Out of the Park Baseball 19 - The quest for the Perfect Team

May S281 team has had a magic number of 1 for 4 5 games now. :(

It looks like Skowron’s quest for the triple crown is coming to an end. He’s been in a bit of homerun slump and is now 7 behind JD Martinez. I don’t see him knocking out 7-8 homers in the next 8 games.

The Kraken are now tied for the #1 wild card spot, still 4 games back in the division.

Well, when he does play, he’ll be Rusty.

Har har, couldn’t resist.

Those steroids I got my team kicked in by the 8th inning.

That game got me a shit-ton of achievement pp, including 3000 pp for “Dominating Show” – score 20 runs in a shutout.

They finally managed to win a game and get over the hump. They took so long they lost out on being the first team to win a division by 1 day. My diamond team continues their late season mediocrity and are currently 74-80 with a tough schedule for the rest of the season.

My North Center Robots are in the Bronze .255 playoffs too. QT3 has a pretty good chance at taking the trophy home.

I walked right into that!

I just got locked out of the Wild Card running, but considering how bad the first two months were the fact that it took until 160 games had been played was ok. We’re 84-76 but left ourselves with too much work to do to close the gap to the leaders.

My season completely flipped around when I made some changes to how we played defence and moved my entire pen to pitchers who induce ground balls. We were dead last for runs against and almost last for.ERA at that point and now we’re first for runs against, first for starter’s ERA and second in defensive efficiency.

Sounds like they could well set for a nice run next season then. My S281 team is now 91-69 with 2 games left, and will be playing in a divisional series. My D374 team is 76-84, and will likely end the season at 76-86. Since my main goal was to avoid relegation when first moving up to diamond I guess I should consider it a successful season, but still somewhat painful after they had a decent 1st half of above .500 ball. It will be a long time before we have a team that can probably finish top 4 and promote to perfect, so we will continue next season trying to avoid relegation and maybe get a little bit better. My other team will likely be on its way to gold, and a few seasons of building there.

On my silver team, I added Larry Dierker to the rotation this year and Sean Doolittle and Brandon Morrow to the bullpen. Dierker hasn’t done as well as I hoped, especially considering how he is performing in diamond for my other team, but Doolittle and Morrow have done pretty well.

My one addition in diamond was Bob Boone at catcher, and he hasn’t performed that well with his bat hitting .241. I don’t how well he has helped my pitchers out, but hopefully that catcher ability helped somewhat.

GB/FB is definitely something I need to pay closer attention to as I upgrade pitchers.

Sweet, the team I am going to have to play in the wild card game has won 12 in a row and has a perfect trout and chris sale as well as a couple diamond players. This should be fun.

Oh wow, you’re also in B.255? You have the second-best record in the league! Also, fun fact: Qt3 is represented by Robots, Librarians, and Red Stockings. Seems fitting.

Anyway, good luck to you and the Librarians in the playoffs. It’s all very exciting!

@vyshka: My Larry Dierker has been very good – 9-2 with a 3.30 ERA since I acquired him late in the season.

He was 13-10 for me in diamond, and I think at one point that was like 12-4. I’ve been happy with him. I didn’t have him for very long in silver. I expect he will do better.

Ted Williams has joined my Entry League team, which is going to be an all-Boston team. He’s played in only 6 games so far, and he’s hitting a disappointing .190. I’m sure he’ll turn it around!

One question, though: he’s got stats from 2023, 2022, and 2021, in things like SiL, GoL, and DiL. Silver, Gold and Diamond Leagues, right? (He hit okay there: .280 or so – but nothing like .406, say.) So he’s been playing for 3 or 4 real life weeks, and he’s now back in the Entry League with me, right? I hadn’t realized the market covered all leagues. Just one Auction House for all of us, then?

On the other end of the scale, I have a 59 OVR Ehire Adrianza who has played for me all year and is hitting almost .300. I can’t bring myself to sit him down. Thanks in part to him, my entry-league team has won 130 games already.

The 100 win dream fell short, but Akron was able to finish above .600 and secure the league’s best record at 99-63.

Future Legend Adonis Medina has been my ace and should get some Cy Young considerations… he’s ending the season 24-2 with a 2.51 ERA. On the whole the Aeros lead the league in batting average, runs against, starter ERA and bullpen ERA. I did adjust the ballpark factors a little - .95 for home runs from each side but I can’t imagine it was that much of an impact.

There was a three-way tie in my league as well. Two of the teams are battling it out for the Central division title, with the loser playing #2 from my division for the second Wild Card slot.

You are correct on all three questions.

Am I a bad person? Before this morning’s one-game wildcard playoff, I looked at my rotation, which seriously slumped by the end of the season. Not liking my choices for the single game, I sniped a 93-rated Aaron Nola off the auction house for 4500pp, about 1000 pp below his average price. He started the wildcard, and won it, pitching 8.2 innings for a 6-3 victory.

Obviously there’s no prohibition on changing your playoff roster after September 1, as there is in real life MLB. So what I did is legal, but somehow it feels cheesy.

Still, all my additions have been with earned points – haven’t spent a dime on this game beyond the initial purchase, so I’m not whaling.

EDIT: I realize now my opponent also started a pitcher he had just picked up at auction, albeit a 72-rated Denny Martinez. Now I don’t feel quite so bad.

I don’t really know what happened here. I’m sure that with two games left I was three games behind the Wildcard spots, but I won my last two and I guess everyone else lost… because I made the one-game playoff.

This was kind of funny at first, until I saw who I was playing against - The Canaries.

The Canaries have a Norwich City Football Club badge and their manager wears the English St. George flag, so he’s almost certainly a Norwich fan. I’m an Ipswich Town fan and those two teams do not like each other, so I had to win.

The Canaries like to steal a lot and struggle against lefties, so I pulled one of the SP I’d put in my pen back out into the rotation because he was a leftie with an enormous “Hold Runners” rating and changed some of my strategy sliders and… I’ve no idea if it really made a difference but we won!

It took a Mark McGwire two-run home run in the 12th inning to do it, but I don’t care. I won and Norwich lost. I can now get swept in the Division series.

Congrats!!!

Won my division by 6 in Bronze .263, now 1-1 in the divisional series and the servers are down so I can’t see what happened last game – AARGH!

Question, what is the criteria for getting promoted into a silver league next year? Do you have to win the series in bronze?