Funniest comment I have read so far: calhoop on the Coors team in marijuana legal Colorado: " REALLY wanted to add the one and only Herb Hash to this team but didn't want to burn $2mm on a mop up.  Would have been fun to see him get smoked repeatedly, though."

     It's always funny how I anticipate others drafting the way I did and often the opposite happens. I thought the Coors theme would be a big hitting league. One of the reasons I avoided low whip high HR pitchers is because they cost more. The majority went with low whip pitchers and less to spend on hitters. As a result I overestimated how much stamina we would need.
     Speaking of stamina, most people in the $70m theme will be playing slightly fatigued. I may lead the league in number of players at 100% but my pitching numbers are a bit lower because I didn't save $ by skimping. It will be interesting to see if playing rested makes up for it. 
     At $90m I made 2 assumptions. Draft a deadball team and draft a bad team to get 7 or 8 Free Agents. The majority did not draw the same conclusions. I'd like to see a comparison of how teams do based on era and number of FA.
     At $80m I was fixated on the pitcher. Reading the comments it sounds like many people were more concerned about getting a pitcher who brings good hitters.

70M – Stars and Scrubs Theme
Stars, Scrubs & Speed

I never really have much to say about my pitching choices at low caps as I find you can’t get too creative.  For this theme I just tried to get 4 quality SPs in the low 6 million range to give me flexibility with the bullpen and leave me with about half of my cap for hitting.  ’92 Tewksbury, ’81 Reuss, ’77 Guidry and ’08 Cliff Lee lead the way and I ended up with about 1220 non-mop-up innings which I hope will be enough in Safeco.  On the hitting side, it seems obvious that speed is a very good strategy at low-caps.  Given the theme restrictions I knew one of my hitters would be ’86 Raines.  The other one ended up being ’83 Rickey Henderson.  Deshields and Concepcion are my only other full-timers.  The rest are made up of platoons with speed.  I have 399 sbs in total vs only 73 cs.  I picked ’79 Rick Dempsey to play the majority of my games at catcher and attempt to counter any other teams with speed.  This team should do fine assuming the pitching staff is decent.


80M – Clone Pitcher & Teammates
The John Tudor Dynasty

I went through quite a few choices for this theme.  I quickly realized that I wasn’t comfortable with Pedro or Maddux as they were too SP heavy in terms of cap allocation and I generally prefer as much balance as possible with my teams.  I looked at about 10 other guys including Clemens, Koufax, R. Johnson, Gooden, Scott, Grove, Hubbell, etc…. I ended up down to Dennis Martinez and John Tudor.   It was basically a coin flip but I leaned towards Tudor for a few reasons.  First, it gave me a bonafide stud with the ’85 version that should dominate at this cap.  Second, given that I could use a couple Tudor seasons in the pen, I was able to get another quality SP in ’88 Hershisher who should also do quite well at this cap.  On the hitting side, I was able to get a nice mix of speed throughout the lineup.  We have 5 guys with 30+ sbs.  I also get Tom Pagnozzi to platoon at catcher to help me against other teams that went the speed route.  Tudor seemed like the right choice among a lot of average choices.  I do have concerns though.  While the lineup has speed, they do not have much else.  The OBPs are generally lower than I gravitate too.  On the pitching side, there are a couple of Tudors I am using that I am not very comfortable with. I imagine most will not be too happy with their 80mil teams.  It will be interesting to see who separates themselves from the pack.


90M – GM Challenge w/Twist
1924 Chicago White Sox & Friends

I didn’t spend too much time looking at the modern era teams to use as I felt the free agent/twist value was certainly in the earlier part of the 20^th century due to the higher IPs of SPs back then.  I liked the idea of having more choice in putting together my roster so I looked mainly at the bad teams from about 1900-1930.  I built rosters for about 10 teams and then narrowed down my choices to the 1919 Cardinals, 1902 Cleveland, 1924 White Sox and 1907 Bosox (not sure why I went with 1907 instead of 1908 which seems to be the common choice).  Picking this team was easily my most difficult choice of the tournament.  It was basically a coin flip between all these teams.  I went with the 1924 White Sox mainly because of their balanced lineup.  I only used one FA on hitting (Sewell) and kept the rest.  They have 5 hitters with OBPs above .400.  Adding Sewell gave the team 6 solid hitters which was more than I could get with the other  teams I looked at.  I used the rest of my FA/Twists on the putrid pitching staff.  I twisted Faber and picked up Free Agents Walter Johnson and Dazzy Vance to round out my rotation.  In the bullpen I have 2 more FAs in Eppa Rixey and Rube Benton.  These 5 pitchers should be fairly decent at this cap but it will be tough to manage as they are the only non-mop-up pitchers I have.  Looking at other teams, I don’t see one I wish I would have picked instead.  They all have their flaws so I’m not too concerned that I’m not crazy about my own team.  I think the 1998 Marlins team is a pretty good choice and may have taken them if I had remembered I could use the full seasons for Piazza and Sheffield.

100M – Old & New Franchise
Boston Blue Jays

I thought this was a very fun theme.  I started with the new franchises.  I went through each one to figure out if I could roster $40 million worth of players that I would be happy with at this cap.  I ended up with the Expos, Blue Jays, Royals, Padres and Mariners as the only viable options.  Each of these franchises had 1 excellent SP that I could combine with SPs from the old franchises where there would presumably be more to choose from.  I determined that of the old franchises only the Indians, Red Sox, White Sox, Cardinals and A’s fit my criteria to fill out my starting staff.  I then paired each new franchise with each old franchise and built teams for each pairing (yep I really did build 25+ teams).  I ended up narrowing it down to an excellent CHW-SD team and my chosen BOS-TOR team.  I really liked the CHW pitching but felt the hitting on that team was somewhat lacking to what I had with the Boston Blue Jays so decided to go with them. On the pitching side we have the usual dominant deadballers (Young, Leonard, Steele, Morgan) and the great ’97 Clemens from the Jays.  The hitting has a great balance of speed, walks and doubles making good use of the home park of the Skydome.  It is nice to see such a variety of choices and I am very interested to see what the right strategies were as I really have no idea how my team will fare.

110M – Five Consecutive Fives
Uniquely Addie and Tim

Another theme I liked.  I figured I would start where most would and that was by grabbing Addie Joss and Tim Raines (hence the tongue-in-cheek team name).  I then looked at DH.  In DH leagues I try to find the worst fielders possible to really maximize the value I am getting for their hitting.  I decided to platoon John McGraw (over .500 obp) and Gavvy Cravath (in his amazing 1919 season).  Both of these years would give me solid options around them and these 4 picks gave me some direction with which to work with.  McGraw’s year gave me 1902 Bernhard who seems to be of high value.  I also took dirt cheap 1909 Cy Morgan in Joss’s group as another high value pitcher.  I quickly realized that I would need another modern group (over and above the 80s) to give me ample RP options.  I decided to round out my rotation with 2013 Matt Harvey as he fit the SP criteria I was looking for.  Harvey’s group gave me 3 RPs and the SS I was looking for in 2011 Reyes.  I would normally like an A glove at SS and thought originally I would take an Ozzie Smith in the Raines group but I was drawn to Reyes’ mix of AVG+, SBs and Triples….plus he has a near perfect amount of PAs (586) for a last batter so as to maximize my value there. I added ’87 Tony Gwynn to my lineup as he fit in with the speed of my team and I realized I could build a strong lineup based around triples and speed.  My team ended up with 120 triples and a few stolen base threats with little power so I put them in Target Field.  I feel very confident about this team and think it should be my best. 

120M – Babe Ruth in Coors
Coors Light Headed & Fatigued

This theme will certainly be a war of attrition with the key being to find the right amount of IPs while having an eye on enough PAs.  Assuming you could get this part right (or fairly close) I felt there were specific strategies that would be helpful in Coors.  On the pitching side of things my focus was low opp.avg and fairly low whip for the most part.  All of my pitchers have an hr/9 over .50 although I did pay close attention to hr/9+.  There have been more homeruns in my league so far than I figured would be the case so hopefully the strong hr/9+ I selected comes into play for me.  I ended up with 1567 non-mop-up innings (1597 total) and felt quite uncomfortable settling on that number.  I couldn’t lower the quality of my pitching any more to grab 25-50 more IP so I just went with it.  It seems I am certainly on the low end of the IP scale so I am anxious to see how it plays out.  On the hitting side I remembered to ensure I had a lot of high PA hitters as I had pretty significant hitter fatigue issues a few years ago in another high scoring league in the WISC.  Aside from high PA I wanted to get a great glove at SS, 2B and CF to ease the burden on my pitchers.  I ended up with Ozzie Smith, Snuffy Stirnweiss (great range) and almost took Ichiro as my CF but was lured by Joe Medwick’s amazing XBHs which was the main criteria I had for my hitters.  I didn’t pay too much attention to HRs (although I have some sneaky HR guys in ’12 Zimmerman, ’95 Thompson, ’18 Ruth and ’19 Cravath).  The 1918 Ruth was my choice because the others were too expensive and I was fine with doing another platoon with 1919 Cravath who should be a monster in Coors.  The other criteria for my hitting was obviously high avg+ but I also ended up with a decent amount of walks in the event most went the low opp.avg route for their pitchers.  I had originally thought it might be a good idea to have some speed but went away from that strategy thinking it could get me a lot of wasted outs with CSs.  I have ’75 Bench behind the plate in case anyone decides to try an SB team.  Overall, I really like this team and we should do great assuming my pitchers last – which is a big IF.