Highlights From Diamond Mind April 2023

FIRST “POST-RESET” SALARY ADJUSTMENT

The first supply-and-demand Classic (career-rated) player salary adjustment following last November’s “value reset” has gone live.

Once again, the Babe tops the table, with a $3,256,000 raise taking his salary to a whopping $33,632,000 (though well short of his all-time high salary of $35,916,000).

With a raise of $2,274,000 to $30,259,000, Mickey Mantle became the first player not named Ruth to top $30,000,000.

As always, the total value of the player pool ($19,890,064,000) remains unchanged. In all, 1620 players had their salary increase, 3329 had their salary decrease and 160 remained unchanged. A whopping 240 players received raises of at least $2 million.

CONTINUING LEAGUES PAGES ARE HERE!

Continuing Leagues pages, along with a redesigned My Teams page, have been introduced. (You can continue to display the old My Teams page design if you wish, but the Continuing Leagues pages must be accessed through the new My Teams page.)

If you are the commissioner of a current or past league that is part of a continuing leagues series (whether a progression league, repeating theme or friends group), you can create a Continuing Leagues page for your series of leagues. When you create your page, you can add moderators who also can make changes and additions to the page. (This will be necessary if you had multiple commissioners during your series of leagues, because only a league commissioner can add the league to a Continuing Leagues page.)

The Continuing Leagues page will aggregate and display the records of all owners who participated in the series of leagues. It also will compile and display team and player batting and pitching leaderboards derived from the series.

If you have a team in a league with a Continuing Leagues page, there will be a link to the Continuing Leagues page under the league name in your Active and Completed Teams lists on the (redesigned) My Teams page.

We will continue to make additions and modifications to the Continuing Leagues page so we welcome your comments and suggestions.

REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN FOR SEASON 52 OF THE LADDER LEAGUES STANDARD ASSOCIATION

Registration is now open for Season 52 of the Ladder Leagues Standard Association.

For those unfamiliar with them, the Ladder Leagues operate similarly to European soccer. At the end of each Ladder Leagues season, the top teams from each league are promoted to higher leagues and the bottom teams are relegated to lower leagues. The promotion and relegation system in the Ladder Leagues ensures competitive leagues with similarly-skilled owners.

Standard Association leagues are autodraft leagues utilizing the Classic (career-rated) player pool and all Standard League settings. The DH rule is on or off in alternate Standard Association seasons. In Season 52, the DH will be off.

There were six ranked leagues in the Season 51 “ladder”. Anyone registering for Season 52 is guaranteed a spot. Why not give the new Classic salaries a try and register for Season 52 of the Ladder Leagues Standard Association?

THE PERFECT FINISH

In all of major league history, there have been just 23 perfect games. Don Larsen’s unlikely Game 5 gem against the Dodgers in the 1956 World Series is the only perfect game thrown in the postseason.

But Larsen’s effort didn’t finish the series, which would go the full seven games before the Yankees came out on top. Pitching for John (shius) Petroshius’s Frozen Ropes in the All-Time Classic FreeForAll league World Series, Roger Clemens did just that: he tossed a seventh game perfecto against Bruno’s New Delhi’s stacked line-up to close out the series!

CUSTOM LEAGUES KINGS

If you want to play in a tried-and-true format and create your team right now, standard leagues (Classic and SSG) are open to the public 24/7. But if you want to try something different, Custom Leagues – created by customers – are there in abundance..

There are franchise leagues, progression leagues, captains leagues, high and low salary cap leagues, “rags to riches” leagues, alphabet leagues, place of birth leagues … the possibilities are limited only by your imagination.

Click here for this month’s feature with Jim Baird, who shares his success strategies with custom leagues.  His league “I’ll Show You Bums” is still looking for a few more owners!

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.

This month we go back to the message board.

Dudley (bokoskid) Bokoski was curious how long it took people to start winning at Diamond Mind. He started a post, When Did You Start Winning, which produced an outpouring of great tips concerning the fundamentals of team construction.

Here are a few of the best:

Tyler Ensor: “For me, the biggest thing was to ignore ‘aesthetic’ factors like balance. I never sign a player who’s a lesser value just because I think the line-up ‘needs’ a power hitter or something like that. I treat all runs as equal, whether they come from offense, speed, defense, or pitching.”

Dvdavins: “You can spend all your money up front. But if you don’t, it pays to plan ahead which positions you’ll upgrade. That plan doesn’t have to be written in stone. It’s fine to have several cheap positions and upgrade [some or] all of them. What works less well is spending at least $5M on each position and still getting weekly cash. Even that isn’t always terrible. Losing 25% of $8M isn’t the end of the world, but it’s best to avoid it.”

Chesswiz: “I played this game for 6 1/2 years without much success. I didn’t look up sim stats, check the Advice board, or do much of any of the things that even minimally aware owners do. I finally decided I either needed to work on learning the game or give it up. I decided on the former, studying all the great resources that are available here. My teams became successful almost overnight.”

IS_cwolfson: “I think Tyler has got it down, but nevertheless I don’t really go that way. While I think it’s important to select value players at every spot in your roster, I also think a complementary roster and park can be greater than the sum of its parts, and that tends to be my starting point. And I definitely agree with DVD that, however you do it, you need to have a plan to use your upgrade money to best effect.”

smatranga: “My fortunes improved when I started studying how the great owners build their teams and looked for patterns. It made me realize some things I wasn’t considering or should do differently.”