The YS9 WAY: Philosophy of Roster Construction

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The YS9 WAY: Philosophy of Roster Construction

Post by RonCo » Sun Sep 19, 2021 8:39 pm

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I think I’m going to start with roster construction, or at least the philosophy of it. That’s the most logical way, I suppose. The premise of this thing was how I would look at the world if I took over a bit of a derelict team, and so the place I’d likely start is in the same place as you would—essentially scanning through my current roster and down into the dregs of whatever was in my minor league system to take stock of our starting place.

That’s what I did the first time, anyway.

By that I don’t necessarily mean that I’m trying to build any particular kind of team. Strong up the middle defensively? Sure. A lineup full of boppers? Okay. But really I’m most just asking a simple question of “Can this guy play for a winning team?” Nothing more and nothing less. This means that I fully subscribe to the idea that baseball is a game of taking whatever the game gives, and moving on.

Yellow Springs, for example, was in disarray when I took them over, but they had some decent talent in the minors. Not deep, but what was there was elite—as in LaLoosh, Chavez, and McNeill elite, which one would hope was true, after all—the GM before me was tossed for purposely tanking, but at least he did it “right”. So the team was set up for at least a good bout of Wave Winning—but even to get there it needed a LOT of work elsewhere. That said, there were a few interesting guys in the organization, one of whom (Carlos Medina) was a pedestrian looking OF who could—if used properly create a bit of value…and who was the subject of a pretty public bet that I (barely) won.

There is a certain art to looking at an OOTP player and saying “that guy can contribute.” I think the challenge is to look at a guy and see what he’s good at—and then not blame him if you put him in the wrong places. Stars, of course, are easy to toss into the lineup simply because their strengths are so strong that they overpower the weaknesses. But a Steady player … well … assessing them is harder. You look at a .3 WAR (say) and figure he can’t get the job done. But WAR is a dangerous, dangerous stat. It can cover up a lot. Or, maybe better said, if a player is exposed to the wrong environments, then holes in his game cause problems. If, on the other hand, a player can be managed well enough, he can play as if he has no holes.

So let me talk about that a little…

The Ron Way: I want to talk about the old Stars and Scrubs vs. the No Holes argument. I like the No Holes thing way better than the Stars thing. Yes, Stars can win you championships in any one year, but No Holes will put you in position for winning every year. No Holes thinking includes depth, and depth is important. In Ron’s ideal roster, every player would be capable of dropping 2-4 WAR, and we would just wear the other guys out. The aforementioned Carlos Medina was that way. If I could keep him away from tough right handed pitching, he could hit. And, for just a glimmer of a moment his range popped up well enough that he could almost play a passable CF—which turned out to be a problem because I tried him out for almost too long, which cut down his WAR (he was a + defender in LF, so if I’d kept him out there his contribution would have been better).

So, really, I’m just not focused on finding Superstars so much as I am in developing waves of simply good baseball players.

That said, I’m not stupid, or blind, and having Superstars in the lineup somewhere along the line makes things considerably easier. The good thing is that the game of OOTP will create them for you, eventually. Sometimes it’s as simple as Dong-po Thum falling into your IC, other times it takes a bit more patience to either draft and develop (or simply develop). But it happens. Or it can happen, anyway, and it can happen often enough that while you can’t plan on it, you can anticipate it, watch for it, and help it along as it’s happening. I’ll get to that more as I go along—but for now just give that to me.

What I’m basically saying is that whether I’m just taking over a team or growing my current one, I’m really looking for three kinds of players: Superstars, Solid Players, and Role Players. And, in reality, since it’s rare to be able to just grab a Star, I’m really not focusing on them. My main goal then is to gather Starters.

A few words on each:

Stars: The less said about Superstars, the better. I mean, we all know what they look like, though sometimes I think guys people consider stars aren’t quite that good. The running discourse on Emilio Morales and Dusty Rhodes are good examples. Both are/were certainly stars, and as long as they were cheap I would have been happy to have them on my team. But once they got pricey, the value/cost thing would make it likely I’d move them. Both these players were outstanding at their core skill, but had holes in their games…hence fall prey to my own personal aesthetic of “No Holes” applied at a lower level. I like AvK. I like Gap. I like Eye. I like defense. For my money, a Superstar hitter does something good in all those categories as well as the more classic Contact/Power game.

On the pitching side, it’s the same. When I traded for Dave Lee—who is a very good pitcher—I’m sure some folks rolled their eyes at my comment that I thought he was a #2. I still do, and in reality he is just that. He excels as a #2, but can’t quite carry the load as a #1. This is because he’s a lefty with fairly deep splits. Hence, a hole. He also only throws three pitches, which while not a “hole” is a questionable item to me. Top pitchers with four or five pitches just seem more reliably outstanding. To my read, this means he’s going to have some years where he is almost untouchable, and others in which he’s … um … touchable? Compare him to Carlos Valle, and you’ll see what I mean.

Valle is a Superstar. Lee is a Solid Player (albeit a very solid Solid Player).

To my view, this is a very important distinction, because if you build your team thinking Lee is a Superstar, you are going to miss your mark more often than you’ll be happy with—and if you accidentally see him as a Superstar, you’ll be asking the powers that be “why did I get such a shitty sim deal?” when in reality, the odds were stacked against you. Valle has been able to compete with the Tchekanovs and Wullenwebers of the world. Lee cannot be trusted to do so with nearly the same consistency. (just what is an ace, after all, eh?)

Solid Starters: Bottom line—my entire goal in getting a team going is to simply find baseball players who can start and contribute in some consistent way to winning baseball games. I love the blue-collar guys above all ability to love. This means amassing #2-#3 pitchers, and either solidly balanced bats (or platoon bats) or simply solid switch hitters. A guy like my current third baseman Derek Cumming is pretty good in this fashion. His rocky defense makes him a low-grade Solid Starter, but his balanced switchie bat means he can play every day, hence freeing up a roster position for a platoon elsewhere.

Give me a player who can play some defense and gets on base at t .350 clip or better, and you can believe I’m going to try to find a way to get him time. And to that matter, let me say this: I do my very best to look at every hitter as if they are two different players—the guy who hits vs. lefties and the guy who hits vs. righties. I’ll talk about platoons in some depth in the next rock, I think, so I’ll leave that here for now by noting only that I view a platoon player as a Solid Starter, and that at this point it is up to me to keep that player in his lane.

I should say that there are probably gradients here. Dave Lee, as I noted above is a very solid Solid Starter. A pitcher like Randall Thomas (to throw out an older name) was simply a Solid Starter—reminds me of a right handed Josh Henson in the way I bucketed him, a guy who could start games and relieve them and not cause dramatic worry). So, really, if you want to say this bin has two levels in my scheme, I wouldn’t argue with you.

Role Players: I believe that there are folks who consider a platoon guy as a role player, but I might be wrong. I also think some consider a true utility player as a role player, and I can’t argue with those people…but for my money, role players are relatively few and far between, Oh, sure, in the early days I throw them into starting roles, but it’s obvious they are out of their league. A true role playing hitter is a guy who can run or be a defensive substitute. A role playing pitcher is essentially a LOOGY (or ROOGY). They have only one or two real jobs, and are used for only those things. Once your team is constructed well enough to use a role player properly, then they are really valuable, but until then they are costing you runs.


The YS9 Way of Bucketing Players

All that is good and well, but putting it in practice takes a bit of energy—especially at first.

As most know, I’ve shared my own insanity in the form of the spreadsheets I use to track my organization. One of the columns I haven’t really spoken of is labeled “P” (for potential). I score a “Superstar” prospect a 5 (and have the spreadsheet set up with conditional parameters to color it in dark green when it’s a 5). The two tiers of Solid Starters get scored a 3 or a 4 (with proper gradation of color coding). Players who I’m not counting on, but who have interesting elements or have had interesting development activity get a 1 or a 2 based on gut feel.

I update that roughly every sim.

What that means is that at any point in time I have a snapshot of players I’m watching, and an idea of who is going to be able to provide value at the big-league level.


Assessing Value Up the Curve

All right, then. Let’s say I’ve taken over this virtual bottom dweller and I’ve made my assessments. Most likely I’ve got no more than one Superstar (and most likely not any), a handful of Solid Starters, and a whole bunch of Role Players who are being masqueraded as starters. What do I do?

The story of eating an elephant comes to mind.

The fact of the matter is that when I took over Yellow Springs I “simply” began the exact process I do today.

In Ted’s opening, I quoted him as saying: Every move is made with this mindset. If a move appears to make me more likely to win now, but could damage my glorious pile of baseballey goodness later, I don't make it.

I like that, but I think of it more from the positive pressure side. I begin making moves, and with every move I ask “is this improving something,” and if so (especially low cost moves), I do it.

WARNING: Right now I’m talking Philosophy of Roster Construction, so this comment can be made too narrow by simply applying it to acquisition of players. I’m going to be bloviating about a billion things over the next several days, I’m sure. This statement of “is this improving something” is very broad, and ultimately probably requires some discussion of priorities. As in, if I have ten things I can do, what should I focus on first. The answer can vary, but eventually, when I get there, I’ll probably say the number one issue is finances. Still, here we are on roster construction philosophy, so there you go.

Coming up the curve is hard, though. Really it is. And it’s fraught with danger because in those early days, even if your pipeline is pretty well stacked, a bad season can blow up plans. Recte helped YS9 get to the playoffs that first season, for example, managing the team a bit while I was away. When I took it back, I made several tweaks that, by rights, should have worked out. Alas, they did not—and then I got a bad break with McNeill’s injury and a Very Bad year from King Kelly, and a few other odds and ends did work out, and suddenly we found ourselves in a bit of a financial situation in which it would have been really nice to get Post Season money that did not arrive.

It happens.

We worked our way through it.

But still, here’s the point. As I’ll note in a billion ways, there are always things going on, and to build a team that practices Sustained Winning, there’s literally something to do every day.

So, here’s the final kicker for this part of the YS9 Way:
  • Rule 1: Constantly be Assessing Players in your Organization
  • Rule 2: Never Miss a Sim
That last bit is probably the most valuable hidden secret of all. If I’m doing this right, meaning if I’m assessing players in ways that are at least close to “proper,” and I’m working every sim in ways that are getting me closer to the end goal, the only variable becomes time.

--- Next up: Well, we’ll see. Probably A bit of a dive into how I think about skill assessment, and maybe the bit I promised on platoon assignments
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Re: The YS9 WAY: Philosophy of Roster Construction

Post by jeheinz72 » Wed Sep 22, 2021 11:03 pm

I'd agree on the "Never miss a sim" - I rarely do in any of my leagues unless I'm out of town, etc. There's always something to peek at, some tweak to make. It's especially nice in a relaxed pace league like this one, you don't miss too much data within a sim
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