Platoons in small ball

I'm really enjoying my adventures in small ball. I have noticed a lot of teams that platoon positions in small ball. Is there an advantage, albeit to take advantage of the L/R, imbalance? Or, is this a $ saving strategy? What other advantages/disadvantages are there. I, for the most part, try to go with a single batter with high OBP and low injury. Any thoughts out there guys.

Platoons can maximize value of lower priced hitters. The downside is the value is lost if platoon players are left on the bench.

generally spend x3/x4 on platooners vs righty pitching

a good cheap platoon vs lefty pitching can also be used as a late game defensive player or runner as well

Agreed, overspend vs. RHP's compared to LHP's. Look for your platoon players vs. LHP's to be as close to $1M as possible.

Great platoon vs. RHP's under $4M: Carew, Nellie Fox, Mazzili, Jamieson, Backman, Bush, many more.

Great stuff on here and totally agree.
In fact, the advantages of platoons generally can be even more pronounced in small ball at lower caps because guys with 7-8 BPHRs on a side are typically more extremely one sided and more expensive than a comparable small ball platooner.

One thing I have noted is in leagues where every owner has optimized to their park and taken mostly good values for their rosters, you can have a league where everyone has a good record at home and struggles on the road.

In that case, it can be advantageous to include a guy on the roster who has small ball chops (like speed and OBA) but still has characteristics that match to a majority of road environments, especially in one's own division. The cap determines how necessary this may be but it can be very effective. I'd posit it is approximately directly proportional to the cap, and gains noticeable importance around 100M and above.

So the balance in some cases is remaining dominant at home but not being completely dominated on the road, and there is no formula for that. Every league is different and so as you experiment keep it in mind. You could have a winning combo 3 leagues in a row and then you hit a league where it falls flat. Don't assume you have to abandon your core approach. It may just need a tweak to account for the league environment.

Platoons seem to work well in any park.

Absolutely true.
The question is--what is the optimized value play?

Anyone can put together a platoon that will do just fine. But is it salary-optimized for L-R balance and for home-away balance?
And is it a better price per run created than a single every day guy and a partial scrub backup. Usually the answer is yes to the second question.

One factor I consider when it comes to the cost-effectiveness of platooning is what I tend to call the "Platoon vs. Scrub discount."

An 80M or 100M team is likely to have a few benchwarming scrubs who cost .5M—just to fill SOM's roster requirement of a 24 player minimum. A manager will have to pay that .5M whether the scrub player is especially useful or not.

A RH platoon player who hits lefties (lets say a 5L) and costs maybe .90 is only costing .40M more than that .50M benchwarming scrub. So you're actually geting the RH platoon player for just .4M more than you'd have to pay simply to fill the roster slot.

I believe that this "Platoon vs. Scrub discount" is one reason that platooning players often proves to be cost-effective.

One thing I always wanted to do, but didn't have the time to do was to go through Diamonddope, log each "viable" small ball players NERP, then adjust it for their fielding to come up with an adjusted NERP and divide that by the player's cost or something like that.

In theory, it would give you a players true relative value per million dollars spent.

And I'm sure other far more ambitious person than I have done something like this or very similar to this. But it sure would be a useful tool.

roniwas--not exactly the same thing, but you may also find some interesting examples in the barnstormers championship league ss well.

In fact, a few excellent managers take a diferent approach than a traditional method, sometimes which includes players one may not immediately think of as textbook choices.

I favor the style rich has successfully described, which I would view as traditional smallball, but there are people who use platoons and/or a smallball angle but different player choices than you might expect.

https://365.strat-o-matic.com/league/464012

Peace