Posts tagged as:

hit & run

Manager strategy settings

April 27, 2009

What’s your manager strategy for Stratomatic’s online baseball game? I feel that over the course of a season my team will be more productive if I set most of my managerial settings to normal:

Base running – normal
Base stealing – normal
Relief usage – normal
Bunting – normal
Hit and Run – normal

Intentional Walk
I will set Intentional walk to Conservative.  Depending on the series,  I might set “IBB less with this pitcher” individual settings for all of my pitchers.  This is especially necessary if my opponent is batting a high clutch hitter in front of a superstar. If you don’t have “IBB less with this pitcher” individual settings set,  HAL will usually always have your pitcher intentionally walk the high clutch hitter to face the superstar.

Hit and Run
Depending on the situation, I may sometimes turn the “Don’t hit and run” individual settings on for all of my starting lineup.   More often than not the hit and run play results in a waste of an at bat.

Setup man/Closer
Back in 2002 when Strat-O-Matic had its ‘super relievers’ I would always draft a ‘super reliever’ and drop him into the setup role and leave the Closer settings empty. Chris Hammond, who pitched 242 innings, for one of my teams was a favorite back in the 2002 season.

Now that the ‘super reliever era’ is gone, I usually always try to land a decent closer within the 3M-6M range. I will usually keep the Setup Man settings empty unless there’s a good matchup with my opponent.

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When is a good strategy to hit & run?

February 21, 2009

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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