Analyzing S0 -- What The Teams Do Well & Not So Well

Pittsburgh Pioneers -- The Cannon

Pioneers are largely successful because they know how to make a team that plays to their home court advantage. They are 44-16 at home and 34-26 away. That tells you the team is truly one with their home team and that is first key to winning in OOTP -- and I can go through that more detailed later. What you get from Pioneers are a team that attack with no regards of human life. They are truly the Pioneers, they enter the land and be gunning every mofo on their way down. Fuck, I would even say their aggression are D-Day-esque -- like their offensive power and aggression are off the chart.

Pioneers' key to victory is definitely their top-of-the-league batting order. The GM clearly hired the right squad and put them on builds that sync well together. Pioneers are 1st in nearly every offensive category except for homerun(3rd) and strikeouts(4th). They have so much stolen bases that they take 45.2% of the league's share in stolen bases -- 297 out of 657. You might think they are a smallball team with 3rd in HR but it's not that far. The first is Sherbrooke with 164, then Vegas with 158 and then 157 for Pittsburgh. In essence, Pioneers dominates batting by a large margin and no team can match their firepower.

Their pitchers aren't as good, and their starters sometime have questionable performance but I would say their defensive weakness lies in their infielders. They have some questionable fielders and truly relies on their bat to turn things around, but if a team can abuse that with multiple line drives and groundballs at the right time, Pioneers might be in trouble if their bats are cold and fail to heat up in time. They are also 4th in homerun given up, so they might roll a lot of tails one game and get smashed at home. Their home field favors the batters and homeruns are common, so looking for pitchers who can at least hold the ball inside the park becomes important. They don't really have that yet, so a team can sometime just out-bat them at their home court through home runs.

Overall, no team can be perfect in the minor level and Pioneers ride their offensive prowess to the first place. Now, we will look at the opposite:


Centurions are quite the opposite of Pittsburgh, and win through their stellar defense and great pitching from their four starters. They top out the chart in majority of the defensive stats and I would point out that being 2nd in home run given with a 1.00 HR park is incredible. There are way better defensive field than Centurions' like Storm's field is ultra defensive but they just don't have the correct personnel to take advantage of that. Centurions has a field that is anti-hit, but yields average home run and they keep everything down to get the top mark in all the categories.

You cannot just look at the pitchers when it comes to defense because fielders are extremely key to a great ERA. Great fielders can make average pitchers look like god(and so can the home field). Centurions' pitchers might not be god-tier yet in this "we all have equal start" S0, but they are truly one tier above everyone right now. It's a good combination of fielding and pitching prowess to achieve this. In a lot of teams, there are some bad pitchers where the other team can exploit to good effect but you can really find none of them in Centurions. All four Centurions pitchers are under 4 in ERA and and they are consistent day in and day out. Centurions just need to find enough run support to secure a win.

But we cannot underestimate Centurions' solid batting either. Centurions is another team that likes to run and having base stealers look to be the key to offensive greatness in this S0 of SBL. They also know that they have a park that allows home runs to fly so they put in some power hitters who are very useful both home and away. The team is only 4th in hits but they generate enough runs to be 2nd. This shows that having the ability to put up hit doesn't mean you will win. You need to convert them in multiple ways and Centurions just have the tools to do so.

Of course, they are also not without weakness. Centurions have trouble with OBP and balls, indicate that they don't usually take advantage of walks. This means that other pitchers can just feed the ball into the corners and force them to take bad swings. It also means that they might not be able to put up pressure against a great K pitcher with questionable controls. That's the prototype pitcher to beat Centurions -- good stuff, good movement and lower control.

When we look at the two successful teams, we understand they do one thing better than others -- finding the talents that fit right into a team. Drafting a team is arguably easier here than other sim engine because your home field actually tells you what kind of strategy you want to be or what kind of team you want to assemble. In other engine, this is not always a thing and you have to build a team surrounding a player or whatever. Here, you can already have a plan before you have a single player.


For instance, Chicago Storm would have been more successful if they have a better pitching squad -- which I say is their top priority in the next SBLM draft. Chicago Storm has the ultra pitcher's park, like 0.85 on a lot of things. You cannot get hit, you cannot smash homers and offensive cannons will have trouble in their field...if they have the pitchers and fielders to do the job. Well, they don't. They have some questionable fielders and not-so-good pitchers. Here are the type of players they should look for in the next draft: NO batter-only player except maybe the 1B and 3B, find players with eyes because BB is always neutral and unaffected by ballpark factors, find some speedsters and maybe try smallball, find defensive-oriented or balanced outfield players and most importantly, grab four starting pitchers as they are foundation to a defensive team.

Sherbrooke is even weirder to solve. They also have an offensive-oriented park and some of their players really aren't that bad on offense. What sets them apart from Pioneers is their complete ignorance on defense. Like even for a team like Pioneers, you still want to play decent defense so you don't fuck shit up. Sherbrooke's infield defense is horrible and it's just hard to win with that. Their pitchers also aren't good enough to compensate for their lack of fielding so the problems just pile up. I feel like they kinda need everything, but I would start with elite batters. Their players aren't bad, but still not good enough to dominate offense. They can either try to chase that, or maybe dial back and up some D. An offensive team like this one will need to have a plan and structure their batting order well to truly leverage themselves, so having an idea of how many players for each style of batter you want is key here.

Tbh half of vegas’s steals come from one guy

For Sherbrooke, 3B and 1B are manned by out of positon players. The shortstop is elite. The 2Bman is the only one actually is bad at defense?

Psanchez55 wrote:For Sherbrooke, 3B and 1B are manned by out of positon players. The shortstop is elite. The 2Bman is the only one actually is bad at defense?

Out of position is death sentence here -- I guess my statement should be "Don't play players out of position OR die". I really feel like this league should provide a second position to a player. One position is too strict.

Also 2B being bad in defense hurts more than 3B and 1B, and the out of position just pilled up on that. No wonder Sherbrooke ERA is bad.

Hey.
Sherbrooke has elite batters.
They're just sleeping alternatively.
It's my turn now.
See you in a week.