Posted by Rob McQuown on Sunday, July 5, 2009 at 4:27 am

Even if Marty Brenneman thinks that you “can’t hide him anywhere”, and “he doesn’t drive in runs” (contrary to the stats), and J.P. Ricciardi doesn’t think he’s a “winning ballplayer”, Adam Dunn still isn’t 30 years old, and now has 300 HR.  Congratulations to a very good ballplayer on this accomplishment!

Anyway, that was sort of an unrelated lead-in to talking about my first experiences with Scoresheet Baseball.  Thanks to Brian Joseph, we are now managing team number P_NL300 (http://scoresheet.com/FOR_WWW/P_NL300.htm) – a train wreck of a Scoresheet team which nonetheless has Stephen Strasburg and Kyle Drabek, and so might make some future owner happy.  But for now, here’s the roster:

Starting lineup used before we took over:

of – Dukes

ss -Theriot

of – Ethier

1b – Votto

of – McLouth

3b – Cantu

c -Saltalamacchia

2b – Frandsen

Bench:  Carlos Ruiz, Seth Smith and Adam Rosales

SP – Vazquez

SP – Maholm

SP – Randy Johnson

SP – Rich Hill

SP – Daniel Cabrera

CL – Peter Moylan

Other P:  Medlan, B.Logan, Troncoso, S.Green, Burnett

MINORS: Vitters, Lawrie, Martis, Balester, Elbert, Lowry, Strasburg, Drabek, Bray

Even before Dukes’ demotion, I figured it was time to get Seth Smith and his .409 OBP off the pines, at least against RHP.  And I tried the “creative” lineup of Ethier, Votto, Salty, Smith, Cantu, McLouth, Theriot, Frandsen against RHP.  Comments:

#3: While I’m not 100% sold on the “put your 2nd-worst hitter 3rd” strategy, I’ve long used that lineup spot for a slugger with low GDP (and often low batting average) in my strat leagues.  Salty isn’t slugging a ton, but I think he can, and he hasn’t been grounding into double plays.  He’s hit less than 35% ground balls this season, counterbalancing his lack of speed.

#1/#2: I’m a big believer in a “stormtrooper” offense.  I want my high-value offensive players batting early to get them more AB.   My approach has always been that if you’re worried about “wasting” power by using it too early in the lineup, the team needs more power!  Ethier led the league in GDP when I filled this out, and despite a cool few days, still has a nice .373 OBP vsR.  While not a burner, he’s not slow. Votto doesn’t ground into a ton of GDP, and a .450+ OBP with decent wheels makes him a nightmare for opposing managers in the 2 hole.

#4/#5: I’d have preferred to use Cantu 4th, since Salty functions as a LHB with his lopsided platoon splits, and would have preferred to use Smith as “2nd leadoff” (the #5 hole in a lineup leads off 2nd-most), but again used the GDP rates as guiding factors.  Smith isn’t very likely to take the team out of a big 2-on/1-out situation with a hard grounder, while Cantu is a righty with a big swing who hits lots of hard shots.  Cantu hasn’t been GDP’ing as much this year, so maybe I’ll just flip these two and hope for the best.  Both have the batting average you want in the 5-hole (to pick up runners in scoring position with 2 outs created by a functional top 4 hitters).

#6/#7: McLouth/Theriot has to be the strongest 6/7 combo among weak teams you’ll see.  Theriot is a veritable GDP machine, so I wanted him behind the only other guy who can steal a base to get out of a GDP situation.

#8: This team really needed to try to pick up some infielders in the May and June drafts.  We don’t get a shot at more players until August, so the trade lines will be burning.  With Frandsen in the minors, Scoresheet reasonably replaces him with “AAA Infielder”.  My complaints with VORP come up here, too, in that in real life, these “replacement guys” can almost always do SOMETHING right – usually field the ball.  But for a game balance situation, having a token which can’t hit or field is balanced and easy to comprehend.

With the pitchers, I tried to program in Troncoso as the Troncloser, with Burnett and Green being the first option out of the pen vsL and vsR, respectively.   We’ll see how my first shot at giving Scoresheet directives works out.  Figured that Bray and Medlen could be the next options out of the pen after that, giving the team a not-so-terrible bullpen, assuming Troncoso has the nerves to handle the 9th inning duties.

WEAKNESSES:

The lineup 1-7 seems fine to me.  The bullpen is light, but not a crisis.  Vazquez/Maholm/RJ aren’t the best 1-3 SP in the world, but things could be worse.  That leaves:

A. Second base.  Frandsen can’t hit and can’t field, and he’s not even in the majors.  That’s about as bad as it gets.  The alignment with Cantu manning the keystone, with Rosales at the hot corner is a nightmare on defense, and Rosales can’t hit.

B. SP #5.   For all his strange ups and downs, Daniel Cabrera still has a career ERA of just 5.  Now, that’s not great, but how on Earth can the Nats cut this guy?!  Almost as dire as the 2b situation, at least D-Cab could be picked up by a team and given another chance.  And said team would certainly have better defenders than Washington, for the few times when he actually allows the ball to go into the field of play.

C. SP #4.   I’ve always liked Rich Hill.  It was tough to see the Cubs give up on him, but it’s even tougher to watch his control struggles.  Here’s hoping he pulls it together, and not just for this Scoresheet team.   With Balester and Martis and Lowry around, there are other options for this slot, but it seems destined to be below-par, even with the bar set very low for #4 SP.  Medlan started in the minors, and Burnett started in the past, and maybe Strasburg even signs quickly and the Nats use him to sell seats in September… not.  Back to reality, if the team wasn’t

The best news here is that there are only 4 teams in a division in Scoresheet, and we’re only 8 games out, behind a team playing .525 ball.   Brian and I searched the site for about an hour total trying to find the contact information of the other managers, and came up empty.  But he’s sending out a search party (emailing the Scoresheet guy), and we expect to have full ability to trade starting shortly.  Any suggestions from Scoresheet vets out there?

Please feel free to leave comments below. Questions for the author may be submitted to Rob McQuown at rmcquown@baseballdigestdaily.com or robmcquown@yahoo.com. Past articles for this author can be found under “Staff Writers” at the Baseball Daily Digest site.