Has the Secret Formula changed??

The not so secret formula that I believe was JPav's --was, in it's simplest form, 40% $ spent on pitching and 60% hitting (or 32M-48M for an 80M team)--he broke it down further--especially with pitching staff, but that is in archives for anyone wanting to read it.

Is 32M spent on pitching sufficient for the average team now?? I find I'm spending more and more on pitching--even before this season--but especially with rules changes this season it seems inevitable that the average team needs more pitching.

If the Secret Formula has changed--by how much? 45%-55%? 50%-50%?--seems to me I'm spending 45% on most of my teams now--I did try one 50%-50%ish team but it was a failure.

If I recall correctly even in the secret formula there was a differenciation between spending on pitching in pitcher's park vs. power parks. This year I tend to spend between 20-25 million in a high power low singles like Citizens. That seems to work. I dont find spending in the high 30s in a pitcher's park like Marlins or AT&T has worked. My best team this year--102 wins-- I spent about 34 million on pitching in AT&T. In a high singles Kaufman I spent 25 million and have a 51-30 record.

I have done better this year when have I have put together a very good offense (for the park I'm in) and spending too much on pitching makes that difficult. Last year it felt that you could select a pitcher's park, put all 1s and you could win. But I havent seen that happening this year.

But it is true that I have to spend more on relief this year because otherwise there will be too many holes. And I tend to always go with good defense to put less stress on the pitching staff. But spending a ton on pitching hasnt worked for me. Winning in this game depends on finding value and I think it gets a bit harder to do that when spending over 35 million.

The essence of The Secret Formula was finding out what championship teams were doing, that other teams were not. To do this I usually sampled 15-25 champs teams from any given season. The similarities generally just jumped off the page at you.

I lost the energy to keep providing seasonal reports, mostly because I was just finding new ways to say the same old things, but anyone who has the enthusiasm could easily do it for where we’re at in this season.

My guess is that pitching salaries have probably moved up some (although ballpark selections matter too, as freeman noted).

New to online Stat and spent some time working through some of this stuff. Only to now find out it was already mostly done 15 years ago.

Anyhow interested in “professional thoughts” on what I came up with.

Basically, for the hitter/pitcher split, my impression was 50% hitter rolls, 36% pitcher rolls, and 14% fielder X rolls (hitters again, except for the “pitcherx” which I just have to ignore). This implied a $29 million (and top heavy) pitching budget. I believe the “formula” then suggests to relatively overspend on pitching?

Next, it seems like a big thing is to exploit pricing inefficiencies. I am working with older years, ‘82 and ‘86. What I have done is rank players (more in a second) then map that rank to the “slot value” for that rank. As an example in 1982 I ranked Doug Decinces as the sixth best batter. The sixth highest salary is ~$10 mil while his salary is ~$8 mil, making him a very desirable player to draft. The next iteration of that might be to sort through by positions.

For rankings I took the leap of faith that the cards would accurately reflect the underlying stats which I am now seeing is only true maybe 70-80% of the time. Those inefficiencies can only be found by painstakingly examining the cards for them especially with pitchers.

Anyhow for hitters, I used modified OPS, 1.5*OBP+SLG to approximate the sabermetric thinking of their relative importance. RC/27 might be even better but a fielding adjustment is unwieldy. Once I had that, I adjusted for fielding. For example Alan Trammell is a “1” SS, the most valuable defender, and gets 0.140 added to his adjOPS. So despite an actual OPS of 720 he winds up the #42 overall batter. The defensive adjustments are less beneficial/severe moving to 2B/CF, 3B, LF/RF/1B. Does this look about right? Catcher I haven’t figured out yet; “arm” seems to really play up versus 1-4 rating.

Pitchers did much the same, calculating an adjusted OPS allowed, and dusted off Bill James’ component ERA calculation and averaged those two ranks. Again, looking for salary discrepancies. But the pitching cards, drive me nuts, seems like many of the guys who ought to be good, are demonstrably worse than those who ought to be bad, so further understanding is needed.

Meanwhile, I’d suggest that I don’t fully understand the pitching process, or the process where relievers are called, so it might be better to spend up on what I think I do understand which is hitters.

Bear in mind this is mainly done “before” playing even one season. Severely overestimated platoon hitters for one thing, which I’m working on. Any comments or critiques to help me work out the bugs are welcomed though!

Basically, for the hitter/pitcher split, my impression was 50% hitter rolls, 36% pitcher rolls, and 14% fielder X rolls (hitters again, except for the “pitcherx” which I just have to ignore). This implied a $29 million (and top heavy) pitching budget. I believe the “formula” then suggests to relatively overspend on pitching?

Pitchers have their own x-rolls, so the breakdown is basically 60% hitters cards ($48 mil) and 40% pitchers cards ($32 mil).

The older leagues really stuck to that for a long, long time. Gradually, we saw the rise of the $40 mil staff (the $20 mil pitching staff goes all the way back). Ballparks, which at one point held little influence, are of greater importance now in how you go about your team’s salary construction.

FWIW, The Secret Formula stuff applies ONLY to 200x leagues. ATG, Mystery Leagues, etc have their own nuances.

Surfdoc,
A few pointers maybe:
(1) First, a good source of info on player stats for 20XX is the Baseball Ratings Guide. Thst costs about $15. For ATG you can look at Diamond Dope.
(2) The park youre in is a huge part of the game. If youre in a power park like Citizens you want to load up on power guys with 8 BP homeruns. If youre in a low power bp park but a high singles park you might want to focus on pitching, defense, good arms in the outfield, and speed. Exploiting your ballpark while still being able to be competitive in a park opposite to your own is a fine art.

(3) number crunchers vs ballpark strategy: Some owners focus more on number crunching, others on finding players that fit their park. The key in Strat is finding value over their stated price. This can be done because you think Strat has misevaluated a player or that a player, even if Strat has the basic value exactly right, can be used in conjunction with other players that increasea overall value.
For example, I hypothesize that if in a low power park I put together a team with a high batting average, good defense, good speed, good arms...that this will together create value. In ATG 8, which I only played once, there were cards players identified that were mispriced and veteran players took advantage of that. ATG 9 has fixed many of those errors. Because there are so many cards in ATG and more extreme parks, it is easier to max out on strategies because you can find players that fit the strategies. It's harder to do in 20XX because of scarcity.
(4) Used to be that you could find value in getting 4 stud * pitchers in 20XX because you could get 300+ inings from those guys amd spend little on relief but changes to fatigue rules have reduced their value. Relief pitchers with high relief ratings of R3+ and elite relief stats used to go 300-400 innings. But the super-reliever problem has been substantially reduced due to changes in fatigue rules and a max of two roles in the bullpen.
(5) Heavy platooning to create value--Very viable in ATG, but much harder in 20XX due to card scarcity
(6) J-Pav's secret formula was basically to look at teams that won championships and try to identify common characteristics of championship teams. A good defense of 1 or 2s at SS, 2B, and CF was one commality; another was a amount spent on pitching vs hitting. It's not a theorectical construct but simply looking at what championships teams actually do most of the time. Some teans dont follow the formula and still win...but it is certainly something to consider.

I dont know exactly what youre doing in examining players but if you are only looking at some characteristics you may be missing aspects of player value that will make your evaluations incorrect. Personally, I like to figure out my players BA OBP Slug in my home park and seeing if I like that given their price. And then look at my team numbers and see if I like them based on my experience of what they should look like..

Good luck!

Basically, for the hitter/pitcher split, my impression was 50% hitter rolls, 36% pitcher rolls, and 14% fielder X rolls (hitters again, except for the “pitcherx” which I just have to ignore). This implied a $29 million (and top heavy) pitching budget. I believe the “formula” then suggests to relatively overspend on pitching?

Pitchers have their own x-rolls, so the breakdown is basically 60% hitters cards ($48 mil) and 40% pitchers cards ($32 mil).

The older leagues really stuck to that for a long, long time. Gradually, we saw the rise of the $40 mil staff (the $20 mil pitching staff goes all the way back). Ballparks, which at one point held little influence, are of greater importance now in how you go about your team’s salary construction.

FWIW, The Secret Formula stuff applies ONLY to 200x leagues. ATG, Mystery Leagues, etc have their own nuances.

I've seen a ton of mentions on drafting to fit your ballpark.

But in our league, 11 owners and one robot owner, the ballparks were the last thing we picked, in the 26th round.

So how do you do THAT?

Plus, what if you draft a pitching and defense squad, planning to grab the Astrodome, but somebody else gets it first?

I've seen a ton of mentions on drafting to fit your ballpark.

But in our league, 11 owners and one robot owner, the ballparks were the last thing we picked, in the 26th round.

So how do you do THAT?

Plus, what if you draft a pitching and defense squad, planning to grab the Astrodome, but somebody else gets it first?

When reading advice on this forum assume it is based on an Autodrafted $80M DH team. Drafting to fit your ballpark means choosing your park first and then building your team to fit the stadiums parameters. If you choose a hitters park then get some sluggers and a staff with low ball park HR's. Pitchers park? Do the opposite.

Your league did a live draft. If you are picking your park at the end of the draft your choices will dwindle. I'm not a live draft guy but maybe there is an option where you can choose your ballpark earlier. Something to look into for future drafts. Also...Welcome to the game!

So another thing I just did was note (sample n=1 league) that top SP's may face ~1000 batters but top batters get only 650 or so PA's. Not sure what to make of that.

On the hitter side of things. Once all the batters are ranked on the same scale (I used an adjusted OPS with a further adjust for defensive rating), it is possible to tee up Excel Solver and ask for an optimal lineup for any given payroll.

Wonder if anyone else has tried that, and how it might have worked out?

The not so secret formula that I believe was JPav's --was, in it's simplest form, 40% $ spent on pitching and 60% hitting (or 32M-48M for an 80M team)--he broke it down further--especially with pitching staff, but that is in archives for anyone wanting to read it.

Is 32M spent on pitching sufficient for the average team now?? I find I'm spending more and more on pitching--even before this season--but especially with rules changes this season it seems inevitable that the average team needs more pitching.

If the Secret Formula has changed--by how much? 45%-55%? 50%-50%?--seems to me I'm spending 45% on most of my teams now--I did try one 50%-50%ish team but it was a failure.

I looked at 14 2019 $80M Autoleauge Championship teams that began play in March.
They follow the SF for RV allocation.

Pitching - $32.6M (SP - 20.9 RP - 11.7)
Hitting - 46.8
RP's costing < $1.00 - 2.4/team

Posts about the new bullpen rules began appearing in mid-May. I've found 14 other teams that started at that time. They are 2/3 of the way through their seasons. I'll report back on their distribution of funds when Champs are crowned in a month or so. I'll be interested to see if the cheap RP's show a decrease.