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AN OVERVIEW
Getting starting is simple: you pick a league to join, a team name, and a home park. Then you choose your players.
All the players have salaries. For Standard Leagues (with or without the DH), which are forming constantly and are open to everyone, you get $100 million to assemble your roster (25 active and 3 inactive players), plus weekly income throughout the season. Custom Leagues, which are set up by individual team-owners, range from a salary cap as low as $50 million to an unlimited amount.
Once your league gets underway, you set your lineups, starting rotation, bullpen roles, bench assignments, and team and individual player tactics. You can sign free agents, propose trades to other team owners, and even take out loans to acquire better players. Every possible player, team and league statistic is tracked and at your fingertips throughout the season.
PICKING YOUR PARK AND YOUR PLAYERS
We’ve got every park currently in use in the major leagues, plus dozens of historical parks to choose from. You want to tailor your team to your park. For example, if you’re playing in Fenway Park, you’ll want some right-handed power hitters in your line up who can take advantage of the Green Monster looming out in left field.
In determining how players should perform, Rob Neyer Baseball ® “normalizes” the statistics that players accumulated during their careers, relative to their league contemporaries. What does this mean?
In 1930, the league batting average in the National League was .303. In 1968, the “Year of the Pitcher,” it was just .243. The Reds shortstop in 1930, Leo Durocher, hit .243; the team’s shortstop in 1968, Leo Cardenas, hit .235, 8 points lower. On a normalized basis, however, Cardenas is better: he fell just 3% below the league average, while “Leo the Lip” was a whopping 20% lower.
FINDING GOOD PLAYERS
When searching for players, you can use their real-life stats, or the stats they’ve accumulated in Rob Neyer Baseball ® leagues (referred to as “sim stats”).
For real-life stats, the categories denominated by a “+” are the normalized stats, with 100 representing the league average. So a pitcher with an ERA+ of 120 had an earned run average 20% better than the league average.
The “sim stats” can be particularly useful for assessing player characteristics that are difficult to gauge from real-life stats, like fielding range and injury-proneness, as well as for the 100 or so Negro Leagues players in the player pool for whom there are no real-life (major league) stats available. Limiting your sim stats searches to Standard Leagues only may provide a better basis for comparing players (since their performance in Custom Leagues may be distorted by the different salary caps and other unique rules applied in such leagues).
How good a player is represents just one-half of the equation, the other half being the player’s salary. You may find that a $16,000,000 player is better than a $12,000,000 player, but how much better? A key to winning in this game is to think about what each player is worth, and maximize the overall value of your roster.
BUDGETING
Picking good value players is only one aspect of the task of building a winning team. The other is assembling a roster of players with complementary skills, so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Everyone knows that you can have too much of a good thing. For example, if you have three closers in your bullpen, there won’t be enough save opportunities to go around for all of them.
Consider a standard $100 million cap DH league team. Taking a balanced approach, you might spend, say, $70 million on position players and $30 million on pitchers (although many owners have succeeded with more extreme approaches).
Your key players are your starting lineup, starting rotation, closer, and main right- and left-handed set-up men. In a DH league with a five-man rotation, that’s 17 players. For the remaining 11 players on your roster - your bench, the back of your bullpen, and your inactive reserve – you want to spend relatively little, say $6 million. That leaves you around $67 million for your starting lineup and $27 million for your core pitchers.
With that amount of cash, you could choose to build your lineup and pitching staff around a few expensive stars supported by role players, or take a more balanced approach with solid players top to bottom. You want to ensure, however, that your roster is structured so that you get maximum value from each player for your investment. Players at the bottom of your batting order, for example, will get a lot fewer plate appearances over the course of the season than those at the top of the order, and by ticking Use Spot Starter Option on your Pitching Rotation page, you can limit the use of your fifth starter compared to your top four.
WINNING TIPS
Newcomers to other online simulation games typically take a beating for several seasons before they either get discouraged and give up, or learn the tricks that insiders use to “game the game” to be successful. That’s not the case here. Rob Neyer Baseball ® is as realistic a simulation of actual baseball as we can make it, which means that if you assemble a fundamentally sound baseball team, it should be competitive.
There are, however, some important differences between Rob Neyer Baseball ® and actual baseball, which you should take into account in constructing your teams:
- At any given time, there is only so much talent to go around for major league teams. A GM may have to compromise: sacrifice defense for offense, sign a right-handed batter when a left-handed one would be preferable, etc. You don’t have the same constraints. You can draw on nearly 4,000 of the best players from throughout baseball history.
- Even star players can slump, sometimes for weeks on end. No real-life GM can “cut” such players at will and spend a large proportion of the salary they were due to sign a replacement from a vast free agent pool. You can, but try to be patient. Churning your roster ultimately leaves you at a competitive disadvantage, and is known, for good reason, as the “death spiral.” Avoid it at all costs. Given time, good players, and good teams, generally produce the results reasonably expected of them.
- You’ll receive substantial income during the course of the season (except in Custom Leagues that limit or eliminate such income). Construct your roster to include a few options for using that money to gain the greatest improvement (such as by manning a starting rotation spot with a relatively inexpensive “innings eater” you can replace later with an “ace”).
If you’d like to read more, you might find some useful tips in these Seawolf’s Breezes columns from our Articles message board archives:
Building a Team to Take Advantage of Your Park
FINAL THOUGHTS
The main thing is to have fun. Pick all-time greats like Babe Ruth and Satchel Paige, and guys with cool names like Catfish Metkovich and Frenchy Bordagaray. Match wits with other baseball fans. Relive your childhood. Fall in love with baseball all over again. If you don’t like what’s happened to baseball in the Steroid Era, our players are guaranteed not to use steroids.
Rob Neyer Baseball ® is also a place to make new friends. On our message boards you can seek advice about the game, talk about baseball, find or organize interesting Custom Leagues, and discuss just about anything else.
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And now ...
It’s time to make some history of your own ... Enjoy!
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