Scoresheet LAD style

Phil Gurnee ♦ March 13, 2017 ♦ Leave a comment

One of my favorite games during the summer is playing Scoresheet baseball.  It is something akin to the old Strata-Matic game except an algorithm uses the actual stats for the week to determine how you did against your opponent. It only uses the raw data, so we are talking at-bats. hits, type of hits. No RBI stat no run stat, those are game dependent so if your player hit a grand slam against the Giants, all you know is that your player will hit a home run but it will be game dependent on how many base runners are on when he does. For pitchers,  it is innings, strikeouts, walks, and most importantly how many actual runs they gave up that week. Not xFIP or any other variety of earned runs but actual honest to god runs given up.  Defense matters, but not enough to make Matt Kemp worthless. You can decide if your players bunt in key situations, bring in defensive replacements, and when you replace a pitcher.

I have several Scoresheet teams but I’ll only bore/enlighten you about one of them. That is my Dodger Scoresheet Root team. The concept of a Scoresheet root league is each owner picks a franchise they want to represent. When the league is first formed you pick seven players from that team’s roster and ten minor leaguers from that team’s farm.  My original draft was over ten years ago but the team below is what I currently have.

I won the league in 2015 but the normal winner has been the owner of the Rockies franchise.  For a while, I thought I was going to be like the actual Dodgers and never win a championship with Kershaw but after three losses in the Championship series I finally broke through in 2015.

This is what a championship series looks like when you lose a seven game series.

This is what it looks like when you win a championship.

The Kershaw/Grienke duo was dynamite. I traded Grienke in the winter of 2015 after he left the Dodgers for the Diamondbacks. I made a horribly great trade. The main focus of the trade was Jordan Zimmerman but I needed more and wanted a minor leaguer. I asked for JP Crawford, they offered me Trevor Story instead. Boom. I’ll be using Story as my 2nd baseman since I have Seager, I’ll take a defensive hit since he doesn’t qualify at 2nd, but the booming bat should make up for it, and I’ll simply replace him with a light hitting defensive wizard ala Ivan DeJesus Junior. Yup, ole DeJesus has a nice defensive ranking at 2nd base.

Anyway, you keep 14 players from the team from last year, as many minor leaguers as you want from other teams, and ten LAD minor leaguers. Each minor leaguer you keep that is not a LAD it reduces one draft pick. Last year I had Cotton and Montas as part of my LAD 10, but with the trade, they are now simply minor league players.

The table below is my team as we start the draft tonight. You don’t always get your players,  when Ryu came over from Korea he becomes eligible in the draft and someone took him before I could.  Eventually, I traded for him just before he blew out his shoulder, but luckily for me, it was Matt Cain who I traded so we both ended up with zilch.

This is an NL only league, with ten franchises. We had 12, but 2 dropped out. The Giants don’t have a franchise owner so all their players were available in the original draft as are all their minor leaguers.

I tend to use the BaseballHQ Runs Above Replacement to help me draft but sometimes you just have to zig or zag. They don’t like Brandon Finnegan but I do so he’ll be my first pick in this draft. I actually traded for him this winter but when it came time to create my 14 player keeper list I couldn’t find the space for him. This will also allow me to have Finnegan on every single type of team I playing with this year. Which means he should be blowing out his elbow in about two weeks time.

Batting Statistics
PLAYER	Pos	Th	OPS	RAR
Seager  Corey	SSS	R	844	31.5
Puig  Yasiel	SRF	R	790	5.6
Kemp  Matt	SLF	R	807	16.3
Pederson  Joc	SCF	L	827	11.9
Grandal  Yasmani	SC	R	815	14.1
Turner  Justin	S3B	R	817	13.2
Story  Trevor	S2B	R	853	19
Gonzalez  Adrian	S1B	L	801	5.8
Verdugo  Alex	MCF	L	718	-0.3
Bellinger  Cody	M1B	L	809	0.8
Toles  Andrew	BLF	R	748	0.3
Barnes  Austin	BC	R	665	-1.5
Will Smith	MC
Willie Calhoun	M2B
Yusniel Diaz	MOF
Pitching Statistics
PLAYER	Pos	ERA	Ctl	Dom	Cmd	RAR	BPV
Kershaw  Clayton	SP5	2	1.4	10.2	7.2	32.4	173
Hamels  Cole	SP4	3.55	3.2	9	2.8	8.7	101
Lackey  John	SP3	3.58	2.3	7.8	3.4	5.1	100
Urias  Julio	SP2	3.34	2.6	9.2	3.5	9.1	116
Cotton  Jharel	SP1	3.94	2.5	8.2	3.2	-2.8	95
Jansen  Kenley	RP	2.49	1.8	13.6	7.5	11.8	206
Melancon  Mark	RP	1.97	1.5	8.3	5.6	10.7	143
De Leon  Jose	MSP	4.06	2.8	8.5	3	0.3	94
Stewart  Brock	MSP	3.58	2	7.5	3.8	-1.6	101
Montas  Frankie	MRP	4.09	3.7	9.4	2.6	0.2	90
Wade Buehler	MSP
Yadier Alvarez	MSP