Congrats!
Our run through the playoffs finally ended in the bronze finals, losing 4 games to 2.
I went 55-28 from July 1 to the end of the season, ending up on top of the division by 3 games. Led the league in runs allowed, slightly below middle of the pack offensively.
Ended up getting beat 3-1 in the Division Series, losing to the WC team who had finished behind me in my division. I’ve made the playoffs as a division winner four times now, and it always seems to end with this type of whimper.
I’ve got about 24K PP saved up, but I’m having trouble deciding where to spend it. I’ll probably just roll it back for another year and see if any of my position players can perform closer to their ratings.
Let’s see…
Washington (Perfect) - got demolished in the whale Perfect league
Leesburg (Silver) - my packs-only team made it to the world series and took a 2-0 lead but lost games 3 and 4 on the road (one to a walk-off homer and one in extra innings). The could not recover and lost games 3 and 4. They’re moving up to Gold.
Annandale (Silver) - won division but lost in the first series to a division rival
Texas Rangers (Iron) - lost wild card game (I hate wild card games!)
Motown (Bronze) - did not make playoffs but raked in some awards at end of season (see pic)
Venusville (Silver) - lost the division series.
Motown’s end-of-year awards:
Yowza. Greatness.
Nice! My silver team can’t decide if it is going to have a good year or not, alternating months of playing well with poorly. At least they are only 2.5gb right now.
Grats on the Rivera pull… I can only assume that’s worth a bucket of PP. You going to keep or sell it?
Most of my teams are doing well - my Washington team in Perfect got together with a bunch of like-minded individuals (and got out of the whale league) and is doing fairly well. Motown, on the other hand, the exact same team that won something like 90 games last year in the exact same league - is playing under .500 ball (for the first two months we were only winning 1/3 of our games … it was super ugly).
Here’s a question for you baseball experts. When upgrading a starting pitcher, I find myself often buying incremental upgrades - going from a low gold to a high gold, going from a high gold to a low diamond. Do you think that’s a decent strategy or should I just save up the PP and buy a much higher-priced pitcher (say someone in the 15k+ range?). The reason I don’t do this is because I am not very patient and it’s frustrating to play for 2+ weeks and not make any changes to your team!
The reason I ask this is because I’ve gotten some low diamond starters on a couple of teams and they don’t seem to do measurably better than the pitchers they’re replacing. Oh sure, they’re “better” but not “wow, so much better.”
As a newb to OOTP (this is my first time playing) the RNG of the players seems to give a pretty wide +/-window to the base ratings. Which is good in that you can have solid gold/silver teams beat diamond teams. But sucks because you’re making somewhat blind decisions on players. And I’m assuming a RNG is involved, because otherwise there are enough games/datapoints that a higher rated player should always outperform a lower rated one over the course of a season, and especially multiple seasons.
So, I generally give a player a few seasons to play to what I perceive as their ‘level’ and if they don’t meet that I try and find a replacement in the AH. Sometimes I grab a lower rated player for less PP than I sell the underperforming player for and see how that goes figuring I’m not losing PP and should always be able to break even at worst.
I’m probably going to sell. The last 7 days average on the auction house is a whopping 275k pp. I can’t pass that up. For now, I have decided to to throw him out there to see how he does for a few games, but I’m pretty overmatched in Perfect right now, so the closer hasn’t even gotten into the game since I pulled him, since my team hasn’t been tied or ahead late in the game. I should maybe move him to the stopper role to give him some innings.
Grats on the Rivera card. I’ve never even gotten a blue card from a pack, the RNG gods looked down upon you. Can’t pass up that 275K points.
Yankee fan whales abound.
Too bad there wasn’t a market for trading PP for real $.
I finally got rid of my Yogi Berra. Just one of many many catchers to consistently play well below their ratings. I’m not sure I’ve had a starting catcher bat over .200 for a season. So now my new starting catcher Buster Posey is hitting at… .190 after a dozen games. Sigh
I had Posey and he was doing well for me in Silver, but I wanted a historical card, so I ditched him for the 85 OVR Thurmond Munson. So far so good; Munson is currently hitting .350 on 30+ games. Other catchers I have that are doing well are Ernie Lombardi (I forget his rating but he’s a gold), the live Realmuto, and the Silver Ted Simmons. Or you could go with LaValliere, and accept ok hitting and great defense.
I’ve had multiple historical cards for catcher but never got any production out of them. And even my pitching has been bad the last few seasons with Berra. So it was time for another change. We will see. I’m back in Gold this season and sitting right at .500 after a terrible first month or so.
Anecdotally, I find live cards are unappealing. It seems they often perform worse than their ratings indicate.
One of my biggest wishes for improving the game is to add the ability to filter out card types in the auction house, instead of filtering for the card type. I would filter out live cards all the time if it was available.
I’m probably at 50/50 live cards to frozen. But most live cards I have are in my pitching staff due to getting diamond pulls there. The gold and diamond pitchers that are historical cost too much. Maybe I’ll sell one of my live diamonds and get some lesser historical pitchers that are more stable.
I had Posey at catcher for a while. He started out very good, but then they dropped his rating four points, and he fell in a hole for me. His rating has rebounded, but his performance is still not up to what he was. I’m currently platooning him with Mike LaValliere, who is more than adequate as long as he doesn’t have to face lefties (and as long as you don’t expect him to hit any home runs).
I started out this season very badly, so I spent most of my saved PP on '63 Willie Mays, '79 Keith Hernandez, and '41 Cecil Travis. Willie stepped right in as my everyday CF. I had planned on sitting Tony Oliva, but he’s performed far too well this season, so Aaron Hicks moved into the 4th OF slot instead. Hernandez is platooning at 1B with '09 Hanley Ramirez, and Travis took Lonny Frey’s roster spot as utility IF. Took a hit there defensively, but Lonny just never hit for me at all.
The moves seemed to have worked. My team has roared back from last place to first (albeit only 2 games over .500), and my offensive numbers are in the top half of the league for the first time since my old slugger teams with Joey Gallo and pre-downgrade JD Martinez.
My starting pitching is down from the past few years, mostly because '15 Dallas Keuchel apparently spent the offseason ripping bong hits and daring himself to eat the entire menu at Waffle House. He was 1-10 with a 6+ ERA by July 1, so I swapped him with Jameson Taillon, who had been my long reliever. I probably waited too long to make the switch, truth be told. It’s been my experience that you need an itchy trigger finger, because players don’t often bounce back after terrible stretches.
I bought the Keuchel card last year when my Annandale team was doing poorly and I was panicking and trying to find some better pitching. He has not pitched particularly well for me. If I had noticed he was a left-hander I probably wouldn’t have purchased them in the first place too.
Is that Tony Olivia card the 79 OVR or the 78? I keep looking at the 78 and thinking I would like to use it in my outfield but this season my defense oriented outfield (Erstad, Kaline, Kearns) has played fairly well so I don’t have an excuse to replace one of them. Also if I recall that cards ratings correctly most people want to platoon Olivia and only play him against righties.