Eddie E wrote: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?