Archive of SportingNews.com's old SOM Baseball forum

In one of Nev's posts, I posted the following:

off the topic a little, but how about the fact that Mathewson (who gave up 80 or so CAREER home runs and only 4 in the year he is carded for) gave up 64 in this season.

so, here's my question/suggestion (give me your thoughts)....


[b:f3b9bddfc0] How about strat re-inventing a way to bring hitters "back to reality" against great pitching? Maybe give pitchers 5 columns and hitters 4 columns (in essence a 9-sided die, it's all computer generated anyway, right?). Might see a little more reality in such a scenario?[/b:f3b9bddfc0]

Now I know this would go totally against the purists and Strat-o-Matic makes the cards that SOMonline uses, so it would be a difficult thing to ever have happen, but wouldn't it be BETTER for the game? If you don't like the 5/4 split, it could be any split since there are no actual dice rolls but randomly generated "rolls"

I think it might help for all those teams where we see 5 or more guys on a team hitting 50+ HRs and all 9 guys drive in 100 or score 100 runs. Don't want pitching to dominate, just looking for a little more realism. What do you think?

Strat at its core is meant to be a game that re-plays a season. I would guess that if Christy was only pitching against players from his given season his stats would line up pretty close to his real life stats. If you expanded the league to include all DB era players he would probably still give up fewer home runs than he does when all eras are combined but his overall stats would be down pitching against top to bottom allstar lineups. In my experience I have found that the 60m cap league produces the best results for having players produce closest to there real life stats but any time you combine eras the Home Run stat will be altered.

I agree Christy would give up more HR's (due to facing big bat lineups) but 64 in a season? and teams with 5 and 6 guys hitting 60+ is getting ridiculous. I know that right now it's 3 pitching columns and 3 hitting columns yet pitchers also have all the fielding plays, thus hitters actually see more results off their cards than pitchers (due to the fielding X results). I just think the 5/4 split (or something like it) would balance out the hitting a little bit.

We had that posted a couple of years ago by yours truly (although I suggested 7 sided roll) and it was quickly shot down...but it goes without saying that I think your post is pure genius. :wink:

agree would be good, even if nonconventional to strat purists

what would be way cool is to have it as a league by league option.. standard/default would be 50/50 but you could set it to be 60/40, 80/20 or whatever split of pitcher card vs. batter card odds you want.

Would drive a lot more stratey simply by adjusting that option... probably yielding more options and strategies than varying the salary cap.

I posted this before, but I'll post it again.

There is no way on God's green earth to have the Babe Ruths and the Christy Mathewsons BOTH replicate their real life statistics. If Ruth, Williams, Mantle, Hack Wilson, Brett, A-Rod, Hornsby, Foxx, and Josh are taking their hacks against Pedro, Maddux, Johnson, and Alexander, both sides are going to "underperform."

There's no way around it.

There was, for a brief time, a game out where the first dice roll was on the pitcher's card, and, IF THE PITCHER CARD allowed it, a second dice roll used the batter card. That would work better for those of you who want to see great pitching, but then we would hear the whines of "Ruth played a full season for me in Fulton County '78 and hit .279-.388-.495. Something's gotta be done about this."

If you don't want to see Mathewson give up 64 HR in a season, choose Petco as your home park. You can win there, and pitchers perform well there.

I get everything you just said, I'm just saying that the hitter's/pitcher's are "out of balance".....way too many times I've seen a team with 5 or 6 guys that hit 60+ HR's and 8 or 9 guys go well over 100RBI's

[quote:4df2632f4d]I get everything you just said, I'm just saying that the hitter's/pitcher's are "out of balance".....way too many times I've seen a team with 5 or 6 guys that hit 60+ HR's and 8 or 9 guys go well over 100RBI's [/quote:4df2632f4d]

If you play 60 or 80 mil non DH leagues you tend to avoid a certain amount of the extremes. Play subsets, pitching strong themes ("Chicks love the Shutout" kind), etc. The pitchers will come around much more to "reality", whatever that is.

Yes, I second that motion. If you want pitching, stay out of live draft and $140-200 million leagues. Use pitchers' parks. Avoid DH leagues.

Or, you could join the party and draft hitters.

I just spent most of the 2nd half of the Broncos game figuring the average performance of the top 150 hitters (by appearances) and top 100 pitchers (by salary) in $200 million leagues, according to DD.

It's actually a lot closer than you would think. The average hitter has an on-base percentage .066 points lower than what's on his card. The average pitcher has a WHIP that equates (approximately) to a .090 point increase in OBP. The reason it looks so gruesome is home runs. Those 100 pitchers allowed an average of 0.386 HR/9 IP in real life, and allow over 2 HR per 9 IP in $200 million leagues.

So the math I did supports my suggestion that you play in pitchers' parks and in lower capped leagues, where the HR/IP will drop dramatically and your pitchers will perform.

BTW, the hitters are slugging about .070 below their actuals. It's just that in the $200 million leagues, nobody uses Larry Bowa.

Results are skewed in favor of hitters for two reasons.

1. Great hitters are farther above the league average than great pitchers are below it in the basic hitting categories of OBP and Slg.

2. The top 100 pitchers in this card set had about an OBP against of .270. So, a .090 differential is 33%. The top 150 hitters had average real-life OBP's of .420. So even a .090 differential would only be about 22%, and they have only a .066 differential.

Ideally, the game would produce an equal differential, so the OBP would be (.270 + .420)/2 or .345. In fact it's producing an OBP of .358. This is really only about a 4% error in what would be "ideal."

A big part of that reason, in the $200 million leagues, is that guys like Gil Hodges, Andres Galarraga, Norm Cash, Larry Walker, and George Brett get platooned. So they use only the "good" sides of their cards.

The analysis I did was too coarse to account for this. But the data set Adrian has posted on his site does not allow for doing any better at all with the pitchers, and for the hitters it would be necessary to evaluate the hitters line by line instead of in bulk.

But it seems reasonable to presume that a large part of the 4% error is the ability of managers to use lopsided cards in platoons in the higher cap leagues.

Another part of the perception problem is that we evaluate the performance of hitters on counting stats (HR, RBI, etc.) and first-order rate stats (OBP, Avg, Slg). ERA is a second order rate stat (OBP * Slg / PA, more or less). So the effects of the averaging of the first order rate stats are inflated by the multiplication. (1.33 x 1.33 = about 1.78). This looks like a huge difference. But if you figured RC/700 for the hitters and compared actuals to real-life, you would see similar declines.