AT&T Park

SportingNews just announced yesterday that the Strat-O-Matic Baseball: 2010 Season has been released. Whenever a new season arrives the first thing usually I do is browse the player cards. As I was going through the cards yesterday I was thinking that it would be great if there was a quicker and more effective way to find cards fit the type of ballpark I use (I usually choose AT&T Park as a ballpark simply because I’m a Giants fan ). This year, the ballpark factors (si 10/10 hr 5/10) for AT&T Park mainly favor right handed players. When searching for pitchers that are best suited for AT&T Park one would look for pitchers who have low ballpark diamonds on the right side. Since the ballpark home run rating for AT&T Park on the left side is relatively low (1-5) one can still find an effective pitcher who’s ballpark home runs on the left side are on the high side.

Searching for a pitcher that suits AT&T park can be a bit tedious with the Player Set Browser because you basically need to go through and open each pitcher card to find their ballpark home run ratings. So, I decided to write a script to make this search a bit easier. At first, I was thinking about a way that would analyze each card and categorize cards with the type of ballpark it would perform well in. A high ballpark diamonds pitcher would be a better fit in a pitcher’s park and a pitcher with a low amount ballpark diamonds would be a better fit in a hitter’s park. Then you have ballparks that favors righties (AT&T) and parks, such as Miller Park, that favors lefties this year.

Since the average Strat-O-Matic manager already has a good understanding of ballpark advantages I decided to write a script that simply adds two columns to the Player Set Browser for each player’s left and right ballpark home run diamonds. Now, it’s a little easier and quicker to find those bargain pitchers for your ballpark.

Download: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/98356

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The logic of the hit & run employs two things:

1. Disregard all readings on the offensive card and replace it by a template card. The better the rating, the better the outcome.
2. Walks and strikeouts are transformed into “ground out, runner advanced to second”.

What does this lead to? You’ll want to use hit & run with weak offensive players who have a good hit & run rating in situations where the batter will hit with runners have their stealing *. This strategy should be maximized even more against stellar pitchers such as someone like Peavy (2007). The most frequent result of the hit & run is, by a large margin, “ground out, runner goes to second”. In this case, you need clutch hitters to back-up players who have good hit & run ability.

What type of weak hitters should you go after for your team? The ideal type is a player with perfect defense (1e10) that also has a *star rating and his hit & run rating is B.

What about the steal rating? Having a good steal rating forces the opponent to hold the runners. When runners are held, hitters have their hit & run rating upgraded by one letter (a rating of B becomes a rating of A). Runners without the *star rating but with good stealing numbers (e.g. 7/- (15-6) should be just as good to force opponets to hold runners as well.

The B rating should be the minimal rating to start with the hit & run strategy. For all players not having a B rating, you should go to the individual settings and select “never use hit-and-run with this player”. Maybe one exception would be very weak hitters with a C rating. Also, I would recommend turning off the hit & run for players with good offensive cards even though they have a B rating.

Hit & Run Strategy and Opponent
You should switch to conservative hit & run for games when you play against teams with weak pitching. The reason for this is that the hit & run strategy turns singles read on pitcher’s card into outs. So, it is a strategy that pays when the opponent pitcher has a few singles on his card. But, it’s costly when the opponent pitcher has many singles on his card.

Line-Up
You should set-up a line-up so that your fast runners are in front of the B-rated hitters, and that slow runners are in front of not qualified hitters.

Hit & Run works better in what type of park?
Take advantage of as many singles out of the ballpark as you can. The ideal ballpark may be AT&T Park.

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