MLB Showdown Cards

#ShotsFriday: Psychographics- Pingers

                Another week full of exciting stuff in baseball. Not sure how we are going to make a strategy card that involves biting players during a bench clearing brawl but trust me we are hard at work. I expect a lot fewer Abreu picks this week. Which is good because I forgot @Chris_Barnes7's pick of him last week and @Orioles881 a few weeks back. Also @Roktikitiki sent his pick to the wrong person but we counted that as his third. I believe Abrue is up to like 12 shots on the year (which is insane). Also every once in a while a shot prediction really impresses me. Last week @BenBoozer623 took Scott Van Syke and it actually worked. That was @BenBoozer623's second and obviously Van Syke's first shot of the year. Oh @TomWyliehart got a correct prediction as well with Yasiel Puig. I hope you were sitting down for that one. That is @TomWyliehart's 6th on the year and Puig's first believe it or not. Remember to tweet in your predictions for who will go deep using our hashtag #ShotsFriday or @MLBShowdownguru. Then spend the rest of your afternoon enjoying your favorite work appropriate beverage and thinking about baseball. 

                The last two weeks we have been doing a series on our “Psychographics”. These are our way of lumping MLB Showdown players together in order to describe why they like to play MLB Showdown. Two weeks ago we talked about Homers who want to play with cards that depict something they have an emotional connection to. Last week we talked about the Power Players who want large emotional events in their games. Today we are going to talk about the players I affectionately call “Pingers”.

                Pingers are players that don’t want huge emotional swings during the game. They want many smaller emotional jumps in the game. Let’s make this clear, both Pingers and Power Players want good things to happen during their MLB Showdown game. Power Players don’t mind if they get few really really good things, while Pingers want many smaller good things. The salary cap actually determines what this level is set at. Traditionally a Pinger card is a 9 OB, speed B, 20 HR, 18-19 2B for 250 point –ish.

                Why do Pingers like those cards? Because they consistently produce. They are very productive at the cost. They can homer in an extreme moment. They even can double with a string of good luck, but with 8-9 of those bad boys in the line-up they are going to walk and single a lot. They get to get the advantage and roll a 16 and go “oh I got on base. Yay”. The Power Player in contrast is thinking “what a waste of an advantage only getting a single with a 16.”

                Like the Power Player they are also not concerned with getting “the best player”. A single great player will cost a lot of points. Those points have to be taken from somewhere. If a Pinger makes up for it by taking point from their 8-9 hitters by punting they now have almost guaranteed outs. Pingers don’t want holes, holes are dreaded. This isn’t to say when budgeting they may not take someone more expensive than 250 points but they are going to want to hover close to that for everyone save their 3-4 hitters. Also the reason for few speed C players as a way of saving points is speed C players ground into double-plays a lot even against bad defenses. Pingers don’t want to make any outs let alone two in an at-bat.

                Below I showed a hypothetical distribution for a Power player and Pinger. Both line-ups are 2,000 points. I know rarely do the numbers come out this smoothly but bear with the example. Lead-off and 2 hole hitters are similar for both line-ups. Power players want someone on base to score on homers. Pingers always like people on base. The difference is 3-4 for the power hitters is more than half the line-up’s points. It comes out to 35% of the Pingers points for 25% of the non-pitcher line-up. The 6-7-8 hitters however still have the ability to get on base and in the Pingers mind score runs.

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8
Pinger	200	250	400	300	250	200	200	200
Power	200	250	550	500	300	100	50	50

                Like the Power Players we found that these players like to have at least one solid option at each position to draft. We try and make sure before we put a set out that no more than two positions are lacking a quality card for these players. Fortunately there tends to be a good bit of players that naturally produce these cards each year. If a position is lacking we will see if we can’t pull up the speed of a potentially slower player or we may drop the speed of a speed A(18) player to B(17) to ensure a quality distribution.

               

 Twitter-Board

6: @TomWyliehart – 2012 Champ

3: @MLBShowdownguru 

3: @BucNforthecard

3: @Avery25

3: @Roktikitiki

3: @Orioles881

2: @Benboozer623

2: @Youngfarm

1: TherealJohnR

1: @Piatz1019

1: @KyleVanPelt – 2011 Champ

1: @GregLeasure

1: @JMoeller05 

1: TweeterLeGrand

1: Kris_Barnes7

Player Board

11: Jose Abreu

3: Josh Donaldson

3: Pedro Alvarez

2: Mark Trumbo

2: Miguel Cabrera
2: Giancarlo Stanton

1: Albert Pujols

1: Josh Hamilton

1: Mike Trout

1: Justin Upton

1: Yeonis Cespedes

1: Starling Marte

1: Joey Votto

1: Troy Tulowitzki

1: Yasiel Puig

1: Scott Van Syke