Archive of SportingNews.com's old SOM Baseball forum

I believe I've brought this up before, but I don't think much became of it. But agabriel recently mentioned it again during the recent discussions about the computer manager's relief pitcher logic, so I'd like to see if I can get some more input.

The idea is to port the CD-ROM game's "Super Hal bullpen management" system into the Online game. I've avoided it up to this point because in my opinion, the instructions for use are too complicated, it's very hard to use effectively, and it's too easy to make disastrous mistakes with.

For those of you who don't own the CD-ROM game and don't know what I'm talking about, [url=http://www.lprezdente.net/baseball/2008/season/SuperHALLogic.htm]here are the instructions[/url]. Basically, you create a "pecking order" of relievers sorted by priority, and then say "use this pecking order to decide who to use in this particular game situation". And then you're expected to do that over and over again, to cover every game situation you can think of. You can describe a given game situation broadly to save work, but then it's not as effective. In essence, you're programming a robot to babysit your kid - if you do it well, life is good, but if you don't, bad things can happen.

There's no way I'm gonna unleash this system on the public as it stands. But if anyone can explain to me why it's not as bad as I fear, or even better, help design a user-friendly template that interfaces with it and makes it so you don't have to be a genius to use it... then we could have something here.

Off the top of my head, I'm thinking we define a set of master game situations, like 10 of them (e.g. "1-run 9th inning save", "Lefty specialist close and late", etc.), and then invite the user to set an optional Pecking Order for each of them. On the plus side, you only set as many as you want, for only the situations you really care about, and the default bullpen logic takes over for everything else. But on the down side, 10 doesn't sound like it covers all possible game situations in enough detail, and having more than that begins to be a pain in the neck to manage.

Or am I on the wrong track? Can anybody help me out here? I figure I'll post this over at stratfanforum.com, where a lot of the offline community hangs out.

Thanks,
Bernie H.
SportingNews.com

Please do this! You are right on with this. In my short online experience I have already lost several games due to "odd" bulpen decitions that would have be corrected had I had the above options.

Bernie please read my message sent to stratomatic@sportingnews.com


Nev

Bernie,

It does take a masters in mathmatics to program HAL's bullpen logic correctly, but man when done right it makes a world of difference.

That being said I think you are on the right track by preprogramming the events for everyone. The problem though will be that everyone uses pitchers differently. Like I might want my closer in the 8th/9th if I am up or down by 3 runs, while someone else only wants the closer in the game with a lead or tie. Also if I have a C6 closer I want him in the game in the 8th, while if my closer is a C3, I might only want him entering games in the 9th. For programming purposes these are two different events, because you tell HAL what range of outs the condition applies to, so for a C6 it would be from out 22 to 99, while for a C3 it would be from out 25 to 99, but only when certain predefined run conditions are also met as well as predefined batter's hands. The conditions can grow exponentially pretty fast.

If you want to try and go there, I am sure there are enough of us in the community that play in CD Rom leagues where we have programmed HAL and from that you can see how we typically define pitching conditions. I think I only use 6 to 8 conditions at the moment, in one league I am in, but that is only because I don't have any of the specialty relievers of the 9L 9R variety.

In short I agree that this would not be a good thing to unleash on the masses, and some predefined conditions would be better than what we have now. You will just have to decide how many of those prepackaged pitching options are you willing to make.

One last thought, if you ultimately go down this path, I think you will find all of the cheap 1 sided relievers are all underpriced, once you can control them facing only a few batters that they match up against. 11 and 12 man pitching staffs with cheap unbalanced bullpens will be the way to go, unless relievers aren't repriced to account for better usage management.

Bbrool

I'd just be happy if on the player controls, we could get:

"Never use VS ________ "

fill in the blank so a 9L or 9R pitcher would never face his opposite.

Do that and I'll be thrilled

or a "Never" steal, bunt, pinch hit for. etc

things like that would be ideal.

Hi Bernie,

Sounds like a good idea, if your having questions about pushing it on everyone why not just make it an option for advances leagues. Keep up the outstanding work.

Page2

we need it so BS like this doesn't happen. Ar what point to do bring in a nested Nathan???

http://fantasygames.sportingnews.com/baseball/stratomatic/2007/league/boxscore.html?group_id=9528&g_id=193

[size=18:48db5e8d60]PLEASE USE THE SUPER HAL BP MANAGEMENT!!![/size:48db5e8d60]

If you make this an option in advanced leagues, and someone experiments with it and has problems, can you then default back to letting good ol' HAL handle it?

I do agree that with the Super HAL BP management option, we're going to have to have a deeper BP.

I think in the regular leagues if you could just designate a long relief, LH specialist, RH specialist on the managerial settings that would be all the extra settings most people need.

Not that I wouldn't love playing with super Hal, but I really think the above idea has a huge merit.