To Boost or Not to Boost

rburgh · 06-07-2026, 01:40 PM

I was knocked out in the first round of PTCS#3 Gold. So, given my mindset, I decided to do a deep dive into whether, and if so which types of cards, you should boost.

Looking at SP seemed to be inconclusive. There were 12 starters who pitched 100 or more innings as each a base card or a level 5 boost. The average gain for the boosted starters was 0.17 in ERA. At first glance, this doesn't look like it's worth the effort. But there are factors that the stats file from the complete tourney may be hiding in plain sight.

1. Boosted starters are likely to have been on stronger teams that encountered opponents with stronger offenses as they progressed.

2. Even 100 innings isn't really a good sample size when evaluating a pitcher. 100 innings is basically 11 games. To compound the uncertainty, if starter pitches 100 innings and gives up a grand slam for one team and for another team doesn't, that's a 0.27 change in ERA for something that is mostly random. So an error like this is about 1.6 x more important than the aggregate body of work.

3. The FIP calculation for the league is way, way off. The league ERA was 5.17 and the average FIP (calculated by multiplying innings x FIP for each individual stat line for each pitcher and dividing by the total number of IP in the league) was 6.60. The devs may want to fix this, the correct procedure is available on many web sites, a simple explanation is on baseball-reference.com.

4. People may use base card starters as relievers in short bursts while increasing the workload for boosted cards. This would nearly eliminate any fatigue effects for the guys being used in relief. Looking at relievers, this seems like it may be a big effect because there were numerous heavily used relievers whose variants saw ERA improvements on the order of 1 point.

Hitters, on the other hand, seemed to routinely gain between 0.6 and 2.0 WAR per 600 PA's. The smaller gains seemed to be on both outliers on walk rate, guys with middle-of-the road walk rates tended to do better than either the hackers or the guys with high walk rates. But again, this was for a tournament that involved somewhere around 900 games, while a complete MLB season plays 2430. So I'm again looking at a small sample size..

cwhitman · 06-07-2026, 05:15 PM

boosting is ridiculously cheap, boosters are like 500 pp a level right now. no reason to not boost everything.

rburgh · 06-08-2026, 09:46 AM

But there are priorities. And casual FTP teams may not have thousands of PP's sitting around to buy more boosters.

06-07-2026, 01:40 PM	#1
rburgh All Star Starter Join Date: Nov 2012 Location: Pittsburgh Posts: 1,108	To Boost or Not to Boost I was knocked out in the first round of PTCS#3 Gold. So, given my mindset, I decided to do a deep dive into whether, and if so which types of cards, you should boost. Looking at SP seemed to be inconclusive. There were 12 starters who pitched 100 or more innings as each a base card or a level 5 boost. The average gain for the boosted starters was 0.17 in ERA. At first glance, this doesn't look like it's worth the effort. But there are factors that the stats file from the complete tourney may be hiding in plain sight. 1. Boosted starters are likely to have been on stronger teams that encountered opponents with stronger offenses as they progressed. 2. Even 100 innings isn't really a good sample size when evaluating a pitcher. 100 innings is basically 11 games. To compound the uncertainty, if starter pitches 100 innings and gives up a grand slam for one team and for another team doesn't, that's a 0.27 change in ERA for something that is mostly random. So an error like this is about 1.6 x more important than the aggregate body of work. 3. The FIP calculation for the league is way, way off. The league ERA was 5.17 and the average FIP (calculated by multiplying innings x FIP for each individual stat line for each pitcher and dividing by the total number of IP in the league) was 6.60. The devs may want to fix this, the correct procedure is available on many web sites, a simple explanation is on baseball-reference.com. 4. People may use base card starters as relievers in short bursts while increasing the workload for boosted cards. This would nearly eliminate any fatigue effects for the guys being used in relief. Looking at relievers, this seems like it may be a big effect because there were numerous heavily used relievers whose variants saw ERA improvements on the order of 1 point. Hitters, on the other hand, seemed to routinely gain between 0.6 and 2.0 WAR per 600 PA's. The smaller gains seemed to be on both outliers on walk rate, guys with middle-of-the road walk rates tended to do better than either the hackers or the guys with high walk rates. But again, this was for a tournament that involved somewhere around 900 games, while a complete MLB season plays 2430. So I'm again looking at a small sample size..

06-07-2026, 05:15 PM	#2
cwhitman All Star Reserve Join Date: Mar 2017 Posts: 649 Infractions: 1/0 (0)	boosting is ridiculously cheap, boosters are like 500 pp a level right now. no reason to not boost everything. __________________ OOTP affiliate streaming competitive content on www.twitch.tv/cwhitdcfc as well as strategy and tips content on https://www.youtube.com/@CWhitDCFC Free PT Data app: https://cwhitstats.com

06-08-2026, 09:46 AM	#3
rburgh All Star Starter Join Date: Nov 2012 Location: Pittsburgh Posts: 1,108	Yes But there are priorities. And casual FTP teams may not have thousands of PP's sitting around to buy more boosters.