Quote:
Originally Posted by jasg224
Nice, Isidro "Chilo" Márquez is a Mexican baseball legend. Top in saves in both the summer and winter league (though the winter record was broken just this past season by Jake "Jake Mate" Sánchez).
Also it's interesting to see all those no-hitters. Usually latin leagues (particularly for Mexico) tend to be high-scoring batters' leagues. Steven Tarpley threw the league's 114th no-hit game in 101 years just last week!
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Sadly, unless the scouting is way off, Chilo comes into the LGB on the basis of his sole MLB season in 1995, which does not reflect his LGB achievements and broader talent. I did tick him up marginally under the hood before the Draft, so hopefully he surprises to the upside and we get to see him at the top level.
On your second point, one must remember that this is a latin league only in setting. While it contains many players from the surrounding nations, the vast majority of them - by dint of their MLB and NeL careers - are really American baseball players of latin origin, if you get my drift. So their "natural" game style is more MLB than LMB.
Still, as I always do, I put a lot of work into designing this league to reflect its origins and player pool. So I pushed speed / SB / up a bit. Increased bunting for hits. Set catcher framing to above average. I set the following LTMs as the starting point:
So, slightly above average power without sacrificing the contact element. I'm still autocalcing these but will stop after 10 seasons and let it drift from there.
The league ERA has been stable at around 4.40 throughout, and yet from the off the LGB looked like it was going to be offence-dominant. The main reason for this is the lack of top-notch pitching to have come through in these early seasons. In the past few, I have handpicked rookies to try redress the imbalance just a tad, which is why three of the four NeL guys this time around were A and above grade hurlers.
In fact, this might be a mirage; a misread on my part. Of the 373 pitchers currently with LGB contracts, OSA has five of them at 80 POT: Dihigo, Foster, Leon Day, Kenley Jansen, and Carlos Marmol.
The first two of these are having 1987 seasons that you won't believe. At the start of September, they each have 340+ strikeouts and an ERA around 2.
There are two pitchers with POT in the 70s, 13 in the 60s, and another 16 in the upper 50s.
All of which makes the outlier number of no-hitters less surprising. Although, six in one season is stretching it, no doubt.
TLDR: I really like the balance and hope it keeps on along the same trajectory throughout. We're not far away from the league hitting the more usual seasonal turnover with retirements starting to creep up as the league age average does likewise, which means I'll need to continue monitoring and fine-tuning the mix.