Giving up already, huh?

I'm not baffled. I figured out the startegy (I think)- not to say that I employed it when picking my team yesterday - and this is really a totally different game from what we're used to.

Playing it the way that we are, with only two trades per week, I think the strategy is to try and figure out

1) Which two teams are gonna make it to the World Series, and
2) Which of those two teams is gonna need more games to get there. Then
3) To the extent that it's possible, load up on the players from that team.

I mean, if you figure that the Yanks are gonna get there and take 12 games to do so, then certainly 10 or 12 games of Miguel Cairo is better than 3 or 4 from jeff Kent, if you figure Houston's gonna be knocked out in the first round,

Just like 3 starts from Jon Lieber is better than one or two from Clemens or Oswalt.

If you guess right on the two World Series teams, and you saved your trades, you should be in great shape. You can use the trades, assuming that it can be done within the cap, to tweak your roster the final few days, especially for starting pitchers.

If you guessed wrong, you use your trades to replace players from the team you were wrong about.

If you were wrong about both, you're fucked, because you don't have enough trades to replace all of those players.

To put it another way, this game, I think, is all about guessing who's gonna make it to the WS. Unless a pitcher throw a couple of really big games and his team gets eliminated, or a hitter has a monster series or two and his team gets eliminated, I'd bet that at the end, all of the highest scorers come from the two World Series teams.

You got it right, there. If you think the Yanks are gonna make it to the WS, then I'd say you played it correctly