"Our League" Season 4--Who Wants To Play Our Way?

[allenciox]

Well, now that the Southpaws are in Gold league, they knew they would have to "up their game". Meet their new DH, Hal McRae, and their new SP, Tim Hudson:

Unfortunately, after a week of trying, they have still been unable to sell Jackie Robinson. Until then, this might be the last signing to announce.

[revmcgator]

Originally Posted by Stanley Kuppchaser

I can handle bronze, so Edster and revmcgator get the week off.

I *would* take the week off...but there's a 7-team OL party happening in Iron 205 and an intimate 4-team OL gathering in Stone 160.

Should be plenty of action in Iron and just enough in Stone.

[Stanley Kuppchaser]

Originally Posted by revmcgator

I *would* take the week off...but there's a 7-team OL party happening in Iron 205 and an intimate 4-team OL gathering in Stone 160.

Should be plenty of action in Iron and just enough in Stone.

Just doing two leagues isn't a week off for you?

[Bottom Of The Sixth]

Originally Posted by revmcgator

I *would* take the week off...but there's a 7-team OL party happening in Iron 205 and an intimate 4-team OL gathering in Stone 160.

Should be plenty of action in Iron and just enough in Stone.

Also over in Iron 205 there are 6 BFF teams with one of them being Ex-OL team member, Palolo Puppies!


"On paper", it should be a wild and crazy week!


As for the Keystones, 90%-95% of all recent pulls from packs have either been garbage or duplicates!


Hopefully we can pull a few leprechauns this week to help strengthen the team.

[HRBaker]

10 OL teams in Bronze 235, including all three of mine for the first time. I truly think we'll be .500 teams in Bronze so my goal will be to try and keep the teams together.

[ColbyVargas]

We finally landed our leadoff hitter, from the St. Louis Stars, and paid a steep price.

May not get any OL gold games anyway, the way it is laid out right now.

[STLRS95]

My gosh, I know I was late to the party this year but how are you guys completing these Build A Legends? I'm feeling a little inadequate. I'm still grinding away trying to complete the Live Missions!

[SPBJT]

My Gem City Bombers all by themselves in stone. I updated my friends list yesterday afternoon, but guess it didn't take. That or nobody else is in Stone.

[ColbyVargas]

Originally Posted by STLRS95

My gosh, I know I was late to the party this year but how are you guys completing these Build A Legends? I'm feeling a little inadequate. I'm still grinding away trying to complete the Live Missions!

Agreed! How about an OL Strategy Guide I get tournament packs most days, and do the twitch drops, and the income stream doesn't seem enough to even approach the BaL missions. Also still need a few to finish Live Missions.

Secret sauce, anyone?

[Quinta]

Originally Posted by stl jason

Silver league:

Annandale and Boulder City together in the AC West, so plenty of OL games there. Waffletown alone in the AC central but should get enough division games with Annandale/Boulder.... Algoma alone in the NC Central, hopefully they will get the AC West as their interleague opponents and get enough OL games to qualify

Algoma will only have 6 OL games this year all against Waffletown. I believe that makes the Penguins ineligible for a title. Should I just tank those games so Waffletown gets an advantage?

[Charlatan]

Originally Posted by ColbyVargas

Agreed! How about an OL Strategy Guide I get tournament packs most days, and do the twitch drops, and the income stream doesn't seem enough to even approach the BaL missions. Also still need a few to finish Live Missions.

Secret sauce, anyone?

I learned from the BFF guys, the key to improving your team is to ignore it. Seriously. Don't spend PP buying better players for your team. That's a money sink since most players won't earn the amount you spend on them, and furthermore they improve your team, which helps your team get promoted, which puts you against better competition, which cuts down on your PP generation. Now granted, eventually your team WILL get promoted but try to keep it slow - the best thing to do early is juice your ballpark for maximum hitting and try to keep your pitching staff worn out so you win or lose lots of games 15-12. That will generate more PP than those 3-2 contests.

While your team is on autopilot, make one or more tournament teams. Enter a few tournaments and look at the winners once they are complete. Figure out why they are running certain players. Copy the teams if you have to or if you want to. If there are players that are super expensive (Bronze Rose), look for cheap alternatives (Hal Chase). Alternatives are always there! Always be running max tourneys.

Sign up for twitch drops, and get them as often as you can.

Any PP you earn should be funneled into improving your tournament team. If there are no improvements to make, just save it. Try to run some of the tournaments with card or good pack rewards (like the Late Daily tourneys that reward 5 diamond packs). Run Perfect Drafts. maybe you will get lucky and win one (I'm terrible at them).

Eventually you will be sort of on autopilot for tournaments. You see a tournament, you enter the tournament. You don't need to futz with your team at all because it's set. At that point you should then try to complete the live missions. Figure out a strategy: pick a league reward you want, then look at the divisions in that league - find a division reward you want and then start completing that division. Then the next. Then the next. And then you have a whole bunch of good reward cards you can use on your team. Don't complete the missions in a scattershot manner - you want to get those division and league topper rewards because those are the cards that will really help your team.

If you need to you can sell the Division and league toppers - probably not worth it now because the prices are pretty deflated. Don't sell the team rewards though, as they will be needed in the next tier of missions.

Eventually you complete the live missions. It may take a while - heck, I think Annandale worked on them for 3 or 4 weeks. But it will eventually happen. Then your team will be pretty good, with all those reward cards.

At that point, you should have a fairly steady stream of packs. Eventually the law of averages will come through and you will hit paydirt, whether it's a live Diamond or Perfect or a pricy historical card. It *will* happen, it's just a matter of getting the drops for long enough. Keep that in mind when you are opening the 10th pack in a row with a Bronze 60 in it.

Once you get a "really good" card you have a decision to make: you can either sell it (and if it's a live card I would sell it unless it was maybe Aroldis Chapman, who I would hold until the next update). If it's a historical maybe you can get a lot of PP for it. It might make sense to sell it even if it's a great card, if it can be the springboard for you to complete other missions. Once you get some PP then it's time to start looking at other missions.

I sat down over the weekend and looked at all the BAL missions and decided who I wanted to pursue. I then took the top 10 or so and estimated how much PP it would take to complete them. Then I reordered the missions according to my priority - to complete some of the "cheaper" missions first. I sold off some of the mission drops I got for cards I'm not interested in (Tony Fernandez, Peavy, Guidry) even though that may be a longer term bad idea. I don't have the resources to hold everything though.



-----

That pretty much describes the process I went through.

Annandale has been incredibly lucky with pack drops to be sure. But I also have purchased almost no cards off the AH to use with the main team. I think I got 2 silver infielders early on when my team graduated out of Rookie since I had nobody good in those spots. I also bought Zach Duke since he is a very highly rated gold pitcher who is cheap. Aside from that, everyone else on my team is a collection reward or a pack drop. Given I'm not spending any PP on buying players, I am using the PP for completing some BAL missions.

Hope this rambling helps.

[Tinkerman]

Ha ha! In the latest twist, OL teams get paired with DLL. And I was already expecting a pasting this season... Good luck Vyshka!

Originally Posted by Bottom Of The Sixth

As for the Keystones, 90%-95% of all recent pulls from packs have either been garbage or duplicates!

Similar. My packs stink so badly recently that I'm losing the faith!

I've actually had to turn to PT21 for therapy, for crying out loud .

[stl jason]

Originally Posted by Quinta

Algoma will only have 6 OL games this year all against Waffletown. I believe that makes the Penguins ineligible for a title. Should I just tank those games so Waffletown gets an advantage?

heh.... appreciate the though, as the Syrups are still searching for their first OL crown and WS title this version, but always want to beat teams at their best to earn it.


and to piggy back off the Annandale experience of team building.... been doing a similar path this version here. In previous versions, I was focused on the old timey players (pre 1945) so had little choice but to buy them from the AH.... now that I'm using any non-live/historical card, I'm trying to go a different route....

focused first on completing the Live missions (waited a couple weeks to get started to let the AH frenzy die down a bit).... had some decent luck picking up silver cards from packs, so was able to build a solid silver tourney squad pretty fast and have been able to hit the prize rounds enough times to keep a decent number of packs coming in (plus the 5 a day twitch drops when streams go long enough)... sell off any dup cards as I get them (unless the are NOT in a mission yet, in which case I'm holding onto them to see if thy do show up in a mission and their price increases), and sell off any Live perfect/diamond/gold cards for the extra funds...

just completed the negro league pitcher mission to nab the Paige card.. just watched for cards selling under their last 10 value and tried to grab them as able... got a bit lucky as the Concepcion card I've been holding that was going for about 25K finally showed up in a mission so his price doubled and I sold him off for 50K the other night to let me knock out the last 9 NL cards pretty fast to finish the pitcher mission

definitely not a rich club with lots of available funds to throw around (think I'm under 3000pp right now ), so patience is a must

[IanIachimoe]

Originally Posted by stl jason

Congrats Nowhere Men on their Silver league WS title!

Thanks! that pic is kinda disheartening... I thought the logo had finally stuck yesterday. shows up for me, apparently not for anyone else.

have a couple roster moves to announce, will get to it here in a couple mins. nothing major, mostly advancing the BAL players (pulling 2 live perfects early thursday evening helped quite a bit).

looks like my BFF & OL team are not only in the same league, but same division. that's gonna be confusing

[Charlatan]

Through some lucky timing (finding the perfect pieces for relatively low prices), Annandale was able to procure the services of Mike Mussina for a very good price. He is now in the Atom Smashers' starting lineup:

[allenciox]

Southpaws and Nowhere Men have been competing with each other for an OL crown just about every season and last season they took their rivalry to the silver level series.

So the gods decided to put the two teams in the same division in G304 so they can beat up on each other all season long. The first of those tussles occurred today when Cary travelled to Nowhere for a three game series.

And boy were they closely fought! In game 1 (game id: 142), Cary was leading 3-2 heading into the bottom o fthe ninth. But Nowhere decided to scrape together a run to send it to extra innings. So Alan Trammell hit a home run in the top of the tenth to make it 5-3 and Cary hoped it would end it. But Nowhere wasn't done. In the bottom of the tenth, newly acquired build-a-legend Harry Heilmann answered with his own two-run shot.

Things stayed quiet until the top of the 14th, when Moises Alou hit a home run with the bases empty to put Cary up 6-5. This time, Nowhere Men had no answer and the game ended in Cary's favor.

So all the tired pitchers from game one hoped that game 2 would be short and sweet. Once again, it went to extra innings tied 2-2 as no one scored after the 2nd inning. That scoring drought ended in the top of the eleventh when Buck Leonard hit a solo home run for Cary. Once again, Cary escaped with a nail-biter.

Now it would only be fitting for the third game to have similar drama. But no, this time Cary's bats came alive as Cary scored eight runs in the first four innings and never looked back, "eaking out" an 8-2 victory.

I am sure that there will be many more exciting games between these two teams this season. With Cary and Nowhere Men beating up on each other, perhaps the Crakes will slide past both of them to get an OL crown this year!

[IanIachimoe]

^ that's a good write up. a rivalry is born

This afternoon, the Nowhere Men signed Pete Hill at a relatively low cost hoping to persuade his buddy Oscar Charleston to join the team shortly after (figured it was time to capitalize on pulling Dihingo). Pete likely won't see much, if any, action. Oscar is being penciled in at CF pushing Dihingo to super utility role.

The Men were short on time & PP last week, the most notable moves being the promotions of Diamond BAL to Perfect (Piazza, Glavine, Baines & Fernandez) who were all able to contribute down the stretch. Glavine was as good as expected, Fernandez signed just before the Silver league series & was a much-needed sparkplug & Baines was a steadying presence in both the field & DH.

As a long time NYM fan, the Men were most excited to welcome Perfect Piazza who started slow but will most certainly turn it around.

Besides the addition of Charleston today, it has been the same players through BAL & will probably continue to be. what I thought would be a slow build has stayed surprisingly competitive so far.

The Men would also like to thank Richie Hebner for his time with the team. With his value almost 3x what it was, it was time to move on.

[Stanley Kuppchaser]

Originally Posted by IanIachimoe

Thanks! that pic is kinda disheartening... I thought the logo had finally stuck yesterday. shows up for me, apparently not for anyone else.

have a couple roster moves to announce, will get to it here in a couple mins. nothing major, mostly advancing the BAL players (pulling 2 live perfects early thursday evening helped quite a bit).

looks like my BFF & OL team are not only in the same league, but same division. that's gonna be confusing

Do you mean the picture of Jeremy Hilliard on the trophy and with the crown? I thought you had settled on that as being okay, but perhaps I'm mistaken. I will adorn any logo you want with the crowns you earn, just post it on the forum so I can copy it. When I try to snip them in game, they often don't yield too well to the editing process and end up fuzzy and unattractive.


By the way, this goes for anyone. If you have a logo you want to use and you haven't posted it on the forum, please do. I have developed a generic logo, but prefer to have league members get their choice.

[Stanley Kuppchaser]

The Commodores won their only contest to take the early lead in the crown chase in B235.

[Stanley Kuppchaser]

Many thanks to Charlatan and Jason for the their insider stories on team building. My "secret" is whether the player was on my roster from when I played in a Strat-O-Matic play-by-mail league 30 or so years ago. I'm not sure if it's still going, but I know that when I left after 14 years, it was about 30 years old. Anyway, a former Crab will always get a look and keep a spot longer that he should sometimes.



My other big consideration is whether I like the guy from my "golden age" of fandom, 1962-1999, when I followed baseball. I also love old timers because I was an inveterate reader of baseball history as a youth.



I also don't like to have guys who were on my team in previous versions, unless they're special favorites. I just like to see new faces.



Not quite as systematic or propitious as the above two esteemed gentleman, but it works for me.