Best Lineup: Endgame Players

Best Lineup seeks to craft the strongest lineup possible. But what if you already have some endgame cards, maybe with a great train or killer skills? Now you can make sure those cards are included! Posted: Mar 01 '22

My Best Lineup tool seeks to craft the strongest lineup possible. But what if you already have some endgame cards? Now you can make sure those are included!

This brief post will go over how the feature works and show some tips for getting the most out of it.

To read about the major algorithm updates to Best Lineup in late 2021, check out this post .

Why is this useful?

Best Lineup is great for spec'ing out your team as you build it. Sure, you could go to the Companion Registry and scope things out yourself (and a lot of people do!) but this tool does the heavy lifting for you with one click.

The new endgame players field is another step towards making Best Lineup less theoretical and more useful in practice. It's great to see the highest OVR lineup, but sometimes you already have cards with amazing trains and triple-Diamond skill sets. By allowing you to lock those players into the lineup, the tool can now better represent the lineup you are actually building.

This is also useful from a technical standpoint for the Companion site. I've had a lot of requests for better tools for building and planning teams. This improvement helps this one tool contribute to that, but it's also a big step towards future innovations.

How do I use it?

I've added a new field to Best Lineup, labeled "Endgame Players". It's an autocomplete field, so simply start typing the name of the player you want to include, and pick the right one from the options. Just like other autocomplete fields on the site you can use the player's in-game name, their year, and their team to narrow the search. Names can be complete (such as "M.Trout") or partial (such as "m.tr"). I've often found the first few letters of a player's name are sufficient to whittle the list down.

Once you've selected a player, their name will appear in the list by the input field. You can also delete players from this list by clicking on the 2017 Astros logo trashcan icon .

Endgame players and the algorithm

The Best Lineup algorithm will take all of your endgame players and slot them into the lineup first. Endgame players will have priority for starting positions (i.e. batters will be in the field or DH if possible) on the assumption that you consider those cards valuable enough that you'd want them to start every game.

Endgame players will be ranked by OVR/aOVR (depending on your OVR Type selection) before being slotted into the lineup. If you enter too many players for a given position (and the bench, for batters), the ones with the lowest OVR/aOVR will be dropped from the lineup. For instance, picking 7 SPs will result in the two weakest SPs being dropped.

After that, the algorithm picks players as usual, filling in the rest of the gaps on the team.

A practical example

Let's say you have MLB 9 Innings legend Frank The Tank, black diamond, +30 POW train, with Charisma / Slugger / Bad Ball Hitter. No chance you'd want to leave him out of your best lineup. Simply start typing his name and select the appropriate year:

Adding in the best possible endgame player

Then when you run the tool, the algorithm will automatically slot him into the lineup wherever he fits best:

(F.Schwindel highlighted here for demonstration purposes)
Adding in the best possible endgame player

Sigs & Primes

I'm sure the first question a lot of you will have is: what about Sigs and Primes? Can Best Lineup factor in their bonuses, especially when calculating the team's OVR?

Not yet, but I'm getting there! While it's straightforward to calculate Sig / Prime bonuses (the Sandbox can already do that), there are a lot of weird and interesting cases to consider when building that into this particular tool. I'm working through those cases, but you'll likely see those improvements come out in chunks, just like this feature.

Who can use this feature?

Currently, this feature is only available for Patreon supporters with site access. If you're not already a supporter over on Patreon, for just a few bucks you can get a bunch of exclusive extra features and support me in developing and maintaining this site!

Thank you!

Thanks for reading and for visiting my site!

I could not do this without the support of the community and especially without the support of all of my followers on Patreon.