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New Player Guide: Tips and Tricks for the WBL

NML

Well-Known Member
Today I’m starting a four-part series to introduce a new player to the WBL. This first section is very basic, and so someone familiar with baseball and OOTP probably won’t get much out of it. I’ve added some bolded “glossary” terms so if there’s something specific you aren’t sure of, you can reference it easily. Also, baseball is far from the sport I’m most knowledgeable about, so I could even be wrong about some of it! But hopefully someone new to the league with find some of this useful…


Section 1, Part 1 – Baseball and OOTP 101

I’m going to start with a, possibly faulty, assumption - that you at least understand the extreme basics of baseball (one team pitches while the other hits, most runs wins, etc.). But that’s about it – I’ll quickly gloss over the other simple things about the game and OOTP, and dive in on some more complex parts.

In our league, you start each game with 10 players: eight batters who both hit and field, a starting pitcher, and a designated hitter (or DH), who bats in place of your pitcher but does not play defense. You have the ability to set the starter, back-up, random spot starters, your pitcher rotation, and almost every other managerial decision there is to make in baseball in OOTP. You set these all before the game itself – one of our commissioners will simulate the league (almost) every day, and each sim covers seven days (generally 5 to 7 games). And just like real baseball, you play 162 games in a season against the other teams in the league. There’s also a pre-season, like in our sports, referred to as spring training. It’s about a month of games before the season starts against the rest of the league.

Our league is split into two sub-leagues – you might think of them as conferences like you see in other sports. Each sub-league has eight teams, with the top four who have the best record at the end of the season making the playoffs. The playoffs are a basic 1v4, 2v3 format for each sub-league, with the two winners facing in the World Series. These are played in a best of seven format. There’s more in these bits to unpack, which I’ll talk on in different sections. For now, let’s dive into the basics of roster management.

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This screen is simultaneously one of the most helpful and scariest for a new player. I’ll work top left to right and down to break down these pieces.

The most important roster management is probably deciding who is on ur ACTIVE ROSTER. During the regular season, this is capped at 25 players. Generally, you want at least 12 of both pitchers and batters, with an extra 13th player able to fill in gaps on ur team or play a specialty role. These are the only players capable of playing a game for you during that sim, unless you have set ur roster management to CPU controlled – a quick aside here: generally, this is not a good idea, because the CPU lineup decisions are not normally optimal. You’d probably only want to do this if you were going to be gone for an extended period of time, but also consider reaching out to a commissioner to help you if that happens instead. It also sets the people you are able to pick from in the upcoming screens.

Next is ur 40 MAN ROSTER. This is one of the first baseball specific pieces, and there aren’t a ton of other sport equivalents. These are players within your organization – which refers to your active roster and ur minor league teams. I’ll talk more on minor leagues in a second, but you can add up to 15 additional players to this roster on top of those players currently playing in the majors for you (aka active roster). If ur like me, when I first saw this, my question was “why would I put a player on the 40 man?” I’ll touch on all the reasons you would have a player on this who wasn’t already on the active roster, but the main thing to keep in mind is this – unlike most sports, almost always, all 25 players on ur active roster will contribute each sim/week. In the NBA, a team is allowed 12 active players, but not all play every game (or even every week). In football, you can think of how lots of teams carry three quarterbacks while only one plays. That’s not the case for baseball. Each spot on a 25 man is important and should be utilized. So, what do you do with ur “back up QB?” You put them on the 40 man roster and they play on your AAA team (the top minor league). So, all the reasons someone would be on the 40 man and NOT the 25 man:

- They are just on the outside of the 25 man roster: Like the back-up QB example above, this is a player who you need as depth but is currently backing up better players. A baseball specific example would be a third catcher (teams carry two in the majors). If there’s an injury, you move this player back to the active roster.

- A short term injured player: when a player gets injured in the majors and they will be out for more than one sim, you’ll want to bring in a replacement. You do this by placing the injured player on the INJURED LIST (use to be called the disabled list). In our league, you can set it for 10 days or 60 days – if you do 10 days, that player remains on the 40 man. A 60 day would remove them from it. As a note, the number of days is from the last date they played, so if a player gets injured on a Wednesday and you put him on the IL on Monday, he’ll be able to be active after the next sim. You need to be careful here with when a player can be activated relative to his injury, and specifically relative to when he sim. Also, when a player comes back from a long-term injury, you’ll want to put him on a rehab assignment in the minors to shake off the rust. He’ll go to ur AAA team to get some reps for a few sims before you have to bring him back up.

- A player who is about to become a minor league free agent: so you’ve got these three minor league teams, which contain all ur prospects, back up players, and filler players. But you can’t keep them forever – as our league stands now, after six seasons in ur minor league system, a player is able to become a free agent and sign with another team. They don’t always, but if they are good enough for the majors, they probably would. And maybe you don’t want to lose them for nothing. By throwing them on the 40-man, they stay with ur team. In OOTP, if you go to Front Office > Upcoming FAs, you can see both major and minor league players who will be free agents after the season. The most common example of this would be a high school drafted player who still isn’t quite fully developed after six years, but still has the potential to play for ur major league team.

I’ll also want to touch on a few different contract/roster oddities here: SUPER TWO, ARBITRATION, and OPTION YEARS. Once a player gets a major league contract, typically by moving to the active roster for the first time, this “starts their clock.” That phrase exists because a player’s contract evolves over time - a player starts by getting three years of major league service on a minimum salary. A “year” refers to 172 days on the 25-man (or IL). That means that a player may stay on the minimum for longer than three years: if they spend a few seasons bouncing between the majors and minors before finally settling in, it may last five seasons. On the other side, there’s a group of players who won’t stay for three years – referred to as a SUPER TWO. A Super Two refers to the top 22% of players between two and three years of service. So if a player gets moved to the majors in May as a rookie, and then spends the next two seasons on the active roster full time, he will almost definitely qualify as a Super Two and no longer stay on the minimum.

So, what happens after the minimum salary? A player goes to ARBITRATION. You are probably familiar with the word outside of sports, and it pretty well defines it here. Once a player is out of the minimum salary years, they go to arbitration, which occurs at the end of the season. At this time, the team (aka you as the owner) will submit a salary that you feel is appropriate for the player, and the player will submit a number they think they are worth (a note: the game provides you with an estimate for the team side, so you don’t actually have to come up with this number). A neutral party picks which is fairer, and that is the player’s salary for the next season. A player goes to arbitration every offseason until they have six years of major league service. A team also has the ability to not offer arbitration, at which point they become a free agent. Teams also can release a player after the season (but before the pre-season!) during the minimum contract years without penalty. In many ways, an arbitration or minimum salary is a one year deal with a team option going forward. So, as you can probably tell, teams have a lot of control during the early years of a contract. A team never has to pay a player they don’t want to have, and almost always these years are well below market value - what they would get or you would pay in free agency. After they’ve reached six years of major league service, they can become free agents. At any time, if you open the Salaries tab under Front Office, you can see a player’s arbitration estimate for future years.

During this whole time, however, you can offer them a contract outside of minimum or arbitration. This almost never makes sense during the minimum years (I’ll talk about some outlier situations in a later section). However, sometimes it will for arbitration. Two options here: you can offer a player a one-year deal before arbitration hits – you will probably pay more than arbitration, but it will improve player morale – or you can offer them a multi-year contract. This has become more and more popular in real life and has existed for a while in the WBL. By “buying out” one or more of the arbitration years, you allow a young player to be locked up long term and not hit free agency. The most common situation is when you have a talented player who is still developing, but you want to lock them up because of that potential. You “buy out” the final arbitration year before that season and sign them to a five-year deal. This has some benefits and some cons. The obvious benefit is they won’t be a free agent after next season, but you can offer a new deal during the following season anyways. The bigger bonus is financially – a player that is still developing probably hasn’t played as well as they can, meaning their arbitration estimate is lower than their talent level, and by extension the contract they will sign is less than they would if they were playing up to their potential. This can help a team retain elite talent at a discount. But, there is a risk. A player may never reach his potential, and you’ve now locked up a player that you don’t want or who isn’t good enough to be stuck with you for another four years. They could get worse during that arbitration year, so you’ve overpaid for the whole contract. They could even get hurt and collapse, in which case you’ve locked urself up with a bad player for five seasons who you could’ve released with no penalty.

Finally, there are OPTION YEARS. Once a player gets a major league contract, they also get three option years. If a player goes to the minors at any point during a season, they use one of the option years. Once all three are used, a player cannot be sent to the minors without going through WAIVERS. This prevents teams from stacking talent in the minors that they don’t need. Let’s say you had a decent outfield that was ur fifth best, and he bounced between the majors and minors for three years as a depth player. Once year four comes around, he still isn’t good enough so you want to send him to the minors. This time, you will have to waive the player – he goes on the waivers with other players who are out of option years and their teams want to send them to the minors. Other teams can get that player for free (besides paying their contract) by “claiming” them. After a couple weeks, the team with the worst record who has submitted a claim on a player gets that player (and their salary). Keep in mind, that player is still out of option years, so you can’t acquire someone and then try and store them in the minors (without again going through waivers). If a player clears waiver, you still have to pay their salary, but they can remain in ur minor league system. You can call them back up, but if you want to demote them again they will have to go back through waivers. Keep in mind, any player you claim on waivers will retain their current contract and salary.

Okay, so we’ve finally moved to the next box. The next three are ur minor league rosters. If ur unfamiliar, each major league team has three minor league teams – groups of players under the umbrella of the team but not good enough to play in the majors. They are AAA, AA, and A, decreasing in general talent level as you go down. AAA is typically filled with veterans who are trying to catch on with a major league team, the depth players on the 40 man who aren’t currently on the 25 man, and prospects who you expect to break through to the majors in the next one to two seasons. A will be filled with recently drafted players, high school draftees who are only a few years out of school, or players recently promoted from the international complex (more on all that later). AA, obviously, covers the middle ground. You want an entire team at each level – they play from April until September (basically one month less than the majors) almost every day. I’ll break down the minors and subsequent strategy later, but the good news is this is something you can automate from ur manager options screen if it feels a little too overwhelming.

Most of the other screens we’ve talked about, with the exception of “Designated for Assignment.” These are players who have cleared waivers and need to be assigned to a team, players who have finished their rehab assignment, or recently acquired players who aren’t on a roster.

This covers some of the basics of baseball with a little bit of OOTP/WBL info. In my next post, I’ll touch on ur active roster - setting lineups and rotations, basic strategy in doing so, and some more on the differences in lineups in baseball vs other sports (hint: you don’t always play ur best players!)
 
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hayvis

Will-Gnome Member
Great explaination. When I read this back it makes me realise how easy it was for me to start playing this game, with my only knowledge of baseball coming from a couple of televised games a week.
 
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NML

Well-Known Member
Section 1, Part 2 – Managing Your Active Roster

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Here you can see ur batters on ur active roster, ur lineup, and ur depth chart. Let’s start with the LINEUP – first, there’s a lot of differing opinions on this and the generally accepted approach has changed rapidly over the past few years, but we’ll at least talk through some basics to keep in mind when it comes to setting ur lineup.

- We’ll work from the bottom up. For batters 6 through 9, you generally want to just have these in descending order based on their bat. It can be hard to pick exactly how we want to judge “best bat” since there’s several ratings that go into this (more on that in another section), but generally I liked to use wRC+ (weighted runs created plus). Simply, this stat normalizes an overall batting ability on a scale where 100 is average, and accounts for park factors (not all parks are the same) and league averages. So anything above 100 is better than average, and anything below is worse. There’s a ton of other stats that try and solve the “who is better at the plate?” argument – this is just more personal favorite and its pretty easy to compare players while still account for some variables.

- For 1 through 5, you generally want ur highest on-base percentage (OBP) bat at #1. Since he will get more bats than anyone else, and because he will have ur best batters right after him, you want him to get on to create run scoring opportunities for ur best hitters. Then, #2 and #4 should be ur best overall hitters (you can use wRC+ here, too). #3 and #5 should be the next tier. One thing to keep in mind is that sometimes ur best OBP is also ur best overall hitter – we are talking a fairly minor difference here, but you generally would want him to slide to #2 and put a batter who gets on base well, but doesn’t necessarily hit for power, at #1. There’s a lot of different thoughts here, so just use these as guidelines.

- Avoid having a run of batters who bat on the same side of the plate. A run of righties or lefties makes it easy for opposing teams to bring in relief pitchers who also pitch on that side. With this, a relief pitcher who is strong against righties will have a significantly easier time than if you alternated righties and lefties. It’s not always possible, but as best as you can, while staying within the framework of rules one and two, try to avoid more than two in a row of the same handedness. I normally use this as a tiebreaker when I have batters of roughly the same ability.

I want to really focus on the DEPTH CHART section. As you can see here, I want my normal nine starting every game unless they are tired. It is worth noting that OOTP’s definition of “tired” may not line up with urs - as you might expect, when a player is tired, he performs worse and is more likely to get injured - and players will be forced to start if their back up is playing somewhere else. As an example, if Ngoc was filling in for Gaines at RF and Hagenaars was tired, he’d be forced to play since there’s not another backup. You can go up to three deep on the depth chart, as well as setting a “DEFENSIVE SUB.” These are players who are better in the field than the starter and typically come in as a way to close out a game where ur team has the lead. The frequency of this can be set in the team strategy section.

For the “Starts” section, you have options. As I’ve done here, you can simply set it to when starter is tired. But maybe you’ve got a young guy who you want to give starts too, or you want a specific rotation for your catchers – you can also set this to “start every X game.” This is especially useful for catchers – you likely don’t want ur starter playing more than four games in a row. Some owners like to constantly rotate their players so they stay fresh. As I mentioned, OOTP has a loose definition of ‘tired’ so that’s a way to work around that. Because you can go three deep, you can even do a three man rotation at a certain position. Just keep in mind ur roster restrictions (only 25 players).

You might also notice that you set a lineup and depth chart for both left handed pitchers (LHP) and right handed pitchers (technically you can set four different lineups to include/not include DH, but all teams use a DH so only worry about those two screens). If ur unfamiliar with baseball, this might seem strange, but its due to the fact that pitcher handedness is a big driver of the ability of the person batting. Almost always, a right handed batter will do better against a left handed pitcher than a right handed pitcher, and vice versa. When you see someone refer to “splits” they are normally talking about the batting/pitching stats versus lefties/righties. Players are often platooned (or rotated) based on what type of pitcher is starting. Some players have very drastic splits – meaning against righties, for example, they are great batters who put up good numbers, whereas against lefties they struggle. So they might be platooned – you pair them with another batter with the opposite situation, and depending on the starter, that’s the batter you play. There’s a lot you can do here, and I’ll touch more on it later, but I wanted to at least get an intro to that in here. It should also explain why all ratings are shown as overall, vs left, and vs right.

Finally, let’s look at the makeup of my roster. As you’ll see, I have 13 total players, and you’d have to be really creative to go down to 11 (but definitely could be done). To follow up on that, there’s a lot of value in just okay players who have the flexibility to play multiple positions because of this reason. Anyways, there’s some things you can’t really get away from when it comes to what ur roster looks like.

- You must have two catchers. Unlike other positions, catchers cannot play every day (even durable ones). Injury history matters, but generally you don’t want ur starter to play more than four games in a row. Setting ur backup catcher to “start every fifth game” accomplishes that.

- You need someone to back up every position. Even if you don’t want to rotate players, you need someone listed behind each player on the depth chart. Injuries happen, and when they happen mid-sim, you want ur team to have someone competent in that position. As mentioned before, the CPU is not optimal when they oversee lineup decisions, so take it out of their hand.

- Starters who you have as backups may not work as intended. OOTP is still a game, so if ur starting second baseman is also ur backup shortstop, when ur starting shortstop needs a break the game may not know the right way to handle it.

Consider this basic example of a 13-bat roster: 2 catchers, 4 starting infielders, 3 starting outfielders, a backup corner IF (1B/3B), backup middle IF (2B/SS), fourth OF, and a DH. Perhaps you want to platoon a corner OF spot, you might find one infielder who can backup all four spots. Or you might have a fifth outfielder who is also ur backup middle infielder. There’s flexibility here, but try and stick to the keys of having 2 catchers and a backup that isn’t a starter at every position, and you’ll be okay.

Another option with lineups is 7 DAY LINEUPS. Here, you literally set the exact lineup for each game you have during that week. Some owners really enjoy this at it lets them have full control over who plays and how often. It’s great if you are particular about how often you want to rotate players or if you want to move your lineup around when a certain backup is in. It’s definitely an advanced technique to setting lineups, so use with caution. Another note: while the game does show you expected starters for the upcoming week, owners change their rotation often and this can mess with 7 day lineups.

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Going all the way back to the first paragraph of part 1, you begin the game with only one pitcher – the starter. You decide who that is based on that left box, where you set ur ROTATION. Rotation refers to the group of pitchers who will start games for you, and they ‘rotate’ who starts every few games. Just like with the lineup and depth chart section, there’s a lot of options here, but I’ll try and stick to general guidelines for setting ur pitching staff.

When it comes to starters, almost always, you want a five man rotation. If you were trying to spread starts around to a lot of different people, you might go to six. If you had a light schedule for the week and a top heavy rotation, you might switch to four for a sim. If you make the playoffs, you get a lot more days off and can also go to 4 (or 3) there. The key for the regular season is that you give your starters at least four days of rest between starts. As long as they don’t throw a complete game or something, that should be enough so that they are able to start their next game at 100%.

You can also set a PITCH COUNT – or a number of pitches they are allowed to throw before getting pulled. This is useful if you have someone starting on less than 100%, a starter who is ‘fragile’ or has low stamina, or if you had a young pitcher whose innings you were trying to limit. Setting it to 0, as I’ve done here, means there is no pitch count and they’ll go until the either get tired (~110 pitches, depending on stamina) or they start sucking. You also have the ability to change ur rotation type between “Strict” – where it always goes in order – “Highest Rested” – where it starts whoever is highest in the rotation who isn’t tired – or a mixture of the two. Unless you are doing some advanced pitching strategies (like using an OPENER – where a relief pitcher starts the game for an inning to two before the bullpen takes over), you want “Allow SP in Relief” set to no.

Before I move onto the bullpen, let’s briefly talk about what makes a pitcher a starter versus someone who needs to be in the bullpen. Again, there’s differing opinions here and it’s constantly changing, but I’ll give some more general guidelines:

- A starter needs, at least, three decent pitches. I prefer to have a starter with three pitches above a 50 rating, though you could get away with 40. This is because they are facing batters more than once, and therefore need multiple pitches to show them. Another note here: pitchers whose position is set to SP, their STUFF rating is based off their top three pitches, whereas a RP will be based off their top two. If you’ve seen a young SP with pitches like 70, 70, and 20, their stuff will be 55, whereas if he was moved to RP, it would just to 70.

- The more stamina, the better. A starter with 35 stamina will both struggle to give you the necessary innings and struggle to recover in time for his next start.

- While not a hard and fast rule, average to below average starters can usually be more effective in the bullpen. Two big reasons for this – 1) they tend to throw harder, as they are less worried about maintaining their ability over several innings, and 2) they generally only face a batter once in a game, so the batter has less time to adjust to his pitching style.

Let’s move on to the BULLPEN. I’ll mostly focus on the roles for this piece, but there’s a huge amount of flexibility and strategy you can implement here.

- Closer: the pitcher who comes in at the end of the game to close out a lead and get the “save.” In the past, this was almost always the team’s best reliever, and is still the case for a lot of teams today. Depending on stamina, you can set at what point you want them to enter (8th, 8th+, or 9th). They typically only pitch if you have the lead or are tied at the end of a game.

- Set Up: typically the pitcher who comes in just before the closer. Traditionally, the set up man took the 8th while the closer took the 9th. Again, they normally only come in for close games.

- Middle Relief: a majority of ur bullpen will be here, as this is the most common relief type. When ur winning, their job is to get the game from ur starter to ur set up/closer. When ur losing, they try to grind innings and keep the game close for a comeback. You also can set these pitchers to how often you want to use them. As you might expect, set better RP to “more often” and worse RP to “less often.” They will normally only pitch 1 to 2 innings.

- Long Relief: pitchers who come in when ur starter gets taken out early, either because he’s tired or because he didn’t pitch well and got pulled. These tend to be ur fringe starters – pitchers just outside ur rotation but still good enough for the majors. They are expected to pitch 2+ innings, so stamina is a little more important here.

- Stopper: a relatively new role, these pitchers come in during HIGH LEVERAGE situations – which you can think of as a time where the game could turn based on the next batter. Often you see them come in to replace the starter when they’ve got themselves in trouble in a close game. For example, 3-2 in the 6th inning with two runners on. The next bat(s) could easily determine who wins the game, so you want a really good pitcher to come in. If you have one of these, it’s almost always the best bullpen pitcher. The game can struggle with who to bring in if you have both a stopper and a closer – since, as you might expect, closers also come in during high leverage situations – so just keep that in mind if you see strange things happening.

- Lefty Specialist: as you might guess, this is a pitcher that comes in strictly to face left-handed batters. Because they are less prevalent than righties, teams have adopted this role to face a team’s big lefty bat. Often times, they come in for only one or two batters, and therefore are sometimes referred to as left-handed, one out guy – or LOOGY.

- Emergency SP: if for some reason you are missing a starter in ur rotation – likely due to injury – this pitcher starts in his place. Normally, I like to throw this as a secondary role on my long relief pitcher.

- None Specified: this is a pitcher who doesn’t have a set role, probably because he’s not very good. These guys fill out bullpens in case everyone else is tired. Also, if you feel a bit overwhelmed with setting roles, you can just set everyone to this and the game will make the decisions.

As I’ve said several times, this is just an introductory course to both baseball and OOTP. One of the really cool things about baseball is how much all of this has evolved over a very short period of time. A couple things I’ve mentioned – opener, stopper – have only come into the game recently (technically, stopper was also a really, really old role), whereas some things, like traditional lineup strategy and rotation, have fallen off.

In section two, I’ll start to talk more about ratings - what they mean, how to judge, and what are important for which position.
 
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Travis7401

Douglass Tagg
Community Liaison
Because we're in a time of ROSTER EXPANSION. You can bring your full 40 man roster to spring training and you can bring your full 40 man roster to the WBL after the minor league seasons end (roughly September 1) as well.
 

NML

Well-Known Member
Currently we are in pre-season, so the roster is expanded. The roster stays expanded until the start of the season. Also, during the last month of the season, after the minor league playoffs end, ur roster expands again.

When spring training hits, you’ll be able to add players to that roster without starting their clock, too
 
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