MLB Edition Strategy: Dense Rosters and Birth-Country Objectives

A dense team graph

Baseball careers are long and full of trades, free agency, waiver claims, and minor-league call-ups. A single player may appear on four or five major-league rosters, and a utility man can appear on more. The result is a very dense graph where short chains are easy to find.

Because of that, par in baseball is often small, and the challenge is less about finding any path and more about finding the least obvious one. The rarity tiers still apply, so the star everyone names first scores low and the bench bat nobody remembers scores high.

Birth-country objectives

A country waypoint such as 'include a player born in Venezuela' or 'born in Japan' changes the puzzle in a specific way. You need a connector whose birthplace matches, and the pool for each country is very different. Some countries have hundreds of major leaguers, others only a handful, and that decides how flexible your route can be.

When the pool is large, pick the qualifying player closest to an endpoint and build outward. When it is small, find the few who qualify first and see which of them touches both ends.

Award and stat-milestone objectives

Award objectives, such as an MVP winner, and stat milestones, such as a 500-home-run career, narrow the pool to a small group of stars. Those players tend to be well known, so their rarity tier as connectors is usually low, but they are the required stop on the way.

The trick is to treat the required player as an anchor and spend your rare picks on the other connectors. Use the star as the guaranteed hub, then reach for deep cuts on either side of him.

Franchise moves and renames

Teams count as one franchise through relocations and renames in the data, so players from a franchise's earlier and later eras can still share a team. Keep that in mind when you are checking whether two players overlapped.