GWJ OOTP League Thread

Pred, the GWJ OOTP league is awesome fun, between chatter here on the board and being a part of the actual in-game "action". I for one thoroughly appreciate that you keep things running!

If you could make my team not suck that would make it more fun for me.

pizzaddict wrote:

If you could make my team not suck that would make it more fun for me. :)

+1

Seriously, I'm having a great time with this. I look forward to each "New File!" a great deal. I love how the owners are all good guys who like to play with very little drama. And that the commish who keeps it all running so smoothly asks for and listens to our input.

Having a top drawer time with the game, m8y. Thanks for running the show. No rule changes have occurred to me, and I definately don't need my stadium expanded. I can't fill the one I have (except when the price rolled back to $0).

Prederick wrote:

EDIT: Oh, the most important question as Commish can ask. Is everyone enjoying themselves and having a good time? If not, how can I/we change that? Do we want to start talking about things like stadium expansion, or major rule changes? I'm open to just about anything, as long as it's fun and everybody's down with it.

Pred, you're awesome. I know I wouldn't have the patience or time to run this thing :). Also, sorry to everyone for missing all of last season and a chunk of the one before due to health issues...and thanks to Pred for not kicking me out without asking first.

The previous post prompted me to write this. I'm sure a lot of you know this, but if there's anyone that doesn't, you deserve to be playing on equal ground as those who do. For those of you struggling financially, go to Financial Info-> Advanced Info. There's a chart in the lower right of the screen showing your park's capacity and attendance. Ideally you want to just BARELY attract enough people to fill the seats. Some of this is determined by uncontrollable factors (mainly how good your team is and local interest), but the one variable you have control over is ticket prices. I set my ticket prices at $35.00 this season and was struggling to get attendance even though my team was very good. I dropped it down to $30.00, and the seats are packed. You can then hone in on an ideal ticket price by increasing ordecreasing ticket prices until you reach that magic equilibrium. Also note: doing this will affect the amount you have available for player extensions immediately, sometimes by a significant amount. It's a vital stat to manage on the financial side of the game.

Pred...really enjoy and always look forward to sim. My wife thinks i'm a bit obsessive about the game. Have a great appreciation for all the time you commit for our pleasure.
Thank You.

Great to hear guys, and Landshrk's post is dead-on RE: finances.

As always, any questions/concerns, just let me know and we'll try and work things out.

Anyway, new file! We're getting down to the real nitty-gritty part of the season, and it's looking more and more like most of the for the top spot are decided outside of the SL East, where Atlanta and Charlotte are breaking out the shanks for a real end-of-season donnybrook. The two will face off five more times before the year ends, so watch out.

Now, the wildcard slots are going to be much more interesting. Both leagues have four teams within 5 games of the final two playoff places, so expectations are high.

So, I've been poking around in the graphs section for Portland, and despite having a 51-68 record, it looks like we've actually improved in a lot of categories, including overall attendance. Granted, we have seen a drastic decrease in recent months after the team took a hit with injuries, but overall I'm pretty pleased with the progress I've been able to make from last year and looking to continue the rebuild in Portland next season

Holy crap! Just checked the new file and it looks like my starting pitcher Leon Long beaned Vancouver's Ramon Gomez which started a brawl and got both players suspended for 9 games Could be the start of some bad blood between the two teams as Vancouver seems to always destroy Portland whenever they play.

I want to beat Charlotte soooo badly. They are my archrivals!

Yeah, I think the rivalry between Portland and Vancouver started right around the draft. There are some reports that the Vancouver owner was talking a whole mess of smack about Portland and how they "suck" or something like that. Pretty sure that put a target on the Kings--just sayin'

Nice time to go on a 9-1 run! Though losing my #1 pitcher for the remainder of the season still stings. But about to get one of my better hitters back from the DL.

Question: what is up with the scouting star system? I have a guy who has been in the MLs for 5 years counting this one (so more like 4 2/3rds). He has been hitting approx. .300 the whole time. Pretty good fielder as well. Yet he's a 1-star guy. I have this other guy who's a 4.5 star guy who I can't keep in the majors because he couldn't get a hit to save his soul. I know the game is "approximating" the scouting so as to not be 100% accurate but I just don't understand it. It's to the point where I don't pay attention to star rankings at all as long as the guy I am looking at has any sort of track record. Having a star system is supposed to make my job evaluating all these thousands of players easier but if it can be so wrong, it just makes the whole scouting/evaluation system suspect in my eyes.

Any insights or commentary from my fellow owners?

tboon wrote:

Having a star system is supposed to make my job evaluating all these thousands of players easier but if it can be so wrong, it just makes the whole scouting/evaluation system suspect in my eyes.

Any insights or commentary from my fellow owners?

Yeah, I'm not sure I'm understanding the star system, either. I've just been looking at ratings (both actual and potential) and making decisions based on that more than star ratings. So far it seems to have worked out.

I know I'm preaching to choir/whining, but Pittsburgh is completely ravaged by injuries. We have relinquished that NL Eastern division lead awhile back and it's amazing that we are still in the playoff hunt at all. I don't think any of our big losses are returning from DL anytime soon so we are banking on the little guys picking up the slack for the next few weeks.

I fear my team has peaked in the previous season(s) and I'm looking at somewhat of a plateau and a slow decline to come.

CptDomano wrote:
tboon wrote:

Having a star system is supposed to make my job evaluating all these thousands of players easier but if it can be so wrong, it just makes the whole scouting/evaluation system suspect in my eyes.

Any insights or commentary from my fellow owners?

Yeah, I'm not sure I'm understanding the star system, either. I've just been looking at ratings (both actual and potential) and making decisions based on that more than star ratings. So far it seems to have worked out.

This is how I do it too. I have 1- and 2-star players who are far more reliable and effective for my purposes than 3-star+ guys.

I think the star system needs some reworking on how it evaluates players.

Without doing much research to back up the claim, I'm guessing the star system just means the player is at the high end for more than just one rating. For more ratings you get closer to 20, the higher your star ranking is.

If you check the lower stars, they may have one rating that is really high, but others that are mid range or low. So, still effective for the one area they're good in, but maybe mediocre overall? All I know is that I feel like I drafted a few two star players last year who I put on my major league roster and they're producing exactly how I wanted them to produce--hitting for average, stealing bases, etc.

CptDomano wrote:

Without doing much research to back up the claim, I'm guessing the star system just means the player is at the high end for more than just one rating. For more ratings you get closer to 20, the higher your star ranking is.

If you check the lower stars, they may have one rating that is really high, but others that are mid range or low. So, still effective for the one area they're good in, but maybe mediocre overall? All I know is that I feel like I drafted a few two star players last year who I put on my major league roster and they're producing exactly how I wanted them to produce--hitting for average, stealing bases, etc.

The discussion is way back in the thread, but after the first season we disabled scouting because it was clearly giving some teams an unfair advantage, and the scout you had when we started playing was basically random. The OSA scouting seems to give a huge edge to young players; most of my good-to-great older players are drastically undervalued by the star ratings.

I'm having a great time with the league. Just wish I can sign players to multiyear contracts in the off-season.

I was just thinking today that I had had pretty good luck with injuries this year. Whoops! MY 1B was spending a week in AAA after being out for two months (before that he was hitting .354/.445). Half way through the week he must have been beaned cause he's now out for 9 months with a concussion. Better luck next year.

New file!

It's Seattle and Dallas' league. The rest of us just play in it.

Credit to Brooklyn, Herman Cherry's earning his deal, leading the league in HRs, RBIs and extra base hits. Brian Burke leads the league in everything else (no seriously, he almost does).

I was looking through some stuff and found this gem.

On August 11, 2015 Roland Church pitched a no-hitter. But when I went to look at it, he was one walk away from a perfect game.

IMAGE(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/281072/no-no.png)

Pittsburgh fell out of the wild card spots.

Novocain wrote:

Pittsburgh fell out of the wild card spots.

I know

I have no idea how LA is below .500 with three SPs with ERAs around three, and five batters hitting +.300.

peedmyself wrote:

I have no idea how LA is below .500 with three SPs with ERAs around three, and five batters hitting +.300.

Their bullpen's bad and they can't hit for power...and they aren't stealing bases enough to play small ball.

Oh, and they have Dallas in their division, who are playing .650 ball, so that doesn't help.

I apologize if that's not an AI team :-/...it was just a quick assessment looking at the stats.

Quick question for the commish: How do we go about trading with AI teams?

EDIT: I'm not saying stealing bases is a very good idea very often. There's a magic number that a player has to be able to put up in order for it to generate runs rather than lose them. Keep in mind, though, optimal lineups and base stealing are only worth 1-2 wins per season (in MLB a run per season is worth about $5mil).

DOUBLE EDIT: I highly recommend reading The Book and Baseball for Brain Surgeons and Other Fans. There's a lot of stuff in there that flies in the face of the way managers write their lineups (the GMs should be writing lineups based on how badly managers do it) and what you hear from most of the awful color announcers who played the game back in the "old days". If you're in a close division and trying to eke out every possible advantage, those are the places I'd turn. Fangraphs is a great resource too, you can use it as a sort of reference to see what real world GMs do (Terry Francona, Joe Madden, etc) buy into sabermetric principles and use it often.

New file! The stretch run begins!

For the sake of speed, I took us all the way up to September 1st and roster expansion.

Even though we're only 4 1/2 out, I think Vancouver's done. We're not gonna finish much better than a game or two over or under .500, and that's not good enough for postseason play this year.

And it looks like most of the divisional races are over. The smallest lead is Atlanta, up six games over Miami. Every other division leader is up by a minimum of 10 games.

A few notes: Three teams are batting .280 or better; Dallas has a genuine shot at 200 Home runs; Brooklyn's Joe Johnson is a lock for Rookie of the Year; opponents are batting .304 against Memphis. No seriously.

Well, Atlanta's record might not last. Jon Reed and Ken Newman both landed themselves on the DL for a good 9-10 months. Kinda glad no one ended up trading me for Jimmy Lange now...

Phew. Thank god I got Riley to negotiate an extension before he hit the free agent market...$13mil a year seems like a steal even with the big money it may tie up. Taking him up to his 29-30 year old seasons seemed to be pretty low risk.

Landshrk83 wrote:

Phew. Thank god I got Riley to negotiate an extension before he hit the free agent market...

Oh shiiiiiiiii...Yeah, contracts. Extensions. Free Agency. All things I neglect to think about. Crap.

Yeah I just locked in Petty and Church (the only two young'uns on my team who could be superstars) to long-term deals. Got'em on the pretty cheap ($6MM/year and $7MM/year, each for 4 years starting next year). Quite a step up from the $432k they are making now but a lot better than trying to bid in our crazy FA market.

tboon wrote:

Yeah I just locked in Petty and Church (the only two young'uns on my team who could be superstars) to long-term deals. Got'em on the pretty cheap ($6MM/year and $7MM/year, each for 4 years starting next year). Quite a step up from the $432k they are making now but a lot better than trying to bid in our crazy FA market.

I like doing the "Evan Longoria" and offering youngsters long term contracts really soon after calling them up at below what they could make, but WAY above what they're currently making. That's how I had Riley for around 6mm/yr this long.

EDIT: Interesting article for those who follow MLB on Felix Hernandez's almost stupidly big extension:

http://bit.ly/WEoyfv

If you look at his FIP from last season, he, Justin Verlander and Clayton Kershaw all fell within a 0.1 difference in FIP (basically negligible). In what looks to be a very lean free agent market for SP in our league this year (we only have 3 elite level pitchers looking like they may be free agents, not counting extensions of current deals), I wonder how closely the contracts will be compared to MLB?