I'd just like to state that while I admit to noticing some randomness in the performance of the players, it is not quite to the extent that it doesn't matter who you have on your roster.

On my team Jeff Kent, Mike Sweeney and Bernie Williams are the best players on my team (a RT team) - as they should be. Are their numbers exactly what they are in real life? No, but then they really aren't that far off. Even with some random deviation of performance you still have to acquire good players. The best teams in any of the leagues I have looked at have more than their share of real-life stars on their roster.

Yeah, maybe the randomness could be diminished some but I don't think that it is so bad that we might as well not even play the games.

As for your team's performance after your Larkin trade it's entirely possible that they were over-achieving (pretty sad) in the pre-Larkin games and are now under-achieving a bit. Hang in there and they just might return to the .325 winning percentage of their glory days. ;o)

The only small beef I have with the game is the dependance on clutch stats, especially in a realtime league. A full season of stats is a fairly low sample size for a simulation. Midseason of a realtime league is even lower and the portion of those stats that constitute "clutch stats" is incredibly low. I've never seen exactly how much clutch stats play into results but it seems to me that pitchers who have very low clutch ratings (thus having very bad clutch stats) perform extraordinarily bad whenever anyone gets to second base. If one of these pitchers gives up a double I usually pray that I don't homer as I can usually coax a long string of hits together with men in scoring position.

Enough rambling. I need to get back to blowing my team's divisional lead (talk about under-achieving...oy).

Eric Williams
PB 98 RT2 Rochester Trolls (can we PLEASE get new names for these leagues?)