Season 5, 2024 thread

[PocketsAintFull]

May your Batters be Brave, and your Pitchers Precise

[Marleigh]

Everyone stayed at the same level last season

Paragon City Heroes, added Barry Larkin (3b), Lance Berkman (1b), Dale Murphy (RF) and a new backup/platoon LF Lonnie Smith. Bagwell moves to DH. our defense gets better, Larkin is better all around than Toby Harrah, Murphy should be better than the SE players at RF, our pitching is still so so.

San Angeles 70s added Boog Powell at 1b, could be the big bat we have needed as long as everyone else performs to their level. John ''The Count'' Montefusco at SP giving us 4/5 of the starting staff as potentially heavy strikeout pitchers. Would love to add the Nolan Ryan SE to the staff but my pitching was decent last season, my offense let me down. For some reason my custom logo keeps resetting every season for this team, weird

Lowdown Lugnuts can't possibly do worse than last year, the pitching staff is all groundballers now, everyone is fully trained defensively in the infield, my only stumbling block may be needing to train the OF, Puckett (RF) and Gwynn(LF) come in and need full training, Mazeroski comes in as backup to all of the IF positions bar 1b, which falls to Dave Magadan. happy with how the team looks, now they just need to perform

[Magus978]

This week's theme: Diamond Days Are Here!

Three diamond leagues this week. Perfect league will not start until there are 30 diamond leagues to promote the winner from (according to Kris), so we are entering the diamond days. The Saints are in D352, a short league with 4 teams per division, 24 teams total. An absolute who's who of notable PT franchises, way too many to list here.

If you're not in diamond hell this week (or the next few weeks for that matter), be thankful!

[PocketsAintFull]

My Birmingham Bolts enter the league of Silver .269, coming off a 122 win season and 4 straight division titles, which probably makes them the most successful team I've ever had starting out Minimal changes needed, so only 98 Yogi Berra joins the club for 28.5k, replacing SE Jason Varitek behind the plate. The only other difference is science-fiction related, as SE Greg Maddux has morphed into 97 Greg Maddux; he just came in to spring training as an alternate version of himself. Probably best not to ask him....


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My Uecker's Underdogs -BFF team have had more of a transformation, ready for their first crack at Iron (.165) level alongside 9 other BFF league hopefuls. The infield sees Live players Rizzo, LeMahieu & Machado leave, replaced by 80 Harry Davis at 1B, 81 Pete Runnels at 2B, and 84 Terry Pendleton at 3B. This brings more balance to the lineup, and also reverts the team to more of a power offense. Finally the search for a consistent rotation goes on, with the addition of 88 Johnny Sain & 85 Ray Berge a-top the order. The Underdogs don't have the power or prestige of their Bolt cousins, but they have their own identity to carve...

[bailey]

Originally Posted by Magus978

This week's theme: Diamond Days Are Here!

Three diamond leagues this week. Perfect league will not start until there are 30 diamond leagues to promote the winner from (according to Kris), so we are entering the diamond days. The Saints are in D352, a short league with 4 teams per division, 24 teams total. An absolute who's who of notable PT franchises, way too many to list here.

If you're not in diamond hell this week (or the next few weeks for that matter), be thankful!

I can't wait to get there. Bronze league should be just as much of a romp (for Collingwood) as iron was, if not easier. (As I type this, Jeff Bagwell starts the season off right with a leadoff HR). Only 2 other teams in my league have completed 39 or more missions and both are in the other conference. As bad luck would have it--in the same division, as well. One team is half done, in my conference, but different division.

I've stood pat for 2 weeks now, lacking a plan. I don't want to pay top dollar for tomorrow's second-rate player as new content gets released. Time to study the card list, I guess, to see what's available. In the past, I've just bought "best available" when I had a yen to buy something, which is not smart play. I confess to flipping cards the last 2 weeks, but my favorite plays seem to be tapped out. My tournament teams, likewise, have gone stone cold. Maybe, tournaments are just tougher on the weekend?

[BigRed75]

The Secret Harbour Pirates are in Silver and guess what? They've got a team with a .750 lifetime winning percentage in their division.

At least there's only *one* whale in the division this time around. But we play them in 7 of our first 9 games. Two games in and we've already hung one L on them. We won't be pushed around (I hope).

The Arequipa Alpacas placed in a 32-team Bo7 Bronze tournament that I entered right before I went to work. It appears to be one of the last tournaments where the 3rd/4th place teams won PPs instead of a pack. Oh well, I'm happy for the change in prizes and look forward to getting some more packs this way. As far as the league goes, the Alpacas stay in Bronze this season, and are in a much more favorable draw with no apparent whale in their conference and a wide-open division full of similar teams. Fingers crossed the Alpacas can distinguish themselves and take home a division title, or better.

The Bibra Lake Quendas went on a big-time shopping spree last night and now find themselves with an all-Future Legend starting lineup. The next couple of weeks will be focused on defensive training as we look to build our bank account back up, it is currently sitting in the low four-figures. Stone .153 in the league, The Chernobyl Tigers and their .689 lifetime winning percentage have this conference sewn up (on paper at least) with all 14 other teams in a band between .540 and .460 lifetime. I will be curious to see how some of these youngsters such as Oneil Cruz, Ronny Mauricio and Carter Kieboom train up at different positions. Just so long as the experiment doesn't get me relegated.

Finally, the Lynn Live Oaks take to the field with seven new players, all SE cards from the first seven completed missions. These would be the six teams (BAL, DET, KC, LAA, SEA and SF) that only require Iron and Bronze cards to complete the mission, plus TOR. Hopefully, the reinforcements will get the Live Oaks out of Stone hell and into Iron. The draw is fairly distributed, with one good team in each division and the rest (including the Oaks) of similar quality. However, with only eight promotions from Stone this season, it won't be enough just to make the playoffs - we will have to win a wild card game (or the division) as well.

[Morug]

2 of my teams are in very deep division..its will be harder to make playoffs. Tiger King team fall in a deep Iron league...team rankings by position is very bad for this team compared to the last season in Stone league.

[waittilnextyear]

In Silver 253, and the Frogs are playing about 2 standard deviations below what I expected so far. The level of competition has gotten noticeably better as well.

[RunninYakAngler]

The Marathoners (15-3) are in Silver 261 this week, as expected there are some pretty good teams but the playoffs should be possible. Looks like most teams have either finished the Live Missions or are getting really close and or buying players.

Probably will jinx Bagwell, but he's off to a blistering pace, after 18 games he's hitting .518 with 7 HRs and 26 RBIs. Newly acquired 100 Joe Cronin is doing the opposite, hitting .071 with 1 hit, a HR. Granted it's only been 4 games but come on man! Hopefully those PPs I spent will be worth it, I couldn't stand having Tulo batting in the 220s.

YakAnglers are playing .500 ball and will probably be good enough to get promoted but playoffs will take a lot of PPs/pack luck.

Battle Corgis are not doing well in Iron. Last I checked they were 3-12. May get relegated, playoffs are not even being considered. Hopefully we'll have enough PPs soon to get disappointed in a pack again.

[JasonC23]

Warhawk's Las Vegas White Tigers!

Huntley has had an up-and-down start to its Gold debut, beginning the season 5-2 before losing 4 straight, the last 3 by 1 run each. That actually has been a theme so far, as the Red Raiders lost their first 4 1-run games before finally winning the most recent 1-run contest in extra innings.

Meanwhile, the White Tigers were hovering around .500 before ripping off 7 wins in a row, an active streak which has them off to a strong start.

Good luck to all in G310 and across the rest of the PT universe!

[DrunkenSuperman]

Hello, new to posting here!

Decided to spend some more time and a small amount of $ on this mode this year, after doing surprisingly well last year despite checking my team maybe once a month. I also like the idea of the pack only teams I've seen around here so I've created one of those that will start play next season.

After two straight seasons of earning the second wild card and being the only non-whale playoff team in the conference, the Slipnutz are off to a strong start in Bronze at 17-10. Though it's looking likely that the wild card is my ceiling again, based on the division I'm in.

You can see from my team that I'm slowly working through the NL live collections as I earn points. Onward and upward.

[Warhawk]

Originally Posted by JasonC23

Warhawk's Las Vegas White Tigers!

Huntley has had an up-and-down start to its Gold debut, beginning the season 5-2 before losing 4 straight, the last 3 by 1 run each. That actually has been a theme so far, as the Red Raiders lost their first 4 1-run games before finally winning the most recent 1-run contest in extra innings.

Meanwhile, the White Tigers were hovering around .500 before ripping off 7 wins in a row, an active streak which has them off to a strong start.

Good luck to all in G310 and across the rest of the PT universe!

Hell, we started off 1-5! 18-3 since. Somehow Carlton who was our worst starter last season has started off 4-0 and allowed all of 2 runs.

Anyway we get you guys in June & July.

BTW just pulled a Trout, gonna drop my 90 OVR Kemp who I was basically platooning with Bellinger by sliding Mays over to RF, and switch over to a Bellinger-Mays platoon entirely over in RF. While they both need to improve in LF I'm gonna use the one who's not starting as the backup, so I can bring up Lindor and use him in a platoon with Pesky at short, who is hitting .440 against righties and .182 against lefties, and slide Lajoie, who had been playing short against lefties to allow Pesky to platoon with Harrah against lefties, into second base against lefties so Harrah gets to platoon with Cano instead. I suppose that's all rather confusing.

Still can't figure out a good fifth starter. I've tried Randy Johnson, Gerrit Cole, Ewell Blackwell, and now Johnson again; they all pitch great in the pen but suck as soon as I make them a starter.

Black Knights in Iron are 18-9. Started 13-2, then lost 7 of 8, and won 4 in a row since then. Up 4 games in the division. Ron Reed is 4-1 with a 0.93 ERA, Randy Johnson is 4-2 with a 2.53 ERA and a 1.60 FIP.

Sun Kings in Silver wrapped up the live missions and started 10-0, they're now 23-4. Leading the league in both runs scored and runs allowed, plus home runs, batting average, and ERA.

[Marleigh]

Paragon City Heroes 16-10 tied for 1st, should be doing better, honus Wagner, Lance Berkman and Robinson Cano have not been hitting at all. pitching has been very up and down, DeGrom being the standout starter 4-1 2.31 era, and plank at stopper has been unreal with 9 saves and a 0.63 WHIP. going to try Lindor out at 2nd and hope the other guys start hitting

San Angeles 70s 12-15 an odd one as statistically the team is doing well, my pythag is -5 and i can't see any obvious reasons other than bad luck at present, of course it would be nice for Boog Powell to hit over .172 but he is the only significant underperformer

Lowdown Lugnuts 12-15 there is an obvious reason for our record, the bullpen, brought in Stan Belinda to try to close things. frank Robinson has put his sub 700 OPS season behind him and has already hit 9HR. made a few lineup tweaks, and hoping we improve

[BigRed75]

The Secret Harbour Pirates are pleasantly in first place, 16-10 with a 1 1/2 game lead. Surprisingly, the whale I was worried about is in LAST place with a 8-17 record. In looking at the lineup, they look to be putting out a strong lineup and aren't tanking so this just seems to be a case of bad luck for the Trash Pandas.

I mentioned that I was annoyed that we had 7 of our first 9 games of the season against them. Well, we won five of those seven games to give us a strong platform for the rest of April. We have three more games to close out the month. At some point the Trash Pandas are going to put it all back together, they are too good a team not to. I'm just glad that we will have already played the majority of our games against them this season after they find their groove.

The other big news for the Pirates is that we have completed the Mets mission, and Mike Piazza should finally plug in that sucking wound that is our backup catcher spot. Well, technically Jason Kendall is going to fill that hole as Piazza becomes our new starter, but you know what I mean. In his first game as a Pirate, Piazza only went and hit two home runs and was named player of the game. Nice!

Also, that Mets mission was our fifth and final NL East mission, which means we welcome SE Steve Carlton to the rotation. With that, the rotation is now complete. Ted Lyons goes back into the bullpen where I'm hoping he can revive his Pirates career much as Live 94 OVR Jack Flaherty did a few seasons ago. Dutch Leonard did well for the Pirates in the early years, but his time on the active roster has come to an end. He will stick around on the reserve roster should a bullpen arm falter, but if he becomes part of a mission we won't hesitate to sell him for a tidy sum.

[bailey]

The Magpies can expect some pack help, thanks to my cat waking me up early enough to find out about the tournament re-structuring this morning. The Saturday gold weekly with reduced to just 16 players needed and the top 8 getting packs. I've never played any tournament higher than iron, but this was also a DRR3, so wouldn't take long and any gold roster can get lucky and win. I didn't realize just how many historical gold cards I had since I never bought any. Just proceeds from tournament packs and the special edition cards from the live missions. I had a complete team except, no shortstop. Pickings on the AH were slim or expensive; I opted for silver Tony Kubek at 1300pp. To back him up at SS (and also 2B) was silver Bobby Richardson which I already owned.

We lost 2 out of the first 3, but one team won all 3 games leaving the rest of us to beat each other up. That same team won 3 more, but I won 2 out of 3 to stumble into the quarter-finals. There the team caught fire and won the next 4 to win 1st place. Tony Kubek handled 49 chances flawlessly including 10 double plays to justify his purchase while Richardson play both games of the best-of-3 finals to wins series MVP.



Don't they look sweet? I hate to open them just yet.... (I'm fearing duplicate Blake Snell, so I'm holding off until that feeling goes away) Stay tuned.

[Marleigh]

Paragon City Heroes 36-18 moved to joint best record in the league behind the bat of Barry larkin (.321 .962 ops) Berkman is still struggling hitting just .195 but his walks have given him a respectable OBP. (95) DeGrom is the star man in the rotation at 9-1 2.24era. Surprisingly this team is number 1 in the league in runs against, various other pitching categories and unsurprisingly defensive efficiency. Currently riding a 6 game win streak

San Angeles 70s 25-29 some really tough matchups this month against some whales combined with a dropoff in performance made an ugly 2nd half of the month after pulling themselves back to .500

Lowdown Lugnuts 29-26 still tinkering with the lineup, brought in Mark Grace at 1b and his bat was smoking hot (.988 ops) Frank Robinson leads the team in pretty much every offensive category. the pitching is definitely helped by the D, Adam Wainwright has been particularly dominant (7-1)

[Perceptor]

The joys of the Diamond League where almost every series is a must win to stay competitive

[HipandKneeDoc]

I guess it will thin out as more teams join...

[Warhawk]

Sold a couple diamonds I wasn't using and finished up all but the last 2 live missions for the Black Knights. Still need 6 White Sox and 12 Yankees but finishing the whole NL helped upgrade a team a lot that was already leading the division.

EDIT: Well my 3 teams, all leading their divisions by decent cushions, started the day a really stellar 2-6. Lovely.

EDIT 2: Incredible. The Black Knights start 34-19, add Bagwell, Kiner, Snider, Ichiro, Piazza, Williams, Mathews, Maddux, Carlton, Wainwright, and Nathan all in one shot, and have gone 1-5 since. Piazza and Williams have been good and Nathan struck out the side in his one appearance to close out the win, but everyone else has been horrendous. Snider is 3 for 22 with a .318 OPS, he's not just worse than Bader (who he replaced) was, he's MUCH worse.

[HelpDodgers]

In my league there is one RBI king....