[mcdog512]

Originally Posted by kingcharlesxii

Well if you're going with a defensive-focused team, you're actually putting the cart before the horse with the top post.

What matters the most completely depends on what pitchers are on your team. That's step 1. There's a couple ways you can go with that: heavy groundball staff (higher BABIP but less XBH) or a heavy flyball staff (lower BABIP but potentially more gap hits). Get a bunch of pitchers that fit the profile you want to build to first. If you have a lot of strikeout pitchers, the defensive value will matter less overall. Generally regardless of what type of pitchers I pick, I tend to focus on movement and control with an adequate level of stuff. High stuff is for teams where you have a weaker defense behind them but isn't bad for this type of team either.

Second, you need to get elite defenders that complement those pitchers. You don't want "good enough" defenders, you want elite, even if you're giving up offense for it. You can put worse defenders on whichever area you're not focusing on (ie you can probably put worse defenders on 1B and 3B if you're focusing on outfield defense. However, I would only punt on one of the OF corners if you're focusing on the infield, two bad defenders in the corner seems to spell trouble even if your CF is elite). I prefer range over all else in the OF, while arm is important at 3B/SS only and error rating is important, along with height at 1B).

Combine that with appropriate strategy settings and you can build a cheap and pretty good team. ZR is the metric you want to be looking at - unlike in real baseball, OOTP's ZR should be a perfectly accurate measurement of how well a player is doing defensively. Team defensive efficiency will fluctuate due to luck but team ZR is a good predictor of the future performance of your defense.

That's the route I've taken. Average defensive team with high strikeout pitchers. I am very curious though on how this experiment works.