Park Factor Success Stories?

[DawnBTVS]

Anybody gone extreme pitching or extreme hitting? I've largely struggled with collecting SP (yet boast a dynamite RP group) in my FTP team and thus I've largely favored more hitting-centric ballparks to favor my power hitters + high strikeout bullpen. Right now my ballpark slightly favors hitting at 1.5% BA and 3.0% HR but I'm thinking of changing it for next season.

Do you change your parks annually based on new obtained cards or stay consistent year to year? Do you stay pretty neutral or vary Righty vs. Lefty?

Figure we could get some interesting discussion going.

[pgjocki]

I've gone strictly to favoring pitchers and defense. One team in Perfect and one in Gold.

Mixed reviews as I won a Championship in Diamond and am a useless punching bag in Perfect.

Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk

[mcdog512]

Originally Posted by pgjocki

I've gone strictly to favoring pitchers and defense. One team in Perfect and one in Gold.

Mixed reviews as I won a Championship in Diamond and am a useless punching bag in Perfect.

Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk

I won two perfect titles going with a hitters park and good defense.

[QuantaCondor]

In my opinion, teams should be built around the ballpark settings, not the other way around. I have a full lefty team, a full righty team, and a contact/gap heavy team all in perfect as F2P. I know there are several other lefty teams in the Perfect NFTP and OL leagues, so it seems to be consistently good to go all-in on a ballpark setting.

[Stick50]

Originally Posted by pgjocki

I've gone strictly to favoring pitchers and defense. One team in Perfect and one in Gold.

What did your settings look like? .9 AVE and .9 HR?

[Stick50]

Originally Posted by QuantaCondor

In my opinion, teams should be built around the ballpark settings, not the other way around. I have a full lefty team, a full righty team.

Same question... What are your settings like

[Magus978]

No success here, just a ton of failure. After multiple seasons of horrible offense and lack of run production, I changed things up for this week. Big mistake. Now we can't pitch to save our lives, especially our bullpen, which had been a huge strength the past few seasons. Now I'm left with nothing to do but wait until Monday to go back to a true neutral setting and see what upgrades I really need.

In trying to fix my offense, I've broken everything else. Don't be a Magus who breaks his team because he wants to score more runs.

[OMGPuppies]

Originally Posted by Magus978

No success here, just a ton of failure. After multiple seasons of horrible offense and lack of run production, I changed things up for this week. Big mistake. Now we can't pitch to save our lives, especially our bullpen, which had been a huge strength the past few seasons. Now I'm left with nothing to do but wait until Monday to go back to a true neutral setting and see what upgrades I really need.

In trying to fix my offense, I've broken everything else. Don't be a Magus who breaks his team because he wants to score more runs.

Too impatient

[Magus978]

Originally Posted by OMGPuppies

Too impatient

Four of my starters have ERA's over 4. Bullpen has guys with ERA's closer to 5 than to 3. No team can expect to succeed with a staff ERA of 4.60. I don't care if you're sending 9 Babe Ruths to the plate, you are NOT winning if you can't pitch competently. I can safely say without ANY hesitation that this experiment is a disaster, and I will be relieved to put it to the merciless death it deserves on Monday and go back to neutral settings!

I will not sit back and let anything of mine continue to suffer one way or the other. Taking action on a problem will always be a better option than inaction and stagnancy. Proactive action, my boy!

[OMGPuppies]

Originally Posted by Magus978

Four of my starters have ERA's over 4. Bullpen has guys with ERA's closer to 5 than to 3. No team can expect to succeed with a staff ERA of 4.60. I don't care if you're sending 9 Babe Ruths to the plate, you are NOT winning if you can't pitch competently. I can safely say without ANY hesitation that this experiment is a disaster, and I will be relieved to put it to the merciless death it deserves on Monday and go back to neutral settings!

I will not sit back and let anything of mine continue to suffer one way or the other. Taking action on a problem will always be a better option than inaction and stagnancy. Proactive action, my boy!

You sound like Foghorn Leghorn.

[Magus978]

Originally Posted by OMGPuppies

You sound like Foghorn Leghorn.

Sounds about right. Overweight, tall, tasty when cooked...but that's neither here nor there.

The point is that I don't believe it's a good idea to stick to something that isn't ideal and doesn't show enough positive signs of getting me to where I want to be, just way too much volatility with the pitching staff to be a viable plan unless you have god-tier pitchers, and that's not something I'm blessed with. Therefore, I believe it's better to make a change for next week and hope the pitching can round back into the form I expect. Not changing it up would leave us even more stagnant than where we were on Monday.

It's either that, or continue to sit here wondering where else I'm going wrong. I can do that with neutral settings, as I believe that's a true barometer of where you need to improve.

[OMGPuppies]

Originally Posted by Magus978

Sounds about right. Overweight, tall, tasty when cooked...but that's neither here nor there.

The point is that I don't believe it's a good idea to stick to something that isn't ideal and doesn't show enough positive signs of getting me to where I want to be, just way too much volatility with the pitching staff to be a viable plan unless you have god-tier pitchers, and that's not something I'm blessed with. Therefore, I believe it's better to make a change for next week and hope the pitching can round back into the form I expect. Not changing it up would leave us even more stagnant than where we were on Monday.

It's either that, or continue to sit here wondering where else I'm going wrong. I can do that with neutral settings, as I believe that's a true barometer of where you need to improve.

Post your roster. I can help.

[chazzycat]

absolutely ballpark factors are a key to building a successful team on the cheap.

Probably the most important thing is that you always have to remember to keep the stats you see in the proper context. Using the example above, if you have your AVG factor set to MAX, yes, your pitchers are going to have bad ERAs. That's inevitable. So if you just look at your staff ERA and think they are all garbage, it's just not true. Giving up ten percent more hits is just absolutely disastrous for a pitcher's ERA, there's no way around it. The important thing is that your offense is outscoring theirs and winning games. Judge your team by it's run differential, not by stats like ERA or batting average.

[Magus978]

Originally Posted by chazzycat

absolutely ballpark factors are a key to building a successful team on the cheap.

Probably the most important thing is that you always have to remember to keep the stats you see in the proper context. Using the example above, if you have your AVG factor set to MAX, yes, your pitchers are going to have bad ERAs. That's inevitable. So if you just look at your staff ERA and think they are all garbage, it's just not true. Giving up ten percent more hits is just absolutely disastrous for a pitcher's ERA, there's no way around it. The important thing is that your offense is outscoring theirs and winning games. Judge your team by it's run differential, not by stats like ERA or batting average.

Run differential was middling...another key factor in my conclusion. I mentioned earlier in the thread before it became a Foghorn Leghorn discussion that while I had noticed a definite uptick in runs, we were still not scoring enough to win on a consistent basis due to the increased amount of runs being given up. The combination of the two is what made my mind up.

On the patience front, I do not believe it's a matter of patience. It's a matter of the results not being anywhere near what I thought they would be and a desire to tinker with things until they're an ideal setting for the 25 players on the team. What that setting is, I still have no idea.

[Argonaut]

IMO some of the setups like the all-Lefty team seem a little too effective. It's something that you can plan against, but with a game that's mostly hands-off these teams are free to runover managers who don't watch all the time (which I assume is most people).

Just a note from one of the things that I've tried.. the super-defensive park works as intended, but the PP gain is pretty awful. Much more PP gain with offensive teams.

[Magus978]

Originally Posted by Argonaut

IMO some of the setups like the all-Lefty team seem a little too effective. It's something that you can plan against, but with a game that's mostly hands-off these teams are free to runover managers who don't watch all the time (which I assume is most people).

Just a note from one of the things that I've tried.. the super-defensive park works as intended, but the PP gain is pretty awful. Much more PP gain with offensive teams.

The defensive setup was what I was going with the past few seasons. Points gain was atrocious, and I honestly thought we had everything necessary to make a more favorable hitters park work. What I don't think I took into account was the fact that we would need more runs than we were scoring previously to make this work, and they just haven't been there.

Being smacked back to reality sucks.

[neugey]

In gold level right now there is a team I noticed in the opposite conference that has all left-handed hitters, lone exception is one switch hitter on the bench, and all left-handed starting pitching. The park has all lefty hitting maxed to 1.1 and all righty hitting nerfed to .9. He's 32-10 at home and 16-27 away. I don't think I'd ever want to go this extreme myself; it just doesn't sit well with me to be dead meat in so many road games.

[One Great Matrix]

I'm sure there are ways to take some advantage of PF, but mine is that I left them alone and one week had the best home vs. road difference in the league.

[Jeff1787]

I wish someone would put up some basic guidelines on how ballpark factors work.

[matingly23]

I haven't messed too much with it in 20 as my rosters are not 100% set/in their final form, and neutral settings are fine.

In 19 I did have some success, but you need to have a roster that will work with the park for the settings to help you. I wanted to limit HRs, so I made the park quite a bit larger and dropped the HR frequency setting. I also upped the BA and 2b/3b settings to account for all the extra OF room.

My roster had great defensive OF'ers so that they could hopefully cover the ground in the OF better than the other team. And I valued contact and gap power in hitters.

I would usually finish in the bottom half of home runs, but (at least through Diamond) close to if not at the top of the league in a lot of the other categories. The larger park and strong OF defense also helped my pitching staff be among the leaders in a lot of categories, except for Ks as I valued movement and control more than stuff.

In regular OOTP I had a lot of success with the Rockies by going with all high movement, groundball pitchers and excellent infield defense. There I didn't modify the park, just tried to adapt the roster to it.