For the 1st time since PT started, I missed an entire week of play. I know that the Raccoons lost in the LCS last season, but after that I was away until today. So they did just fine without me, but were still 14 games off of last year's record season.
I made an adjustment to my ballpark factors (finally!) by reducing HRs to 1.0 from 1.1 (all other factors are maxed out for offense). Now that my team is a high average, high OBP, middle to low power team, it didn't make sense to boost HRs since that would only help those teams with lots of power. Hopefully, this will help us in the playoffs against those teams with a fair bit more power than us.
We finished the season 1st in R with 957 and BAvg (.309) and in many other categories, but were only 12th in HR and last as always in SB. Because of the variation from season to season in home and away records, I'm not sure what kind of impact this will have on our home record over time. This season we did unusually poorly on the road. We were 50-31 (.617) on the road, but went 65-16 (.802) at home. Our pitching had an off year so I'm thinking that reducing HRs at home might have helped at least a little since it was our pitching that wasn't doing so well.
I started playing Cy Seymour in LF 6 seasons ago (only vs RHP) after using him mostly as a backup for several season and now I can't imagine replacing him. He hit .320 with a .520 SLG this season and plays good, if not great, defense in LF (93 rating). Boggs had another stellar season for us (we picked him up last year). He finished with a 152 OPS+ and led in WAR with an 8.5. He even played respectable defense finishing with a ZR of +2.1.
In the playoffs, we're up 2-0 in the divisional round. We've outscored them 30-5 so far, with Seymour getting 12 RBIs so far and hitting .667. This is like what happened last season. We blew out the team in the divisional round and then couldn't hardly score in the LCS. Hopefully, we'll do better this time around.
Good luck to all of you in the playoffs! I hope to see some championships won by some of you in here - as long as you're not in my league!
