Small Ball 101

Since like many others, I am nearing the end of the line here, I figured I'd share my, ahem, "knowledge" about winning at Small Ball. To me, the keys to being successful playing small ball are: Speed, Defense and Pitching.

SPEED:
As the saying goes, "Speed Kills". A team full of all 17 rated runners puts a lot of pressure on the defense and the outfield arms in particular. When I have all (or nearly all) 17's on the base paths, I set my team to VERY AGGRESSIVE baserunning. You will take a ton of extra bases over the course of the season, far more extra bases than the times you get caught.

Base stealing is also critical. My small ball teams are typically all 17's and all A's or better, but preferably AA (19-15) stealers. They too put pressure on the defense and force teams to hold runners on which leads to more hits and batting averages often times higher than anticipated for the park you are playing in. I set my hitters to STEAL MORE and I set my team to CONSERVATIVE. Often times this will result in both leading the league in Steals and SB Success %. Typicall yielding a success rate in the 75%-80% range (with all AA's), sometimes you'll only by 70%-75%, but other times you'll be over 80%, that is affected by your opponents Pitchers hold ratings and catchers arms. Speaking of catcher's arms, I'll steal on a guy with a -2 arm but a 20 Throwing error rating all day long.

DEFENSE:
Preferably all 1's if feasible, but mandatory up the middle (SS, 2B & CF). No worse than 2's at the corner outfield positions and no worse than 3's at 1B, 3B and C. Low E ratings if possible. Minus arms in the OF, stronger the better for the same reason mentioned above, cut down on the extra bases taken against you. Catcher defense is highly underrated if you ask me. I'm not so much worried about the range rating, though I prefer a 1 or 2. But it's the other things, E rating, throwing arm, Passed Balls and Throwing Errors. I've seen Roger Bresnahan (who looks great as a small ball catcher at first glance) commit 50 errors in a season which is insane. And I've lost Championships due to a Passed Ball. Guys with bad PB ratings could give up 50 passed balls in a season. Personally, I almost always sacrifice offense and speed behind the plate, give me a good CHEAP defensive catcher (Molina) and I'm a happy guy.

PITCHING:
In a small ball park (Petco, Braves 38, Forbes 09, Griffith 41) you can go different directions, I've lead the league in pitching with $5-$6 mill starters because of my home park and the defense I put behind them. The key is getting pitchers who's price is artificially lower because they give up a lot of BP HR's.

In DH leagues (my preference), I do prefer all S9* rated pitchers, but will settle for the right S8*'s or even S7*'s. In a DH league where they won't get pulled for a pinch hitter, S7's will pitch many complete games if set to F0, F1, F2 or F3. The better the pitcher the lower the F rating I use. If you can't tell just by looking the cards over, sort to the pitchers with the lowest WHIP. Or use Diamond Dope, choose your park and download the player pool into an excel spreadsheet and sort by Batted Runs allowed. In DH leagues, I will have 4 Reliever Only and typically spend no more than $4 mill on my bullpen. If my starters are all S9's for example, I will have 2 9L's and 2 9R's , set them to quick hook, max 1-2 and avoid opposite side. I set NO roles. Let HAL make the choice and more often than not, he will do okay.

In Non-DH League, I am not as worried about the fatigue rating because I know many times a starter will get pulled for a pinch hitter. So I'll live with S6's, S7's and S8's. It's not worth spending the extra cash on an S9 who might only go 6-7 innings anyways. Set the starters fatigue ratings the same way, or even lower so they don't get pulled and ONLY get pinch hit for. (F0, F1 or F2). In Non-DH leagues, I typically carry a 5 man bullpen, 2 9L's and 2 9R's and one guy around $2 mill who is pretty solid (Turk Lown with -6 hold is a great example, super tough in Petco), set NO ROLES for this pitcher and HAL will choose him first almost every time. I also look for pitchers with a good hold rating. But if your catcher has a -4 arm, you can get by with guys with a + Hold rating. Still I like to get my combined pitcher/catcher ratings as close to -5 as possible (-5 is the best you get, anything better than that is overkill).

Bunting:
A team full of A rated bunters when set to Bunt More and Very Aggressive can really play hell with a bad defensive team. If my team is pitching heavy, I will do more bunting because that means I've sacrificed offense for pitching and I need to manufacture runs. If I have a strong offensive team, I'll set bunting to conservative and leave the hitters unchecked. But any hitter rated as a BAD bunter will be checked Do Not Bunt.

Hit & Run:
I don't really care about H & R. I have built Bunt Heavy teams and H & R heavy teams, the H & R teams never produced like expected, so I never encourage H & R. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. But I have never seen the results to make it worthwhile.

Clutch:
Clutch is fickle, I've built All Clutch teams and gotten an extra 45 hits in a season and I've also had All Clutch teams that only produced 15 extra hits a season. So I view clutch as nice, but not critical. And I follow the old school thought of putting my clutch hitters at 5 & 6 in the lineup.

gbA's:
Look for hitters with LOW gbA's and pitchers with HIGH gbA's. With high gbA pitchers and all 1's on defense, you will very likely lead the league in Double Plays turned on defense which is great. Many pitchers have ZERO gbA's on their cards, anything over 6 is very good, the really good ones are around 12 gbA's on their pitching card. For hitters, since runs are at a premium for a small ball team, you need to minimize the number of Double Plays you hit into, so look for low gbA hitters. 20 is the standard number of gbA's for a typical hitter, but there are guys with less than 5-10, look for them if possible. Your number 2 hitter should be a low gbA guy (and an A bunter) on the assumption your leadoff man gets on base a lot, you don't want him wiped out on a double play before your 3 and 4 hitters step to the plate.

Here are some of my favorite players by position:

1B - Frank Chance & George Sisler.
2B - Frankie Frisch & Johnny Evers (if going cheap)
SS - Aparicio, Ozzie, Bush, Bowa
3B - Collins, Figgins
LF - Willie Wilson
CF - Lofton, Suzuki
RF - Suzuki, Gwynn
C - Molina, Petway, other Cheap 1's with good arms and good sub ratings.

That's all I can think of for now.

Thanks for sharing! I need to think about GBAs a bit more.

Thanks for sharing! I need to think about GBAs a bit more.

It can be a game changer ... Literally.

Brilliant, you've cracked the code. Tip of the hat!

For $80-100M leagues, I do like these fellas below for small ball, though they don't meet all the criteria you note above (I kinda aim for OBP perhaps more than speed, but what you say above is convincing, and really fun, so I will experiment henceforth with some "speed demons"):

Tris Speaker in CF (any card)
Lajoie at 2B (8.78M)
Geronimo/Kreevich platoon in CF
Lavaillierre/Ruel platoon at C
Mercer/Figgins platoon at 3B
Phil Bradley/Clines platoon in LF or RF

On pitching, I've always gone with the *9 four ace approach. Now that I see it may be possible to try *8s or even *7s, may look at doing that. I like a very cheap bullpen, under 1M for each reliever, in $80 and $100M.

I think you'll really be surprised at how low $ you can go on pitching. A true SB team, concentrating on defense and speed, can really affect the outcome of games. It's early but Just started a SB team that is 5-1 and the my pitchers are 2 *4's, an *5 and an *7. 4 of the 6 games were complete games. Like egvrich says, if you concentrate on defense and speed the pitching sort of falls in place. Maybe 29-30M for the pitching. Egv has really been helpful in my SB education and you would do well to listen.

I think you'll really be surprised at how low $ you can go on pitching. A true SB team, concentrating on defense and speed, can really affect the outcome of games. It's early but Just started a SB team that is 5-1 and the my pitchers are 2 *4's, an *5 and an *7. 4 of the 6 games were complete games. Like egvrich says, if you concentrate on defense and speed the pitching sort of falls in place. Maybe 29-30M for the pitching. Egv has really been helpful in my SB education and you would do well to listen.

Yep, there are plenty of great sub 8 Mill pitchers for a pitchers park that allow you to spend more on your offense, that is always the struggle in small ball ... scoring enough runs to win consistently. There's even some guys that are sub 4 million that will regularly deliver great results. $2.6 Mill Dave Boswell is an example.

indeed.
And if you build a team right, unlike the case of stolen base settings, you would be looking for a super super aggressive ludicrous speed Base Running setting.

Because typically, the most aggressive setting is still not as aggressive as I'd like when you are getting maybe 60% advancement attempts, with a ratio of success to outs in the 10:1 range.

Especially when you have high OBA, at least for me I'd want that risk to go higher. I'd like to see a 75% advancement rate that causes me to get the success ratio down in the 70% range or so.

Here's a pretty typical small ball team for me, albeit at a higher than normal cap in a 24 team league:

https://365.strat-o-matic.com/league/st ... ing/463041

1st in the league in SB
2nd in SB %
3rd in Fielding %
2nd in Double Plays turned
1st in Pitching

about 2/3 of the way down the list for runs scored. But the other things made up for the lack of runs scored.

As an additional mention, GbAs are obvious to avoid for smallball hitters as they are particularly devastating to a team without longball threats, but I usally also avoid strikeouts, popouts, lineouts, shallow flyouts. Of course getting the max GbCs and deep flyballs is good. Get hitters who move runners with outs.

Reverse that value for your pitchers. A guy may not have a lot of strikeouts but some of them replace that with lots of popouts and lineouts which is just as good.
Get pitchers that have maximum outs that don't move runners

As an additional mention, GbAs are obvious to avoid for smallball hitters as they are particularly devastating to a team without longball threats, but I usally also avoid strikeouts, popouts, lineouts, shallow flyouts. Of course getting the max GbCs and deep flyballs is good. Get hitters who move runners with outs.

Reverse that value for your pitchers. A guy may not have a lot of strikeouts but some of them replace that with lots of popouts and lineouts which is just as good.
Get pitchers that have maximum outs that don't move runners

It would be great if you could download all of that info from Diamonddope ...

Give me pitchers with K's, popouts, lineouts, gbA's, Flyball C's like Frankie said.