Power Pros Forum

Haven't posted here in literally an eternity, but I've been replaying season mode a lot and wanted to share some tips and tricks I've found over the years. Sorry if this is all old news but I figure someone might benefit from it.

Dream Draft/Key Players to Trade For

1. If you are doing Dream Draft, ALWAYS first pick Albert Pujols. Just trust me on this one. Despite his unwieldy contract he is capable of single-handedly carrying teams.

Now onto other players I've noticed are good picks since the game is coded strangely:

Jorge Posada - always really high BA even at advanced age (though I've never signed him on my own team - always seen him get ridiculous numbers)
Casey Blake - good BA, respectable power, good utility despite subpar fielding. Also ages well
Garrett Atkins
Ryan Howard
Markakis
Ethier
Garko
Hafner - cheap, usually gets good BA/HR totals in my experience. Easily trainable to A power

Harang
Arroyo - with Harang, strikeout bros
Duke - real beast
Liriano - mostly have seen him do well, but have seen a few meh seasons as well
Wang - good stats, young guy too, relatively cheap

(this is off the top of my head; I'm sure there's a more comprehensive list out there, and I'll be sure to update this later)

Training Your Team

The best way to get better is to train your team by purchasing items in the shop to accelerate practice. The wiki of course has a list of all items in the shop and how to get them: http://www.mlbppworld.com/wiki/index.php?title=Items I recommend focusing on one specific stat per year to save money in buying shop items. The most important type of training is technique training though, which requires solid friendship/trust levels. Make sure even if you are unable to afford technique training items that you keep expanding the network of trust levels on your team by pairing players up for practice often.

Now, a trick to quickly unlock the technique books - aside from trading almost all of your players, you can also wait for the offseason to sign young free agents at minimum salary. Then, while still in the offseason, deal these players to other teams for small amount of cash (I mean, points) to ensure your trade will go through. This will quickly build up the required number of trades to unlock the different technique books. Do note that this number happens to reset every year or two so you'll have to continue this tactic of signing and dealing.

Free Agents

One tactic I have with signing free agents is the shotgun strategy: if there are many attractive free agents, but a limited salary pool, then simply offer them very low deals - but offer many of them these same deals. In my experience you're bound to have at least one of them accept, and in the case too may do, you can always just sell them off to other teams or keep them in AAA or as second string players (though I do feel guilty about this at times).

Draft Picks

In general, players with closer to 1 star potential will tend to have higher stats than those with high (near 5 star) potential. Account for this based on your needs as a team (i.e. are you looking for a long term prospect or a rookie to make an immediate impact now?). The descriptions of players is also very telling - players that are described as being "MVP," or "triple crown winners," or "home run champs" in school tend to be better than those "involved in cross country" or "karate" etc. Keep in mind of course that higher potential = faster and easier training. But also keep in mind age - a 27 year old with 5 star potential won't have as much time to improve than an 18 year old with 1 star potential.

The graphic with the metric next to each player doesn't lie of course but I think that especially 1 star potential + MVP/triple crown players are "boosted" a lot higher than the graphic shows. The stats graphic also doesn't show possible abilities that these players might have - these are more likely to be discerned from their description (e.g. "home run champ" = possible power hitter ability).

Avoiding Luxury Tax

In the situation where you will exceed the luxury tax limit EVEN IF you shrewdly negotiate with your team's star players (this would happen with massive multi-year contracts), you can easily skip the luxury tax with this process.

As luxury tax is only calculated at the end of the year, simply offer some of your players no contract; for some reason they will never declare free agency to be bidded upon by other teams, so you will be able to safely pick them up come January at the beginning of the new year. Thus your annual salary will have been temporarily lowered to skip the luxury tax, and rise again once you resign those pesky expensive players.
More to come later.

We here have known for a while that Zach Duke is a beast.

Welcome back again

Do you mean Garrett Atkins?

Nice thread BTW, and it's cool that you're back, I'm pretty new here

Whoops, I did mean Garrett Atkins. That's what I get for writing posts late at night..

Ha ha, nice, he's one of my favorite players

I would think that the catchers with good or great catching abilities and decent power, or shortstops with solid defense and offense would be the first players to choose



How do you improve the trust levels? I am almost always having players train together, but I've never gotten trust levels over "low." I forget what it is called, but you know how one player is kind of listed as the mentor-type? Well, I make sure that the mentor type has a better ranking and whatever is being trained than the mentee. For example, right now my players are focusing on speed training. I have my players with D or E speed being mentored by players with C and B speed. After that, I try to have the mentor be a player who has been in the league more than the mentee.

Maybe when I have to move one of the players to the resting mode and then bring him back, he starts over? Still, I would have thought that at some point, I would have gotten to the medium trust levels, but never have. I'm also not sure I have a really notice difference between how players progress when they're practicing in a group versus solo



Other than the "MVP – will help the team a lot," description, I do not find the other ones insightful, whether it be about being a homerun champ, being proud of their defense, or playing another sport.

To get the first pick in the first draft with ANY team, create an Arrange Mode version of the team you plan to use, and replace the default team with the arrange mode team when choosing your team at startup.

I am playing season mode with no trades are allowed. Does that mean only the most basic technique book will be available? I've been holding off on buying the basic one because I was assuming that as I make it to the postseason, more of the books will be unlocked

Anyone ever successfully get the "hot hitter" ability through training? I must've s/r a couple of dozen times, but no dice. Good catcher and power hitter are easy compared to this!

A lot of times actually. I've also noticed that for some season modes I'll have 1 player practice to gain an ability and he won't get it for 4 or 5 years. But if I start another season mode, they'll get it on the first try

Thanks. I think some abilities are extra-hard/unlikely to succeed - the "great" and intimidator abilities, probably. Glad to hear this isn't one of them.

Yes. Apparently, that is exactly what it means.

Anyone ever play a season mode with player conditions turned off or set to normal or anything like that? I'm realizing that a lot of my success comes from the fact that I keep my team in good condition, while the computer has a lot of players in blue and purple. Especially in the playoffs. So...I'm thinking forcing everyone to always be in average condition might tilt things a little more to the computers favor without frustrating me too much.

Any downside? With training, I guess I would never have to rest my players, so they would train up more quickly. Would "fatigue" still be a factor? I might not be calling it right - I mean the player bar that is shown in the practice screens - higher levels mean a player might drop to blue condition more quickly or take longer to get in better condition if you rest him.

I don't think you can turn condition off, or else I'm sure I would've.