Changes Since ATG 4

I don’t have that big of a problem with the bullpens , I use a few different ways and of course sometimes the wrong guys get used but mostly I don’t have a big issue. My three favorite strategies for the pen are :

1) closer , set up , middleman , lh specialist , rh specialist, and 6th starter as mopup with the closer middleman and setup doubling down in the tied and late tied and 9+ and trailing late

2) closer vs lefties , closer vs righties , setup (pitcher with about 125+ innings) who doubles as tied and late , lh special , rh special , mop up

3) closer , setup (around 1 mil) , and 2 lh and 2 rh special cheap , mopup (this one with starters that go 9)

Besides the bullpen best thing I learned is play to your ball park. Being over .500 at home and you’ll be in contention in most instances.

Lots of choices, so many ways to play now. The biggest change for me is the the bullpen. A subset of people bitterly complained about the super relievers back in ATG 8, so Garcia decided to "fix" it and basically tossed out the baby with the bath water.

There is now a huge premium placed on relievers with r3 or higher ratings and r2's are also priced much higher than r1's. That change alone may have significantly reduced the super reliever's influence on the game, but then SOM went way overboard and limited each reliever to only two roles. Now if you want to enjoy Sutter, you need to play higher caps, otherwise he has been effectively priced out of the 100M or lower caps.

Several folks, no names mentioned here but I was not one of them, also lobbied for fairly drastic changes to the pricing model, and not just for relievers. Basically anyone who was a bargain in ATG 8 (Tori Hunter, Tommy Davis, Ashburn etc) received hefty price increases in ATG 9 while platoon players such as Duncan and Mercer became comparatively under priced in the new pricing model and have become very hot commodities indeed along with Tekulve's 110M card.

Many players, especially Nev, prefer to play almost exclusively higher caps. These used to be problem back in ATG 4 because of the limited player pool. Back then a bad draft spelled disaster. Now you can have a bad draft at 200M and still cobble together a viable team.

The other big change since ATG 4 is that the quality of managers is far more sophisticated today than was the case in the days of Bernie Hou. I'd say there is a lower percentage of "rubes" playing the game now.

Hope that helps.

And if it hasn't been mentioned yet, a HUGE pricing premium has been placed on speed. Anyone who runs as a 17 is not around a million dollars or higher. Frank Taveras, the best pinch runner in the set, went from 0.50 to something like 1.20 which is insane.