How to win The Player Stack

The Player Stack deals you ten real players, one at a time. Each one goes into one of ten career-stat categories, and their real total in that category is added to your stack. Every category gets used exactly once. Clear the day’s target and you win.

Most people lose this game in the first three picks, and it isn’t because they don’t know the players. It’s because they treat the ten categories as if they were the same size.

The categories aren’t the same size

Look at what a typical career is worth in each baseball category. The middle player in the pool has 265 total bases but only 7 stolen bases. A very good career (better than nine out of ten) has 1,819 total bases and 78 steals.

So the same player can be worth 1,800 in one slot and 80 in another. The board is decided by which players land in the top three or four rows of that table. Getting the bottom rows “right” barely moves your score.

Save the big buckets for the big careers

Total bases, hits, strikeouts and runs are the big buckets. Your best one or two careers of the day belong there. Everyone else should be filling the small buckets, where their totals hardly matter anyway.

Here’s a real board. The ten players were Corey Patterson, Craig Wilson, Clint Robinson, Ruben Tejada, Robbie Grossman, Joey Loperfido, Shed Long, Tyler Wade, Joaquin Arias and Vaughn Grissom. The best possible stack was 3,803, and the target was 2,200.

• Corey Patterson, twelve seasons in the majors, went into total bases for 1,669. That single slot is 44% of the best possible score.
• Robbie Grossman, the other long career, went into strikeouts (1,014), the next biggest bucket left.
• Ruben Tejada took hits (530), and Craig Wilson took RBI (292).
• The other six filled the small buckets: 6 steals, 12 homers, 24 double plays, and so on. All six together added 298, about what Wilson added by himself.

Put Patterson in stolen bases (218) instead and the best stack still possible drops from 3,803 to 3,227. That’s nearly 600 points from a single decision, on a board where the target is 2,200.

You can’t see who’s coming

The hard part is that players arrive one at a time. When a decent career shows up early, you don’t know whether a better one is still coming. Two habits help:

1. Short careers go to small buckets right away. A player with two seasons is never going to be your total-bases guy. Put him in steals, double plays or homers and move on.
2. Long careers take a big bucket, but not always the biggest. If your first real career is good but not great, consider putting him in runs or strikeouts and keeping total bases open. Ten players is a big sample, and there’s usually at least one more long career on the board.

Use the specialists

Some players are worth far more in one small bucket than a typical player. A speedster with 300 steals belongs in stolen bases even if he had a long career, because nobody else on the board will get anywhere near that. The same goes for a slow slugger with 200 double plays. When a specialist shows up, check whether their special stat beats what a normal player would add there by a lot.

The target is fair

A solver works out the best possible stack for each day’s ten players, and the target is a share of it. A board of role players gets a lower target than a board of stars. So don’t panic when you’re dealt names you don’t know. Everyone got the same ten, and the target already accounts for them.

Pitchers days

On some baseball days all ten players are pitchers, and the categories change: wins, losses, innings pitched, strikeouts and so on. The same idea applies. Innings pitched and strikeouts are the big buckets, and saves and hit batsmen are tiny for most pitchers. The exception is a closer, who belongs in saves, no question.