I’m sure that Jimmie Foxx will rebound sooner than later. I’ve seen a few in my past few leagues among the league leaders in multiple categories.
I’m finding in my anecdotal experience that it’s better to have a batter that is elite in one area and lacking in others, than to have a “jack of all trades” type. For instance, my 77 Tony Gwynn is high 80s in contact (mid 90s against RHP), with good speed and acceptable defense, but no home-run power and a low walk rate. He’s won two batting titles and is a perennial 4+ WAR player. On the other hand, my 95 Live series Mookie Betts is mid-70s in just about every offensive rating, but struggles to reach even 3 WAR most seasons.
I’ve been playing Gallo for the last couple of seasons. His average is in the low to mid 200s generally, but he walks a ton and racks up plenty of HRs and RBIs. And is decent in the field too. Aaron Judge is doing well for me as well. After his first season anyway where he was just bad. But I’ve mostly moved to try and get historical players if I can.
Now, my Live pitchers are ass. My Verlander’s ERA is in the upper 5s as is Grienke’s. So it’s fun to lose to another player’s Verlander only to notice his V’s ERA is 2 something. And I’ve moved Paxton and Snell to the bullpen they’ve been so bad. Ugh.
I’ve done OK with live pitchers. Walker Buehler’s been a solid #2/#3 starter over five seasons, and I’ve had pretty good luck with Aroldis Chapman and Felipe Vazquez. Even Jordan Hicks and Jose Alvarado did well, until they were busted down to low gold and silver, respectively. Actually now that I think about it, Zach Britton was a valuable bullpen arm in Gold leagues even after his rating went down into the 60s.
My packs-only team plays a few live guys. Gallo was the first diamond card I got so I’ve played him for maybe 10 seasons. He has only started hitting above .200 the last three or so years … but I’ve used him full time in years he hit .175 (but slugged .375).
I have a perfect Scherzer and he does ok but not appreciably better than say the 93 OVR Cliff Lee historical card. I mean, I don’t want to ditch him but it doesn’t feel like he performs like a 100 card.
I’ve also had Tatis in my lineup for a while, and he’s done really well.
Other cards like Altuve, Carrasco, Acuna… they’re ok but nothing great.
He won his second consecutive pitching Triple Crown, which nets a really nice PP haul (4K for the triple crown, plus 400 each for the ERA and Wins titles). He didn’t lose a game after June 29, and in fact only had one no-decision from that date to the end of the season.
And so, inevitably, he took the hill for game 1 of the Division Series and gave up 4 runs in 5 innings. He was in line for the L until we scored five in the bottom of the 8th to pull it out.
Surprising absolutely no one, the series went five games. In the fifth game, my untouchable starting pitcher gave up 7 earned runs on 9 hits in 5.2 innings of an 8-1 loss. Because of fucking course. He was “due” for a two bad starts in a row, right?
I guess I shouldn’t be too mad. The only other 100-game winner in the league was dispatched 3-1 by an 84-win team. Miraculously, the league leader in run differential somehow made it to the LCS. However, they’re currently down 2 games to 0, so all is right with the world.
I lost in the WC play-in game to a strong team with a bunch of diamond players so I didn’t feel too bad. My batting was ok mostly with and MVP worthy performance by Biggio who led the league in OPS and was up there in all batting categories. My pitching was horrible to the point I had to bench f’ing Verlander and his 6+ ERA for a Legend Mike Hampton who at least kept his ERA in the upper 3s.
I did get a bunch of PP for a triple play and a four strike inning. So I’ve got that going for me.
Both my 19 teams were in their first season in diamond and both stank. One will be relegated back to gold next season, the other survived to continue on in diamond.
We ended up sweeping in the diamond finals for ootp19. So another trophy to the cabinet, and then off for a week of torture. Anyone understand how the season score is calculated? It was only an 88-74 season, which isn’t too bad, but we still made it to the finals and won, so I’d think that would warrant better than a 695 score. When my ootp20 won their gold league last season I think they had a score close to 1200.
My Washington team in Perfect won their division with an 81-81 record (???) and then got destroyed by a whale team. I looked at their roster - their active and inactive rosters - all 200 cards - were only diamonds and perfects. They had things like the 95 and 100 Bob Gibsons on the bench because they were were playing the 99 Bob Gibson. I can’t fathom the amount of money you’d spend to get so many cards of that quality. I can’t get mad at losing to a team like that because it was like fighting a tsunami (they won something like 120 games in the regular season).
All of my other teams just sort of flailed about - they all ended up winning between 76 and 84 games, and none of them made the playoffs.
Thought I’d try to do some collections but it feels like the auction house is drying up.
Still working on my Senators team - I’ve had time to organize my purchases so know who to buy. Unfortunately, that means I’m waiting for one specific card to show up and I need to keep enough cash on hand so I can buy it when it does. That means not much other buying.
I was looking at completing two collections for cards I can use on the Senators, but it feels like key cards for collections are being priced crazy right now - I’ve done some adding and it turns out for the two collections I’m interested in, it’s cheaper to buy the reward card than it is to assemble the collection (especially if you’re doing it from scratch).
