The Buscher

I'm trying not to get carried away about the Mets' 6-1 start, which is their best start since 2006. Tough not to feel really good about winning a road series against a Nats team that dominated them the last two years. That being said, the Nats are without Murphy who turns into Ted Williams when he plays the Mets. If I have a concern it's that they're still a station-to-station, strikeout-prone team offensively. And while the bullpen has been stellar so far, starters have only gone six innings twice so far which means the bullpen is on pace for a lottttttt of work. The series against the Marlins this week is actually kinda important because I think the Mets simply can't afford to let games against the Marlins slip away if they're gonna have playoff aspirations this year.

I'm hearing an unnerving amount of talk that the Giants supposedly love Josh Allen. If they take him, I will need to get a new TV remote the next day.

I have no idea why he's done this, but it is amazing.

Ironically, my insistence on being accurate inadvertently conked things up a bit more for me when I set up the 25 man rosters. A lot of teams only started the year with four starting pitchers due to early season off days. So the Show automatically bumps a reliever into the rotation to fill the spot. Unbeknownst to me, some of the teams then re-ordered their rotation. And so the Padres decided to give the Opening Day start to submarining reliever Kazuhisa Makita. 6 innings of 1 run ball in his Major League debut.

Because you can set 29 teams to autopilot while still giving yourself a hedge against some of the really perplexing things the CPU teams will do. Like I saw Mike Trout get traded for a C-level prospect in MLB 16. Stuff like that just kills the immersion for me. At least with 30 team control I could jump back in and reverse out dumb stuff like that. And I find a few years in that you end up with a backlog of A-level prospects who never get added to teams' 40 man rosters because there is no way to set up when guys should be Rule 5 draft eligible. For example, if I didn't intervene I'm willing to bet the Braves will keep Ronald Acuna in the minor leagues for like three more years even though he's going to debut this year in real life. OFSM walked me through setting up a new profile to get the difficulty sliders the way I want them, so now I've played a few games and am having a blast.

I'm now trying to figure out how difficulty settings are supposed to work with 30 team control. I have a new profile set up for the Mets on dynamic difficulty, which is always my personal preference as the game will adjust as I go along. Usually I'll kill the computer for a game or two before the difficulty will adjust and I'll get a real challenge. Then there's an "Other Teams" profile. Apparently by default, they are on Beginner difficulty. Which means that, from the CPU's standpoint, they're playing on beginner. AKA the second I fired up Opening Day, Syndergaard gave up 5 runs in the first inning even though I was supposedly on the easiest possible level. Sooooo I guess that means everything is reversed I need to set the Other Teams profile to Legend difficulty? But that means the CPU will always suck even as my Dynamic sliders change. Even if I set the CPU to a middle of the road setting, they won't ever improve or get worse. Or I could set both to Dynamic but I feel like that's bound to mess things up big time and neither side will ever adjust in difficulty. I may need to start over without 30 team control, meaning the couple hours I spent accurately getting DLs/40 man rosters set were a complete waste of time.

The Mets and Phillies are currently airing a game streamed exclusively on Facebook. Pro: It's the only time I've been able to stream a weekday day game at work because Comcast doesn't allow me to stream SNY like every other provider does Con: John Kruk and Cliff Floyd are making this broadcast borderline unwatchable

As best I can tell a lot of those glitches are based on the Phases system. So if the World Series ends earlier than the game expects, the next offseason phase will start earlier than it is listed, and it will cause stuff to cock up. So basically the only thing they changed about franchise also bugged it to hell. Lovely. Good thing I'll probably take my time with the first season as I normally do. I never play every game but usually I play at least one game in each ballpark I visit along with key series and home games.

I never bought that the Giants were trading Beckham for anything less than a king's ransom.

For further filing under "SDS doesn't care about franchise", there is apparently a bug where you lose the ability to offer arbitration or sign free agents after year 3.

Honestly the fact that shifts even work to the extent that they do is kinda remarkable to me because it shows that so many professional players are incapable of making adjustments. Everyone should always work on bunting against the shift and hitting to opposite field.

I spent a couple of hours last night setting up 40 man rosters, now I just need to manually injure people who are gonna be out for a while and then I can start my franchise. Pretty stoked.

OSFM rosters are out!!!

CB Bucknor is atrocious.

Two games into the season and Mickey Callaway's already shown a much more outside the box approach to bullpen management than Terry Collins. He had Swarzak and Familia throw 30 pitches each, effectively making them unavailable tomorrow. Sounds like a batshit crazy thing to do so early in the season, but I think that might actually be his style. He'd rather get his money's worth and burn a guy out for the next day than get into the habit of running five or six relievers out there every game.

Yeah I typically take full advantage of the contract renewable guys, but it's the minor leaguers not on my 40 man roster that seem to screw me. Good point on the depth though. I try to set my 40 man roster up realistically: 35 or so guys I'd be comfortable using throughout the year and maybe a handful of prospects who aren't yet ready but who I need to keep on the 40 for the Rule 5 Draft. But I do like to have a few other Major league quality guys in the minors not on the 40. I don't pay them a lot, but then again I'm looking at the dollars from a real life standpoint and that's probably where I screw myself. MLB doesn't allow SDS to use accurate contract amounts in the game. You'll see dudes on bloated contracts making next to nothing in the game, and so doling out a $750k for a minor league depth guy is comparatively a lot of money.

This car horn buzzer is dreadful.

I wonder if minor leaguers are a culprit for my budget woes. In real life minor leaguers are property of your team for a set number of years, yet in the Show most minor leaguers are on a one-year contract and it seems like they can still test the market even when they shouldn't be able to. Unless it turns out I've been paying minor leaguers way more than I should when in reality they have no choice but to accept my shitty offer.

Does anyone have any good pointers for properly managing the budget in this game? It feels like every year without fail, usually a couple of seasons into franchise, I will reach a point where merely re-signing my minor leaguers and arbitration eligible guys pushes me to the budget limit and that's even after winning a World Series and being given a lavish budget increase. I'll offer contracts that immediately get disallowed because I have no budget space to offer even a league minimum deal and will be confused as to how the money dried up so quickly. I've played with ignore budgets on before since there isn't a salary cap in baseball, but it's not exactly realistic as every team does operate with an internal budget and in video game land no budget means you can build a super team with minimal effort, especially with this 2018 free agent class.

An emotional day for me saying goodbye to a loved one, but baseball brought me back to some semblance of normalcy. I was able to catch the SNY replay and ignored the ticker at the bottom of the screen, so I basically watched it as though it were live. Fun way to start the season, and I enjoyed the tributes to Rusty Staub who passed this morning. The Mets started off their history 0-8 on Opening Day and have gone 37-12 on Opening Day since then. Just a mind-boggling statistic.

I had Opening Day booked off of work for months but, sadly, my day off is now dedicated to going to a funeral instead of having a relaxing day watching baseball SNY are replaying the game at 8 PM, so I'm gonna try to avoid going onto social media during the trip home and watch the replay as if it were live. All while awkwardly avoiding reading the ticker on the bottom of the screen which is likely to show the outcome. I guess that would kinda sorta salvage the Opening Day experience.

Final game of spring training. Cardinals playing the Blue Jays in Montreal. 19-year old Vladimir Guerrero Jr hits a walkoff home run with 2 outs in the 9th inning. Unbelievable.

My fantasy drafted team actually ended up being very similar to @Meacon's, probably because the same players are always available in the late rounds. I also remember from prior games that there was always a huge run on RPs in round 9, so I used my picks in rounds 6-8 to take the top three RPs while also kicking one (Jenkins) into the rotation. I also always remember that there are good CPs left for a long time because once a team drafts a CP they don't bother again. All the more reason that the distinction between RPs and CPs in this game is dumb, usually when I do my real franchise I convert all of the CPs to RPs. I used the Astros and picked smack dab in the middle at #15. Naturally I took Piazza first. I took great liberties with players' listed secondary positions and just tried to build the most fun lineup I could to pass the time before OFSM drops. We faced the Rangers and Chris Sale on Opening Day so my batting order was based on their hitter ratings against LHP: 1. 2B Paul Molitor 2. CF Charlie Blackmon 3. 3B Miguel Cabrera 4. DH Ryan Braun 5. C Mike Piazza 6. 1B Willie McCovey 7. LF Yoenis Cespedes 8. RF Matt Kemp 9. SS Brandon Crawford Like Meacon I have Francisco Cervelli as my backup catcher and Josh Harrison as a utility guy. Jay Bruce is Kemp's platoon partner and will start in RF against RHP. The last bench spot went to Rajai Davis and even though I didn't really need another OF-only guy, I wanted him as a pinch run specialist and he was the fastest non-fake player available. Fergie Jenkins got the ball for Opening Day and also in the rotation with him are Max Scherzer, Cole Hamels, Andrew Triggs, and J.A. Happ. I've got a killer bullpen to help offset a somewhat weak back end of the rotation. Dennis Eckersley, Darren O'Day, Alex Colome, Arodys Vizcaino, and Brad Brach from the right side. Andrew Miller and Ryan Buchter from the left side.

I've seen most people predicting one of the NL East teams to grab an NL Wild Card for much the same reason. The theory is that all of the NL East teams will have nearly 20 games against the Marlins to fatten up, so whatever team really puts the hammer down on that terrible ball club will get a nice boost to their record by default. It seems to be pretty well split on who among the Mets, Phillies, or Braves is the most likely to break out and make a playoff run but I can understand the thought that at least one of them will in a lousy division. The most generous win total I've seen guessed for the Mets was 88 wins and a wild card from SI, and even in that scenario they had the Nats cakewalking to the division with 100 wins.

Funny enough I got the exact opposite. Willie McCovey laces a double and they talk up him getting his first major league hit, complete with the graphics and visuals of the ball being thrown into the dugout.