Sometimes, the cheapest position is the most important. It's hard to field a team of ineffective relievers, but having a dominant bullpen can also be one of the easiest ways to build an advantage.
Relievers are the one area of team building where you'd be crazy to spend money outside of some of the shutdown closers (if that's how you build). Just by watching the waiver wire and how every team undervalues relievers, you can create an effective pen with the least effort. Of course you illustrate that with your highlights. PS - please keep them coming, I've learned so much about this game from your content.
What gets me is that they not only not value good pitching as far as ratings, they almost completely ignore performance. I know there are sliders, but the default is ridiculous. Mets trade for Zack Britton on 7/31. He pitches 6.1 innings, strikes out 6, .95 WHIP, 1 ER. They release him on 8/22. This example is even worse. Collin McHugh goes 77 innings, 77 k, 1.0 WHIP 2.90 ERA in 2022 for Atlanta, and then in 2003 he starts the season going 44 innings, 37 k, .84 WHIP 2.25 ERA and they release him. His rating is still 55 and he was cheap.
Manipulating the 40 man roster. Following up on a comment from guthrien below. Building effective bullpens can be the most fun part of the game. I play most of my games so I tend to check the waiver wire everyday and have noticed a very unique "tactic" used by some of the teams (Dodgers are the most common) and was wondering if this is actually part of the game. They use waivers (looks like waivers/designate for assignment) with pitchers to keep a rotation of pretty effective relievers from having your bullpen blown up then after the 3 day waiver period they simply rotate them back in while DFAing another reliever. The reliever is then rested and ready to go for the next series. In other words, they manipulate their 40 man roster by doing this.
Do you have any guidance on bullpen roles? Player selection seems pretty straightforward based on ratings, but I'm not really sure how to set up my bullpen roles.
Do you know if your pitches tier list is still up to date with ootp 23 ? If not then which pitching combination seems to be the most effective in this version ? ( for starters and relievers)
Question. I play without the cash maximum and always look to get cash in trades but I’m not sure what exactly I can do with it. At times I can get a crazy amount of cash over time but it just sits in cash available
At that point, you can either spend on the best players available in free agency, retain big money to get insane trade value, or sign a lot of international amateurs.
