In This Month’s Newsletter
Tournament News
As this newsletter “goes to press”, the final round of the Grand Open Tournament XIV is reaching crunch time in the regular season. Bob Jecmen, who was defeated in the finals World Series in GOT XIII and is still looking for his first GOT championship, currently boasts the league’s best record (81-54).
The SSG Playoff head-to-head elimination tournament, which started with 64 teams, is down to just two. David Hochstein (dhhchstn) and Bryan Walters (bryanwalters) will square off in a 162 game winner-take-all two-team final league. The league will be played at turbo pace, in the Baby Boomers era of play, with a player pool from 1950-59, $103 million salary cap, $6 million weekly income and the DH on.
And Round 1 of the 2021 Masters Tournament is underway. The 72 competitors will battle through three rounds with unique and challenging themes, with the 24 collecting the most cumulative points advancing to the finals.
A Game for The Ages
Thirteen home runs were hit by the two teams combined. The Poets took the lead in the top of the ninth, tenth and fourteenth innings, only to have the Barons tie things up again each time in the bottom half of the inning.
The Poets took the lead again with two runs in the top of the eighteenth on a leadoff home run by Mark Texeira and a run-scoring single by Schmidt. To close things out, they brought on Fred Glade, their eighth pitcher of the day, who was coming off a complete game victory just two days earlier, and the Barons quickly took advantage.
Robin Ventura and Lu Blue homered to start off the inning and re-tie the score. Glade then walked the bases full, and Jose Macias was the unlikely hero, singling in the game-winning run.
The Erie Barge Leagues
RJ Proulx (RJP6) recently wrote to us about the Erie Barge leagues. These certainly are one of the longest continuously running Diamond Mind Online leagues, having begun in 2000, before the inception of Imagine Sports.
Erie Barge originated with a group of owners from the Buffalo/Niagara Falls area. They run four leagues annually – Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall – all of which are franchise leagues.
There have been 62 Erie Barge leagues at IS, including one currently in progress. Of those leagues, Dan Ingersoll (BuffHorn) leads the way with 12 World Series wins, RJ has 11 and Steve Lowman (lukelow) 7. Len Previte is a perfect five wins from five World Series appearances.
There is a championship trophy (pictured above) on which a plaque is affixed for each league champion. Ron Carr and his Owo Pirates were the first Erie Barge champions.
The current league is the Erie – Barge Winter 2021 league, which, at the time of this writing, is nearing the end of the regular season, with RJ’s Yankee Boomers (85-68) currently sporting the league’s best record. From the current league, RJ, Dan, Brian Burns (FOBURNS), John Tracy (jct1757) and Patrick DiBartolomeo (psdibar) all are founding Erie Bargers.
The Tipping Point
Each month we’ll offer a few tips in this space that may come in handy for the beginner as well as the experienced team owner.
Recently we invited Diamond Mind team owners to send us their best tips. This one comes from Jay Knight (TheSwami), Grand Open Tournament XIII champion:
CONSIDER YOUR LEAGUE CONTEXT!
After the initial league draft, take a good look at your division rivals (and to a lesser extent, other non-division rivals in the league) and see if their team has any notable imbalances, such as shortages of LH or RH batting, LH or RH pitching, or overreliance on switch hitters or platoons.
Then adjust your roster during the preseason free agent period to exploit those rivals’ weaknesses. Consider:
1) Bulking up on righty pitching if your rivals’ batting tilts righty, or vice versa.
2) Same thing on your batting lineups; if rivals’ pitching tilts one way, Invest more $ on players which hit the rivals’ pitching side better.
3) If a rival utilizes a lot of platoons or switch hitters, consider picking up pitchers with reverse splits, to counter the platoon advantage when playing against them.I have observed that many players here have rather sophisticated analysis methods to look at sim stats and determine what they consider to be the best absolute player values. Personally, I don’t have any such sophisticated spreadsheet or equivalent. However, my experience is that these absolute player ratings do not consider the advantages that certain players will have against certain teams and in particular league contexts. A player like George Brett may be a great value in one league, but a mediocre or poor value in another league, regardless of whatever the number crunching of all accumulated sim stats may indicate in a spreadsheet.
My advice is, therefore, don’t try to go up against experienced owners and pit your spreadsheet against their spreadsheet. If you do, the best you likely can expect to do is .500. But gain your advantages by countering, and adjusting your team to match the league and division context you are in. Works well enough for me, anyway.
Some of the Best MLB Teams That Didn’t Win The World Series
There have been some powerhouse teams that looked like they'd win it all in spring - but ended up falling short when it mattered in the fall.
Player With the Most Errors in MLB History: Herman Long
Herman Long played 16 MLB seasons & won a championship with the Boston Beaneaters, but (unfortunately) remembered most for his 1,096 errors.
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