Saturday, February 28, 2009

The Show: Free Agents and a Test Sim

I'm 3 games into my Reds franchise, sitting at 2-1 thanks to a 9th inning homer given up by Weathers to kill a potential sweep of the Mets.

So I decided to start a new franchise with everything set to CPU, sim out the season and see what shakes out.

So, a few random baseball geek notes:

  • The default roster has a lot of great/solid players setting in the FA Pool (Manny, Abreu, Dunn, Sheets, and so on). These players remained unsigned for the entire year. The CPU basically ignored them. (I have team financials turned on, fwiw)
  • During the off season FA stage, these players did sign with a new team after sitting out all of '09 -- except for Manny...who retired. Good FAs are being signed even though there were some aging players in the 2010 FA pool who could use a team, but no one that jumped out as a star that was languishing in the FA pool. Methinks we'll need a roster update to fix this.
  • I cannot find an easy way to view the league's trades. There is a league transaction page, but it has everything in it (call ups, DL moves) and it's a huge running file. I just want to see the trades. I'm not sure if I can.
  • Yanks over the Cubs in 5.
  • Playoff teams: Reds, Giants, Braves, Cubs, Yanks, Tribe, Angels, Red Sox
  • Some stats: 1 20 game winner (C.C.) and 5 19 game winners, including an aging Smoltz, who retired after the season.
  • 15 SPs with an ERA under 3.00
  • 28 hitters over .300
  • Carl Crawford hit .322, 58 2bs, 16 3b, 21 HR, and stole 63 bases. Jesus.
  • No 50 homer hitters
  • 10 with at least 40
  • 40 with at least 30
  • 2 players with season OPS over 1.0+
  • Team stats:
  • Worst hitting team: Oakland: .252
  • Best: Twins at .286
  • Best TEAM ERA: The Cubs at 3.15
  • Worst: Baltimore at 4.81 with the team average being around 4.12. This is the stat that jumped out as being a bit on the extreme side. The team ERAs, on the average, in this one test season, were a bit on the low side and a 3.15 TEAM ERA is pretty darn epic. For a team to pitch below 4.00 is very, very good. 3.15 is late 1960s era baseball back when the mound was high and Bob Gibson scared people.