are also a number of players who will be a great value or a costly injury waiting to happen. Time to move on to the pitchers.......

it's JUICED!

About half the top hitters are more than 1.0 injury risks. A lot of them also are 4s and a few 5s defensively. It will be interesting how many of those guys we are willing to roll the dice with. Lots of HRs (steroids).

I don't play the ATG game, but Bonds in this set is unreal and at 13.6 mil, underpriced. Pujols also great. For a 12 team league, it looks like depth is infinite.

Way too many R1 relievers.

Way too many R1 relievers.

Also with the new ATG bullpen logic. No more superrelievers.

I'll cast the first "nit to pick" (I'm sure there will be others), but Kerry Wood should have relief numbers

Does anyone know how many players are in the set? I assume it's quite a bit more players than the other decades, which if true is nice.

I am sure there are a few mistakes.

Kerry Wood as mentioned above.

Kenny Lorton should be eligible in LF.

And Chone Figgins appears to be horribly overpriced, and doesn't even have his best card.

But I SURE AM GLAD IT IS FINALLY HERE!

I'll cast the first "nit to pick" (I'm sure there will be others), but Kerry Wood should have relief numbers

Kerry Wood is similar to Dennis Eckersley. Both had years where they only started and years where they were RP only. It is very difficult to combine the two in a decade game. SOM chose to use the years 2000-2004. During those years Wood had 138 starts and zero relief appearances. SOM could have used the years 2007-2011 where Wood made lots of relief appearances with zero starts. That would have been perfectly acceptable too but he would have been a RP only.

Even if SOM had combined some of these years and made him a S/R, his ability to start games would make trying to use him as a RP pitcher too expensive. Wood had one elite RP season in 2008 but other than that season his best seasons were as a SP. I think SOM made the right choice to present him as a SP only player in this set.

I was surprised that Vizquel and JJ Hardy were only 2's at SS in this set. I thought they were known to be elite defenders at SS. Vizquel won 4 Gold Gloves in the 2000's. I don't know what they were rated by SOM in the 2000-2009 player sets to be honest. Omar was in the 2nd half of his career so maybe he had come down from being a 1 in the 90s and Hardy won 3 Gold Gloves but they were all in the 2010s so maybe his best fielding years were not early in his career.