How bad can you be Part two

JPav, I am willing to put out my worst team from 2013 for dissection. I had been reading your posts about drafting an all .50 team and then picking up the leftovers after waivers were done. I gave it a try and failed miserably.

http://onlinegames.strat-o-matic.com/team/1126011

Looks like you lost about 4.5M in drop/adds with in season moves. That doesn't help. That is a lot of southpaws in your rotation in an evenly balanced park. Tulo only hitting .250, Hunter at .190 and Freeman hitting .232 is just bad luck I'd say.

That is one of the issues that I encountered trying to take the leftovers. The quality of pitching was terrible after waivers and I tried to put an offense together with the high priced leftovers and platoons elsewhere but my platoons really underperformed as well. My drops were only after a third of the season had passed, no one wanted to trade, and I was twenty plus games behind in the division so it was a last ditch effort to right the ship.

Thanks for offering your viewpoint.

JPav, I am willing to put out my worst team from 2013 for dissection.

That's funny, I was reading the threads about your best teams and trying to learn from them!

LMB hit the high points pretty well.

The drops (always the first clue I look to) only pulled about, what, 5% off your total available salary? I don't think this was a big factor here, although forfeiting any salary is rarely that great an idea, as fallacious as that may sound.

Your salary construction was a bit wacky. I know you were only working with the available pool, but I have to believe there were some higher priced SPs available that you passed on. You also overspent on the pen, but I imagine that was to support what you already knew to be a weak starting staff. Also, with regard to the all-lefty thing, stevep loves the all lefty starters, all righty relievers strategy. But he does this ahead of time and puts them in a park favoring the lefty starters. Using Torres as the reliever probably didn't hurt much here, because he is such a good card. But the trick is to go with a big righty R2, because those lineups of 6L hitters against lefties gets flipped right on its head as you move to the important late-middle to closing innings.

Your middle defense was fine, actually above average.

If you score five runs and give up four, you win 90 games. Your pitching staff was hanging around at 4.25, but the offense was completely hamstrung at less than 3.50 runs per game.

To me, knowing what you set out to do in advance, the biggest miscalculation you made was choosing Citi Field. It's a specialty park that demands a lot of SLG (to offset the many singles you do not get) and probably a lot of home run hitters. You likely should have gone with a Wrigley or something like that (not knowing what the pool would be offering in advance), although I don't know that in the end it would have made a HUGE amount of difference. Basically you didn't win because you didn't score, and you didn't score because you didn't get runners on base, and you didn't move the few runners you had because there weren't enough home run hitters in the arsenal.

The over-riding factor of all of the above, was HAL just hated this team. Your best hitters combined for a largely terrible effort, not likely duplicated if they were all given second chances. I have seen guys like Tulo, Freeman and Hunter post perfectly acceptable stats on other teams.

You obviously learned from this outlier though, because you are in fact building some nice teams since, no?

J Pav ,

Thank you for your insight. I have indeed had some success in 2013 (7 teams, 6 playoffs, 3 champs). I seem to do ok when I build a team with a plan in mind but the two teams that have or are failing are the two teams where I had to wing it. The above mentioned attempt at taking the leftovers and a current team where I am in your division. That team missed out on my top 7 draft picks and believe it or not over 70% of my draft. Here is what I said before the league started:

Ouch. I got stomped in the draft. Didn't get all four of my starters, my closer, my setup man, my 2b, my 3b, my LF, my CF and my DH. All I got was 1b, ss and Rf. Lotta work to do.

I have had success building a HR oriented team, Pitching team, SB team, team built for Progressive, etc. But if I don't get my first choices then I really struggle to reassemble a workable team. That is what interested me about your thread on picking up the leftovers and making a team out of it. I could definitely learn from you there.

To Eddie,

The OVER-RIDING lesson to learn from a terrible draft is to not impose your original interpretation of what you wanted to do on the players you actually received.

If you wanted nine home run hitters in the Cell and got five, maybe go for some defense and table-setters instead of taking Adam Dunn (because he's the next best available home run hitter left in the pool).

Remember your Bruce Lee: “Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”

Also, it doesn't hurt to have 30-40 teams under your belt when you try that experiment, either.

Meant to post this here:

I'm going to sacrifice a credit to try and draft the lineup I posted in the previous thread. If I can draft that in an auto league, I THINK it might be a good control...or maybe I'll just be proving a handful of players are overvalued? But then again, is the mispricing an element that could cause someone trying to break .500 to actually fail miserably (outside of salary dumps)?

Back when the introduced the 1986 season, SOM/SN had a promotion where they gave everyone free 86 teams. This lead us to start the ".50 cent league" where the object was to lose as many games as possible. So, here is quite possibly the worst strat-o-matic online team of all times, and "winner" of the loser's league, the aptly named "First Pick in the Draft":

http://onlinegames.strat-o-matic.com/team/77245

We did have _some_ rules in the league, mainly, you had to have a player on your roster for every position. This was to prevent anyone from, say, drafting a team of all catchers or something, and then playing 5s at every other position. The winning team was a good combination of horrible defense (lead the league in unearned runs), bad pitching (3rd worst in the league), and terrible hitting (2nd worst).

Honorable mentions here included my team, easily the worst hitting team. Featuring a .206/.273/.272 team hitting line with a total of 22 HRs all season long.

http://onlinegames.strat-o-matic.com/team/79136

Also impressive here were the "Benchwarming Slackers" with the worst league run differential and easily the worst pitching. 86 had a couple of "S1" starters (Juan Agosto, and Bob L. Gibson) who could get tired as a starter in the 1st inning, and were really key to this team. However, the most amazing stats were turned in by Ron Davis who had a truly horrendous 86 card and really shined in this league:

http://onlinegames.strat-o-matic.com/team/79970

So, there you go. Some marks to shoot for, such as it is.

FYI, this league was TONS of fun, and the players still talk about it today. I'd be up for doing it again, even if we had to burn a credit. I wonder if we could get SOM to just eliminate the playoff credits just so nobody is tempted to try to win once it's clear they aren't going to be one of the real losers?

How about a how bad can you draft league?

I am in a vet league where 1 GM drafts all .50 players then has to build a team through waivers from the undrafted players.

The GM in question has no special waiver options. He also has to have selected his stadium before knowing what is available in waivers.

each of the first 2 season the GM has been over .500...(86/76 and 82/80)

Meant to post this here:

I'm going to sacrifice a credit to try and draft the lineup I posted in the previous thread. If I can draft that in an auto league, I THINK it might be a good control...or maybe I'll just be proving a handful of players are overvalued? But then again, is the mispricing an element that could cause someone trying to break .500 to actually fail miserably (outside of salary dumps)?

So the draft just went, I got every single pick on my draft card...$79.95M

I guess most people have learned to avoid this overpriced gang of under-achievers:

http://onlinegames.strat-o-matic.com/team/1392139

1's and 2's up the middle...and everywhere, except for LF and 1B.

I think it could represent a team that is trying to win, but will fail miserably. (Although now I find myself rooting for them!)