Examining The Lesser Names & Builds

Hello, this week we will talk more about build and such. There might be a lot of misconceptions and so on in the birth of a new sim league. OOTP is also flexible enough that you can do a lot when it comes to batters. Like there are a certain pattern to follow but you are unlikely to find two of the same batters due to the amount of variables you can invest in. You can truly be whoever you want to be in this system so today we can examine some of the smaller names this season, take a crack and their build and see what's what.


Captain Snowball -- Vegas Centurions
All-rounder, 40 across the board
.239/.334/.400, 48 R, 44 RBI, 15 HR, 6 SB, 1.9 WAR
1x SBLM All-Star

First one on the board is Captain Snowball who is going with a true well-rounded build. His WAR is not too impressive, only 1.9 WAR with 30 games. I mean, he is still an all-star and one of the better performing RFs but no one is going wow on his stats. This is pretty much what you get with an all-round build in year 1. You are an utility guy, super reliable to provide for the team in any scenario but you will not shine as bright as some others. It's the price to pay in a world where big numbers are key to fame.

The benefit from an all-rounder is TPE efficiency. This will likely be reflected further in the middle part of everyone's big league career. The TPE cost is pretty harsh on the bigger scale here and you have to double down the investment in OOTP because you need both vL and vR. Specialists certainly have their chance to shine but I truly believe that some all-rounders to be the backbone of your team is never bad. They can be put into any position in the batting order and will deliver respectable performance. They can also field decently, which is also a very important part of baseball and ultimately, they are consistent in what they do.


Bobby Boucher is an interesting player for sure. What many expect to be the killer silver slugger on 2B, the man is underperforming based on how hyped he was back then and has a mere 1.6 WAR as of now due to inconsistent batting and horrible fielding(which is straight up negative WAR). What I want to talk about with Bobby Boucher is the value of a platoon bat, even though it's not a common occurence in sim league at all. Platoon is ultra useful in real life and I think that is a statement without any argument at all.

In sim league though, it's hard to have platoon when players are expected to start all the games in a certain position and with this league having no DH at all. Don't get me wrong, I like this hardcore no DH setup, I am just saying it's further lower the chance of a platoon playing a DH. In sim league, the most common platoon occurence is when the team wants to let some younglings have fun in the big league, so they set up like two younglings to bat vs either side. This way, they can both bat insanely well against one side and don't have to spread points and hurt their early career performance. It's one way of TPE optimization. It's much easier to do it with DH since you can just put two batters with any position profienciency into that position and they will do fine. They can even abandon fielding for a bit and just focus on destroying some pitchers at the field. Without DH and this league being ultra strict on positional XP, it's very very unlikely for what I described to work. Now, you will need two players playing the same position to share time. That is super hard. A team is unlikely to draft two guys of the same position, so maybe this strategy is kinda moot here.

Anyway, moot or not, I am just breaking down the builds and their impact. What we see from Bobby Boucher is a straight up destruction against any RHP but at the cost of being horrible against LHP. He did make the right call, as the player has 151 AB vL and 202 AB vR, so leaning toward vR is the right call. One can argue that with a 3:4 ratio, it might be best to stay balanced and that's fair too, but you would want him to lean right than lean left. Here's another tips for you all sim leaguers: scout the fucking hand of the pitchers. Unlikely real life, your batting vL and vR are wild in sim league. It's never the 75% vR as in real life. In sim league, everyone can magically become left-handed pitcher while in real life you actually have to find such talents and they take time to develop. It's a very different world. Thus, you need to stay on top of this shit, you want to lean on the side that you will face more often. If you are a playoff team looking for a ship, you want to target the hand of the other hot contenders to get yourself the best chance. OOTP baseball is as micro-oriented as real life baseball, there are a lot of detail to look at if you really want to tryhard.


Brian Strong -- Pittsburth Pioneers
.269/.357/.465, 66 R, 57 RBI, 17 HR, 41 SB, 4.0 WAR
1x SBLM All-Star
1x SBLM PotM

Perhaps the biggest name of this week's topic, Brian Strong is, to me, the best basestealer of this season and he earns his WAR less with batting and more just with his insane baserunning and stealing at this time. Here's why the Pioneers are doing great -- they have a boatload of good baserunners and they are ultra aggressive with their baserunning. More importantly, they have very good SB%. As I have stated in another article, the baseline for MLB is 75%. I am sure different league will have different baseline based on their batting performance, fielding error frequency and etc but 75% is a pretty good baseline as to determine if your stealing is helping your team or not. Anything above 75% is net positive, as it means you are not giving up too many outs and you are threatening to create runs more often than not. A player is regarded as "in scoring position" when he is on second base or further. So you might think that first base and second base is just one base, but the threatening level of someone on a second base is much higher than on first. A long single can more often than not bring someone from second to home but less likely so from first to third. There's also double play chance when someone is on first base while it's much harder to achieve that with an empty first and someone on second. Hence, getting to second base is huge and base stealing is one way to achieve that. Pair that with Pioneers' batting and you have a killer playstyle.

Gustav IsRealDaddy is arguably the best in terms of both volume and consistency but one shouldn't ignore Brian Strong despite his lower volume. Brian Strong has the highest SB% among the top stealers and 87.2% is insanely efficient. Sometime, you want to not risk random steal attempts cuz you don't want stupid outs from out of nowhere and Brian Strong is someone that follow that line of thinking. He will still only when it's the right time to steal -- and I would take here to point out that the AI coach in OOTP is extremely competent, so you can believe that they are only asking him to run in very good situation. Otherwise, he stays and let the batter does his thing. That can be more beneficial to a team than just running again and again while eating outs. Some other Pioneers, like Flynn Fungo and Dale Cooper, have questionable stealing. Personally, I would ask them to steal less and play a bit safer but that's just me. I mean, Pioneers have so many stealers that they can afford to be more safe with the less successful one.

I guess what I want to say with this speedster part is how to optimize your stealing, and why volume isn't always good. Also, why is getting to second base an important part of winning baseball.