This is for the $60m Screw Your Neighbor League owners to discuss in more depth their thought processes in drafting the teams they did. Especially to call out anything particularly nefarious that might go unnoticed or under appreciated.

Team: The Genie’s Lamp
Salary: $59,413,687

I went through roughly 6-7 iterations on this team. I first built the worst roster possible without any care for meeting salary requirements just to find the worst options who could get me to the PA & IP thresholds. That team came in at barely above $21m. From there, I had to decide who was worth keeping from that core, and who was worth swapping for more salary. To help narrow it down. I looked at two variations where I built a team with high $/IP pitchers and high $/PA hitters. After looking at those, I tried to build out a balanced team that distributed awfulness roughly equally. After I had each of those 4 core teams built I looked at each and what they did well and did not do well. The requirement for 2 each of the position players and no primary DH limited a classic SYN strategy of loading up on DH, but I wanted to essentially do the same thing. So I started with drafting the worst, lowest PA options I could across each of SS, 3B, 2B, and C. Wanting all fielders to basically be D-/D- OF and 1B. Combining that with the options on the teams above meant I could take the following:

SS PA: 157 of .159/.223/.221 with .887 FLD and 2.33 RF
3B PA: 136 of .201/.272/.252 with .871 FLD and 1.62 RF
2B PA: 221 of .198/.249/.279 with .937 FLD with 3.48 RF
C PA: 155 of .207/.265/.393 with .930 FLD 3.13 RF and .15 CS%

This means that these guys will most likely be sent down to AAA. They provide no value. Except, the BA AAA won’t provide enough PA at these key positions, so there’s now a choice… use these guys with the AAA to have your best fielding options and maybe some decent hitting options from AAA, or play the OF/1B out of position.

But I need to spend $. These guys barely cost anything, the highest salary among them doesn’t even reach $500k. So I gave you the first of the 3 wishes you could hope for in who will likely be the 1-2 players in the MVP: 1994 Frank Thomas and Jeff Bagwell. These guys combine for some crazy awesomeness. Except, they’re both below average fielding 1B, so if you want to use both of them, one of them is playing OOP. Then you’ve got 4 other hitters who will likely be above average for this league in 1994 Reuben Sierra, 1986 Pete Incaviglia, 1992 Kevin Reimer, and 1985 Brad Komminsk. Again, however, these guys are all horrific fielders. This is where the strategy comes in, are you better off playing your best fielders in the natural positions and your AAA players in the positions you’re short, or are you better off taking the OOP hits on these horrible fielders and playing them in the key defensive roles? Depending on which players you play where your FLD % across 2B, 3B, SS will be between .768-885, is that worth the few runs their bats provide, or is it better to play your AAA and scrubs to the tune of .887-.938 FLD and likely better from your AAA?

For pitching, I loaded up on low IP/G pitchers with less than 140IP. There are only three pitchers with an IP/G over 2, and not much over… Most of the pitchers are between 0.7-1.8. I drafted the highest $/IP option in 1990 Eckersley for your 3rd wish. Over $7.5m for 74 IP. No one else has an OAV below .300, a WHIP# below 1.60, most of them also allow HRs at a worse than league average rate. That said, I cut the pitching as close as possible to 1,125 IP, I needed you to rely on your AAA for IP, and force you into decisions on who gets sent down from your hitters. You can’t afford to send any pitchers down. And appearance fatigue is going to be a challenge to manage as none of these guys can go more than 2 innings, so most of them are going to be pitching every single game.

The team does have some HR hitters, so I stuck them in a -HR park, but it’s a +2 1B park, since I wanted your pitchers biggest weakness to be exploited the most, and give your fielders errors a bigger impact.

This team is about trade offs and roster management. There are some solid players, but using them comes at a cost elsewhere. They’re tempting, but are they worth it?

Offense Slash: 4,515 PA, .276/.355/.500
Pitching Slash: 1,125 IP, 5.28/.303/1.60 with a 1.264 HR/9.
Key Fielding Stats:
SS: .887 FLD and 2.33 RF
3B: .871 FLD and 1.62 RF
2B: .937 FLD with 3.48 RF
C: .930 FLD 3.13 RF and .15 CS%
1B: .991 FLD and 9.38 RF
OF: .940 FLD and 1.71 RF
P: .947 FLD and 1.81 RF

Team: The Mighty Cobra
Salary: $59,021,475

This team I didn’t have to iterate or try different high value hitter/pitcher combos to get the structure and balance right to make the trade offs actually work. This one is just pure punishment. I spent all your budget on IP. You have 10 pitchers with between 203-252 IP. All of them but one have an OAV over .300. Some of them don’t walk many guys, but I figured the hitters in this league wouldn’t be walking much anyway. I stuck these guys in Mile High to take full advantage of this weakness. Especially since your hitters are so bad, the +3 hit factor doesn’t even help them (except the trio discussed below).

I also figured no one would be drafting any major base stealers, so I wasted as much of your salary as possible on the best C arms. You’ve got 1975 Jim Sundberg and 1984 Bob Boone who between them threw out 45% of base stealers. They also account for roughly ~1,100 PA for you. This means you’ll likely have to play one OOP. This isn’t all bad, they’ll likely be a better fielder than whomever they’re replacing, that said, neither of them can hit…. Their combined slash is .201/.261/.259. You’ve got three guys who can reasonably hit: 1981 Dave Parker, 1985 Pat Tabler, and 1997 Glenallen Hill. And by reasonable, I mean for this league… they have a combined OBP below .300. You will be using your AAA, and you’ll have a mostly clear cut decision on who's getting sent down, your only OOP will be your C, for the rest, you can run an actual platoon with whom I’ve drafted and your AAA. With all the wasted salary on excess IP and C arms, this team will realistically play more like a $35-40m team with roughly $19-24m wasted depending on how you structure things… Your defense isn’t great, in fact it sucks, it’s on par or worse than the first team above, but without the option to make it even worse for some improved offense.

This team is all about just not being good and trying to make the most of what you have.

Offense Slash: 4,533 PA, .228/.276/.331
Pitching Slash: 2,263 IP, 4.79/.305/1.50 with a 0.883 HR/9.
Key Fielding Stats:
SS: .910 FLD and 3.40 RF
3B: .882 FLD and 2.27 RF
2B: .938 FLD with 3.19 RF
C: .982 FLD 5.56 RF and .45 CS%
1B: .983 FLD and 8.83 RF
OF: .939 FLD and 1.59 RF
P: .945 FLD and 2.58 RF

Both teams also feature one other aspect that I want to wait until after the league has played a little before discussing.

Festering Piles of Putresence

I did a lot of tinkering with my roster and hopefully achieved all my goals. My initial strategy was to waste a good chunk of money on a highly overpriced player. The $7.3m Eckersley started out on the staff as a way to do that. I was actually working on a second roster before the league filled that also had the $15m Brett. You can really scrape the bottom of the barrel when you spend $22m of the $59m on two guys.

Then as I built the team I started to wonder if I really had to give someone any good players at all and how would it look if I just spent more money on bad pitchers. The key turned out to be maximizing my offensive strategy and then figuring out how to divide what was left over among 10 bad pitchers. Challenge accepted.

So goal one on the offense was to ensure poor defense along with completely limiting the PA at all the key positions. That means to fit within the rules I drafted two scrubs at C, 2B, 3B and SS. You have 150 PA or fewer at all of them, and the ones you do have are dreadful. Buddy Biancalana awful. Several of your pitchers look like Ted Williams compared to these sub .500 OPS dudes you’ve got.

That means your only hope is to use AAA guys at those spots, and it’s unlikely you’ll get enough PA and very little in terms of talent. Better than the scrubs I offered, sure, but you’ll probably end up using my guys just because you need someone out there.

To make all that work, I had to load up the PA and salary at 1b and OF. I actually thought I had to hit 4800 PA instead of 4500, so maybe you caught a break. Though of course if a guy eats up more salary based on PA it means he’s worse than a guy with fewer PA would be for the same cost.

You do actually have two hitters with 100 RBI on the roster. 1986 Bill Buckner has a .719 OPS#, which makes him a stud in these parts. Buck is only a C/D defender; I could only do so much damage. Just hope you don’t face Mookie Wilson with a game on the line! Plus you get 1993 Ruben Sierra, with a # slash of .231/.284/.378. These guys are MVP candidates around here.

Wasting a nice chunk of salary is 1986 Cecil Cooper, another 1b with a .669 OPS#. I had to make a couple concessions to make those five OF spots as weak as possible. This meant the defense isn’t totally dreadful, plus you get some speed in 1994 Vince Coleman and 1999 Brian Hunter. Not that either of them is good at getting on base, but you know I can’t give you everything. Oh yeah and you’ve got a weak-hitting Harold Baines and a can’t-hit-water-with-an-oar Rob Deer.

That gets you just over 4800 PA … but you’ll be playing in Coors so that should accelerate the fatigue some. Better hope those AAA guys can really play or else you’ll be playing Deer at SS occasionally. I spent $22m on the offense, with 8 guys totaling under $2m of it. That left me needing to spend $37m on pitching and only 10 slots allowed.

Tempting though it was to spend $7m of that on Eck, I figured I’d try it without him. It’s pretty tough in a league like this to limit PA and IP without giving too much talent, so I didn’t worry about IP. You get 10 of the sorriest SP of the era. The raw stats are: 2164 IP, 295 HR, .293 OAV, 1.60 WHIP, 5.33 ERA. Some of them are a little worse than others, but the good news is you’re well insulated from fatigue even in Coors. I could have made them worse if I’d compromised elsewhere, but by no means can you call any of them good.

I think that’s all I could do to cause maximum trouble. My roster with Brett had equally bad pitching with far fewer innings, so that might have been a bigger challenge. Though Brett might have hit .500 in this league and made up for the difference.

Team: Kingdome Schadenfreude (definition: pleasure derived from someone else's misfortune)
Salary: $59,175,135
Offense: PA 5455, .226/.309/.315/.624
Pitching; IP 1538,ERA 6.70, WHIP 1.76, BA .313
The strategy here was to give you the worst possible pitching I could come up with. I decided to give you fielding percentage at the expense of hitting in the hitter friendly Kingdome. Thus, your most expensive fielder is $6.35 million 2B Tommy Herr with a .674 OPS. You've got great fielding, slap hitting OFs but 5 of them so you can't play them all unless they are out of position. Oh, and you have 268 really bad PAs at SS and 297 bad PAs at C, prime defensive spots. So, I hope you get some good AAA guys and your pitchers give up flyballs. Good luck.

Team: NJ Turd Burglars (I do hope Trentonjoe gets these guys).
Stadium: Shea
Salary: $59,021,282
Offense: PA 6530, .211/.284/.300/.584
Pitching: IPs 1704, ERA 6.46, WHIP 1.74 BA .307

The pitching is almost as bad here. I went with all SPs so you'll have to pick and choose who your closer is from this mess. For hitting, I pretty much went with the same strategy, lots of bad PAs. In fact, the offense is a little worse here than the other team plus I was able to pick guys with bad defense too. The difference is that you have PAs at all positions rather than limiting certain positions. Also, the 2B, Glenn Hubbard (who went to my HS several years before I did) is your highest salary guy with an OPS of .651. Good luck.

Nebbish Homeboys

I have good news for whomever gets this team… you have the potential Cy Young winner in 2000 Pedro Martinez! You also get 1979 Pete Rose with his .331 average and 1980 Mike Hargrove, who should have a great year at the plate!

Unfortunately, after spending more than half the budget on those three, I had to go cheap on the outfielders. You get Vince Coleman, who should steal 100 in this league! You also get Jeff Borroughs with some decent pop in his bat as well as Tom Brunansky! Those three outfielders will give you more than 2,000 PA, so there shouldn’t be many fatigue issues despite playing in Coors! If fatigue becomes an issue, you have an additional 389 PA in the outfield, including a very serviceable 1981 Clint Hurdle.

Very unfortunately, I couldn’t afford a whole lot after that, so had to skimp on C, 2B, 3B and SS, but I am sure it will be ok as Rose can play 2B or 3B (D-/D- for both). Plus, with Pedro on the mound, who is going to get a hit anyway? Speaking of Pedro, that $19.7 million salary really hurt the budgeting process. I had to go cheap with the rest of the staff, but don’t worry, you get 912 innings of guys who gave up less than 3 walks a game! An OAV of .314 and an HR/9 of 1.7 for that group won’t be too terrible in Coors, right?

Offensive stats: 4559 PA, .258/.346/.387 F/R C+/D
Pitching: 1129 IP, 1.44 WHIP, .288 OAV, 1.51 HR/9

Team No Rain delays in the dome
Salary Just over 59 Million
Offence PA 6519 .221/.278/.270/.548
Pitching IP 1675, ERA 6.64, WHIP 1.64

Took a very simple strategy being my first SYN league. First very bad pitching included in that was 291 HR given up in the friendly confinds of the Kingdome. 2nd As little offence as possible the team combined for 13 HR with only 3 players slugging above .300. The Best player is a 5 Mil Ozzie Guillen who has a .608 OPS but does have decent ratings at SS Paired him with 1981 Ivan Dejesus .509 OPS. Also have 1983 Pete Rose as your starting 1b with his .602 OPS. I realized that fielding and the amount of PA will be Strengths of the team in every spot except for Catcher where there are 2 players with a combined 150 abs.

Hitless in Seattle
Salary just over 59 mil
Offense PA 4536 .190/.252/.263
Pitching 2189 IP 1.59 WHIP .297 oav 5.04 ERA

I've never played in a SYN league before, so a) I apologize if I broke some unwritten rule and b) I apologize if team is too good. Since it is my first time, I tried to do some research by looking at past SYN league. Most had very different parameters but I got some general ideas to start. My biggest question once I started to mess around was how to do I make this team bad and still use the necessary salay- ie, how do I waste salary without upgrading the team too much. My answer - as many IPs as I could get. With almost 2200 innings, whoever gets this will have somewhere between 800-100 innings in wasted salary they won't be able to use no matter how hard they try. This allowed my to make the offense bad. Like really bad. Then I put them in a pitcher's park. My goal (half - joking) is that this team never score a run at home. The defense, in most cases, isn't great. It's not terrible, but there was only so much to work with.
I did mess around with a team that was almost the exact opposite. I believe nothing wrecks a team more, especially at low caps, than pitching fatigue. So I had a staff with 1130 innings, spread over 5 200ish inning pitchers and 5 < 1ip guys. The offense had almost 8000 PAs. If I were to do this again, I may circle back to this. But I went with my first instinct here.

Expertise in sucky P shines finally!!
Salary= $59.965M
Offense - PA 5451 .202/,241/.257
Pitching - 2168 IP 1.57 WHIP 5.16ERA .274 oav

So of the teams posted so far, lowest obp and slug avg Only two teams with more PA.

Wanted to get as many PA and IP as possible, because many will never be needed.

only two hitters over 30RBI, and they have 1074 PA combined Highest in 39. only 27 team HR's.

Danny Ainge at 3B with 421 PA, 187/258228 is just gold. He had 14 rbi LOL.

Every P has a BB/0 4.28 or higher except one at 4.15. Booby Witt over 8 LOL

And I rostered Mario Mendoza just cuz.

In the wonderful comedy My Blue Heaven, Rick Moranis's character tells a flight attendant a joke. "What's the difference between a pregnant woman and a lightbulb? You can unscrew a lightbulb." My team name is an homage. What's the difference between this team and a lightbulb?

In any case, I think I may have been overly generous. Whoever gets this team is gonna have 4 really good players. Like, really good. Maybe 4.5, as there's a part-timer who is pretty good too.
1978 Ron Guidry
1997 Larry Walker
1998 Vlad Guerrero
2000 Gary Sheffield
1999 Glenallen Hill (he's the "0.5")
That's $38M in salary among 5 players. You can do the math to figure out what's left.

Still, you'll score some runs. You might have the league MVP (Walker) and the Cy Young (Guidry).

What you won't have:
-- Anyone besides an OF who can hit, at all.
-- Anyone rated at 2B or SS who is anything other than D-/D-
-- Anyone with a C arm better than D-
-- Nearly enough PA at C, 2B, SS
-- Anyone other than Guidry who can do, well, anything on the mound
-- Any innings to spare. Some teams went with lots of wasted IP...I tried to give you the bare minimum. 1127. My prediction is that by game 10, this staff will be in the red, and in the immortal words of Gollum from Return of The King, "once they goes in, there's no coming out."

Offense: 5063 PA, .270/.328/.443. But that's ALL from the 3.5 studs. Other than those guys, the OPS of this team is about .550.
Pitching: 1127 IP, .304 OAV, 1.67 WHIP, 4.02 BB/9, 1.27 HR/9.
That includes Guidry. Take away Guidry and the staff looks like this:
855 IP, .335 OAV, 1.90 WHIP, 4.54 BB/9, 1.54 HR/9. Before they get tired. In Mile High. With a very very very porous defense...

Pride of the Short Bus

It doesn't sound like my strategy was at all unique. I got as few, poor defense 2B/SS as possible, as few poor IP as possible, low HR hitters, and threw them all in Coors field. I toyed around with the albatross route, but ended up deciding that would be too strong, so I went with trying to find subpar players across the board, making sure to have an excess of PA, especially in the OF. Catchers are top of the line arms as I feel the sim overprices that aspect of defense and I didn't expect many people to have great base stealers, but I'm wondering if that was the wrong idea.

I attempted at first to go with lot of below 1-IP/G pitchers, but started having trouble filling out the roster both in terms of required IP and salary, so I ditched that plan and made sure I used pitchers with at least 4 BB/9 and 1.5 HR/9.

Bottom line:
Offense has 6988 PA, 65 HR, and a slash of .245/.301/.335
Pitching has 1129 IP, 622 walks (4.96 BB/9), 243 HR allowed (1.96 HR/9), and a 7.29/.311/1.87 slash

Posted by just4me on 8/23/2025 3:46:00 PM (view original):

Team: The Genie’s Lamp
Salary: $59,413,687

I went through roughly 6-7 iterations on this team. I first built the worst roster possible without any care for meeting salary requirements just to find the worst options who could get me to the PA & IP thresholds. That team came in at barely above $21m. From there, I had to decide who was worth keeping from that core, and who was worth swapping for more salary. To help narrow it down. I looked at two variations where I built a team with high $/IP pitchers and high $/PA hitters. After looking at those, I tried to build out a balanced team that distributed awfulness roughly equally. After I had each of those 4 core teams built I looked at each and what they did well and did not do well. The requirement for 2 each of the position players and no primary DH limited a classic SYN strategy of loading up on DH, but I wanted to essentially do the same thing. So I started with drafting the worst, lowest PA options I could across each of SS, 3B, 2B, and C. Wanting all fielders to basically be D-/D- OF and 1B. Combining that with the options on the teams above meant I could take the following:

SS PA: 157 of .159/.223/.221 with .887 FLD and 2.33 RF
3B PA: 136 of .201/.272/.252 with .871 FLD and 1.62 RF
2B PA: 221 of .198/.249/.279 with .937 FLD with 3.48 RF
C PA: 155 of .207/.265/.393 with .930 FLD 3.13 RF and .15 CS%

This means that these guys will most likely be sent down to AAA. They provide no value. Except, the BA AAA won’t provide enough PA at these key positions, so there’s now a choice… use these guys with the AAA to have your best fielding options and maybe some decent hitting options from AAA, or play the OF/1B out of position.

But I need to spend $. These guys barely cost anything, the highest salary among them doesn’t even reach $500k. So I gave you the first of the 3 wishes you could hope for in who will likely be the 1-2 players in the MVP: 1994 Frank Thomas and Jeff Bagwell. These guys combine for some crazy awesomeness. Except, they’re both below average fielding 1B, so if you want to use both of them, one of them is playing OOP. Then you’ve got 4 other hitters who will likely be above average for this league in 1994 Reuben Sierra, 1986 Pete Incaviglia, 1992 Kevin Reimer, and 1985 Brad Komminsk. Again, however, these guys are all horrific fielders. This is where the strategy comes in, are you better off playing your best fielders in the natural positions and your AAA players in the positions you’re short, or are you better off taking the OOP hits on these horrible fielders and playing them in the key defensive roles? Depending on which players you play where your FLD % across 2B, 3B, SS will be between .768-885, is that worth the few runs their bats provide, or is it better to play your AAA and scrubs to the tune of .887-.938 FLD and likely better from your AAA?

For pitching, I loaded up on low IP/G pitchers with less than 140IP. There are only three pitchers with an IP/G over 2, and not much over… Most of the pitchers are between 0.7-1.8. I drafted the highest $/IP option in 1990 Eckersley for your 3rd wish. Over $7.5m for 74 IP. No one else has an OAV below .300, a WHIP# below 1.60, most of them also allow HRs at a worse than league average rate. That said, I cut the pitching as close as possible to 1,125 IP, I needed you to rely on your AAA for IP, and force you into decisions on who gets sent down from your hitters. You can’t afford to send any pitchers down. And appearance fatigue is going to be a challenge to manage as none of these guys can go more than 2 innings, so most of them are going to be pitching every single game.

The team does have some HR hitters, so I stuck them in a -HR park, but it’s a +2 1B park, since I wanted your pitchers biggest weakness to be exploited the most, and give your fielders errors a bigger impact.

This team is about trade offs and roster management. There are some solid players, but using them comes at a cost elsewhere. They’re tempting, but are they worth it?

Offense Slash: 4,515 PA, .276/.355/.500
Pitching Slash: 1,125 IP, 5.28/.303/1.60 with a 1.264 HR/9.
Key Fielding Stats:
SS: .887 FLD and 2.33 RF
3B: .871 FLD and 1.62 RF
2B: .937 FLD with 3.48 RF
C: .930 FLD 3.13 RF and .15 CS%
1B: .991 FLD and 9.38 RF
OF: .940 FLD and 1.71 RF
P: .947 FLD and 1.81 RF

I landed this roster. Whoa, Nellie!

Team: Bargain Basement Braves
Salary: $59.4m
Offense: PA 6403, .242/.298/.312
Pitching IP 1612, WHIP 1.54, ERA 5.21, HR/9 1.44

My first SYN league (or at least in such a long time that I don’t remember). I knew there would be tons of Coors Field, so I wanted to go a little different and choose the old Launching Pad in Atlanta. My goal was to set up a team that really wouldn’t have to deal with fatigue problems, but generally had no power (Doug Glanville leads the team with 8, and slugger Pete Rose at 1B hit none). I spent money on defense in the OF, but set up a pretty horrible infield defense. Couple that with bad pitchers that are prone to the longball, and I thought it would be interesting to see how they’d fare. The pitchers might be decent if they can overcome the HRs. And just for fun, I gave them a low IP closer (well, he’s really a SP) with great numbers. I debated like many others in creating an albatross situation with one or two studs, but elected to go consistently bad throughout.

Looking at a few other rosters (including the one I got with only 1131 IP), and the discussions above, I was probably too kind and did a little less digging (okay, a lot in some instances) than some of the super researchers we have. Should be fun to see how it all plays out.

Team: Winning Optional
Salary: I forget exactly- $59.2m maybe?
Offense: PA 7001, .173/.198/.204
Pitching IP 1556, WHIP 1.72, ERA 5.69, OAV.325

This is my first SYN league, so we'll see how it goes. Like someone else said, I figured we'd see a lot of Coors/Mile High so I wanted to try something different. I originally drafted just the absolutely worst team I could, which came in around $25 mil. Still a ways to go. Ultimately, I decided to put the team at Fenway. I focused on batters with very low 2B/9 and crappy OBP. On the pitching side of things, I looked for guys with high OAVs and WHIPs, hoping to keep a lot of guys on the basepaths. I paired that with as bad of defense as I could. I started off with the idea to really try to limit total IP and PAs, but that didn't really work. So, I shifted gears and instead decided that, since PAs/IPs are factored into the price, I'd just try to pay for as many low-quality PAs and IP as possible. I think I achieved that more on the PA side of things than IP, but hopefully the pitching is bad enough and targeted enough to be bad at Fenway it'll mitigate the fact that he should be able to field a relatively rested staff all year.

I also assumed that with a lot of teams in extreme stadiums, other teams might have looked more at things like HR/9 rather than 2B/9 or OBP, so some visiting teams might get a slight offensive boost if they have some guys who can hit singles or doubles but not HRs.