Lately, I’ve been playing a lot of Madden Ultimate Team and I’ve been enjoying it so much that I thought about what it would be like if Strat-O-Matic baseball online had the same format. Just imagine being able to collect a set of virtual baseball cards to build a fantasy team that you can use in Strat-O-Matic baseball online. There would be four packs of random player cards to choose from – platinum, gold, silver, and bronze. Platinum packs might consist of players in the 9M and above range, gold 6M-8M, silver 3M-5M, and bronze .50M-2M.
You would start out with a set of 25 randomized bronze players along with a (bronze valued) ballpark. As an example, here’s a list of players you might start out with:
Ballpark
McAfee Coliseum
Lineup
Travis Buck C 2.48M
Ross Gload 1B .78M
Jeff Baker 2B 2.13M
Jose Bautista 3B 1.34M
Bobby Crosby SS 1.23M
Clete Thomas LF 2.03M
Willie Bloomquist CF 1.01M
Eric Hinkse RF 2.68M
Brian Barton DH .67M
Bench
Paul Lo Duca C .50M
Julio Lugo SS .50M
Jose Vidro 1B .50M
Travis Hafner DH .50M
Omar Vizquel SS .50M
Pitchers
John Lannan SP 2.29M
Nick Blackburn SP 1.88M
Aaron Harang SP .81M
Brett Tomko SP .55M
Zach Duke SP .50M
Francisco Rodriguez CP 2.66M
Juan Cruz RP .85M
Jamey Wright RP .59M
David Aardsma RP .50M
Jason Grilli RP 1.71M
Jack Cassel RP .50M
From a quick glance, this team (worth about 30M) appears to be pretty well balanced but there’s a chance you might end up with a team that is short on left-handed batters or you might end up with an all lefty starting rotation for instance. It’s all random to begin with so it would be a nice challenge to be able to rebuild and optimize your team.
Earning Coins
You would start out with zero coins but you can earn coins through your performance on the field. Let’s say you win a game you might earn 200 coins. Hit a home run or pitch a shutout and your team would earn bonus coins. You could start out by playing with your bronze team for the first 20 or so games and this would allow you to earn enough coins to buy new cards from the auction block or buy new packs.
Contract Cards
Each card would have a contract of a certain number of games. Let’s say each card starts with a 20 game contract. Before the contract expires you must decide if you want to extend the contract (with a contract card) or allow the contract expire and buy another player from the auction house. Contract cards would be valuable, especially when it comes to keeping gold-level talent on your team. There would also be injury cards you could use to speed up the healing process of your injured players.
Team Chemistry
I’m not sure if this would work in Strat-O-Matic’s current online engine but in Madden Ultimate Team there’s a chemistry feature that plays a large factor on your team’s performance. If you are able to collect cards with players from the same pro and college team you get an on-field performance boost. In Strat-O-Matic perhaps each batter on the team could get a minor increase in home run chances, for example.
Admittedly, most Strat-O-Matic players won’t particularly like the idea of playing in a league with duplicate players involved but I think the fun factor of a Strat-O-Matic Ultimate team would outweigh any of these concerns.
For more information about Madden Ultimate Team visit Madden Online Tips.
Go to Strat-O-Matic Baseball: 2008 season Rankings and sort by winning percentage. Keep Scrolling down the list until you find a manager with at least 10 teams. At the time of this writing, one manager has a .573 winning percentage! Of the 10 teams, I found 5 seasons where he won at least 94 games 4 out of 5 times. One team won 108 games!
I thought it would be interesting to analyze these teams to see what kind of formula this manager has put together. These teams played in primarily pitcher parks and Fenway Park was a favorite.
Batting
The one thing that stood out was the team on base percentage. Two teams had a .380 OBP. Of the five teams, the lowest team OBP was .358. The average slugging percentage was .446.
So far, Milton Bradley at DH and Mike Fontenot at 2B have been favorites. Both of these players have been on every single team. Pablo Sandoval is used at 1B and Brian McCann is the catcher. All outfielders have excellent OBP percentage and/or high double chances. Matt Holliday or Ryan Spilborghs play in left field, Nyler Morgan in Center field, and Brian Giles in right field. This appears to make a pretty solid lineup so far. The only position left is shortstop and no player has really been a fixture here. Orlando Cabrera has been used a couple times.
Bench
Luis Rodriguez was found on every team. He can play SS, 2B, 1B, and 3B. He has 28 single chances against right-handed pitchers and also has a good OBP against right handers. Against left handed pitchers Blake Dewitt and Jeff Keppinger were taken most of the time. Milton Bradley has an injury on a 3 so any of these bench guys can fill in for Bradley at DH.
Pitching
For this manager, only one team had a * (Needs only 3 days of rest between starts.) starting rotation. All of the other teams used non * starting pitchers. For an $80M salary cap, an average of $26.38M was used for these pitching staffs.
For the starting rotation the following pitchers were used on a total of 5 teams:
David Bush
Scott Kazmir
Randy Johnson
John Lannan
With the exception of Harden being drafted a couple times, the highest paid SP was always usually around the 3.5M-3.7M range.
For the bullpen, Dan Giese was the setup man four times and Hong-Chih Kuo was on the team three times. Both of these pitchers have a relief endurance of R3. If you browse the Strat-O-Matic 2008 card-set these two pitchers are probably the only quality non-starting relievers that have an R3 rating. Having an R3 reliever in your pitching staff appears to be essential for success.
For the closer Bobby Jenks was primarily taken. He’s affordable at $3.55M and has a C6 rating.
For pitching, the strategy appears to be to use a starting rotation of non * pitchers with endurance ratings of S6 or lower and then have a setup man with an R3 rating pitch around 200-250 innings in relief. A closer with a C5 or C6 closer rating is also a prerequisite for success.
Photo by: Scott Ableman
Here are a few baserunning tips to think about when deciding on a lineup.
1. Think more aggressive against a quality starting pitchers. Taking more baserunning chances against guys like Tim Lincecum makes perfect sense. There usually aren’t very many baserunning opportunities against these pitchers so you need to make the most out of these chances.
2. Be less aggressive on the base paths against pitchers like Nick Blackburn. These pitcher cards allow a high number of singles and other on-base chances which means you’ll have an ample amount of scoring chances.
3. Be aware of the home field advantage max rule. When you are playing on the road you may lose some rolls due to the home field advantage rule so you may want to run a little more aggressively.
Earlier, I wrote about using the Strat-O-Matic Baseball Online: All-Time Records to help with player selection. Studying the team records section (Team 80) can help in determining what makes a successful team.
First, take a look at the Most Wins section. Looks like you might need to go extreme when deciding on a park to play. Two teams chose hitter parks and three teams went for pitcher parks.
You probably can’t really determine what makes a winning team by going through these other categories. The leaders under Team Errors – Fewest, however, showed quite a bit of success. These teams averaged 88 wins.
Defense
Looking back in the Most Wins section, it looks like you must have at least 3 or 4 starting 1’s in your lineups. These record holding teams averaged 4.5 starting ‘1′ position players. A team called The Wrong Stuff 441 had 8 1’s in their starting lineup!
All teams have a ‘1′ at second base. This is no surprise as there appears to be plenty ‘1’s in the player set. At short stop, however, there’s only 10 players with a ‘1′ range so you will see more 2’s being used at shortstop. The bottom line is that you need good defense up the middle. No 3’s or 4’s.
Hitting
In outfield, you will see that Frank Robinson was used a couple times. It’s quite a solid card. He hits for power, has good OBP, has speed.
Tony Gwynn, Tris Speaker, and Bobby Bonds also appear on at least 2 teams.
Pitching
These top $80 million dollar salary teams averaged about 24M for their pitching staffs.
Of the 6 teams, there were only 5 pitchers over $5M. 3 out of the 6 teams didn’t have a pitcher over 5M. Using a staff with pitchers who can pitch on 3 days rest is the way to go. John Clarkson was picked up twice as well as Fred Norman.
It looks like the key to winning is to not spend much on relief pitching. Of the 6 teams, there’s not one relief pitcher over 4M. I see Ron Perranoski appearing a couple times. Firpo Marberry had success a couple times.
