Radical idea/question?.....give me your thoughts

[doug_tucker10]

Instead of a salary cap maybe each team should have a PA and IP cap in conjunction with a cap on OPS and WHIP average per team. The final numbers may make each team have to follow a uniform standard but each manager could still vary their strategy, scrubs n subs or a balanced roster for example.

[The Last Druid]

[quote:dfd8a23119]That would be a customer relations nightmare. [/quote:dfd8a23119]

Is there any evidence that Hal Richman cares about customer relations?

Best pitching model I've seen is the original Sports Illustrated Baseball game which only had the 70-72 seasons. There the pitcher rolls first and only if there is no result on the pitchers card does the batter get to swing away.

[Paul_Long71]

I had the old Sports Illustrated/ Athlon Sports Baseball game. I had the 1980, 1983, and 1986 seasons.

I grew up on that game and found out about Strat in college.

[rburgh]

Petro,

See my post from 10/2 at 16:00. I didn't remember the name of the game, though.

Anybody that thinks Ed Walsh could pitch 250 innings (let alone 422) and allow only 3 HR in today's MLB needs to come down off of their cloud and rejoin the real world. Similarly, anyone who thinks that Roy Halladay would have allowed 24 HR in 250.2 innings if pitching before 1920 doesn't understand the difference in equipment, ballparks, strategy, and physical skills between today and 100 years ago.

SOM has apparently (rightly, in my opinion) decided to build this card set so that it mimics modern day baseball. If hitters are going to hit more or less their real-life numbers of HR in this game, somebody is going to have to give them up.

Using the SOM model, a typical league average pitcher over the past 30 years or so will give up about a dozen HR per 1000 BFP. That translates to about 8 per 700 PA, which is a normal amount of PA in a full season for an everyday batter. ALL of the rest of those HR are coming off the batter cards.

If they would modify the game so that some pitchers could suppress HR off the batter's card, then (a) salaries of those pitchers would soar, and (b) a (probably different) group of people are going to be whining about their hitters drastically underperforming. There's no way to satisfy both camps.

SOM's decision is that HR's sell better than gbA's. I suspect they're right. And I also suspect that a pitcher-dominated game would generate more, and louder, complaints from the players here. In fact, I suspect the volume of the complaints would only be limited by the number of defections of disgruntled managers.

A quick analysis of the top 50 pitchers (by salary, with results per season) vs. the next 50 yields the following interesting numbers. After every stat, the first number is the average performance of the top 50 and the 2nd is the next 50.

ERA 4.59 4.86
WHIP 1.366 1.422
W/L % .505 .493
HR/9 1.588 1.559
Uses 7243 2873

The number that jumps out, of course, is the HR rate. But that's almost surely due to the fact that most of the top 50 cards, and few of the next 50, are staples of the live draft leagues.

Pitchers do, in fact, produce more or less in relation to the value of their cards, it's just that the great pitchers are producing numbers that we associate with innings-eater starters in real baseball. Rest assured, the next tier of starters would be doing worse in your league. Your fellow managers agree, by almost a 3:1 margin.

[rburgh]

I ran the same analysis for the same two groups of pitchers, for $100 million cap leagues.

ERA 4.32 4.89
WHIP 1.347 1.428
HR/9 1.309 1.57
Uses 701 2139

Here, it's clear that the top guys are performing better. But, again, HR/9 are way higher than real life. Still, if you just suspend the expectation that the top pitchers are going to match their real-life performances, you will come to appreciate that they do, indeed, return value for the money you spend.

[Valen]

[quote:9c71408490]I was just looking at the top 2 hitters and pitchers. Ruth and Bonds are hitting HR at roughly the same rate that they did in real life. Meanwhile, Maddux and Alexander are giving up HR at over three times their real life rate. And they are walking at least twice as many as real life. [/quote:9c71408490]
Which reinforces my contention that strat is ideally suited to reproduce extreme offensive performances but not extreme pitching performances.

I find it interesting that someone can take the top hitters and compare their actuals to real life and seeing little difference argue that proves everything is about right. Really? Hitters face allstar pitching staffs the likes of which they never saw in real life and yet produce the same numbers anyway and that proves accuracy while pitchers get shelled in to oblivion and no surprise after all they are facing allstar lineups. If the algorithm were accurate pitchers numbers would go up and hitters numbers would go down due to the impact of both facing allstar opponents.

[ADRIANGABRIEL]

I think a new model could be introduced around fielding independent pitching.

[Valen]

Fielding independent pitching would be a very interesting feature for online strat. Just as one now takes someone from an extreme park to one of the opposite extreme for marked different results one could take a pitcher with a poor infield and give him a gold glove set of defenders.

But again you have compatability issues with existing card sets. How would you get around that?

[honestiago1]

You have to remember that some of these guys (Bonds, Kiner for example) were in VERY tough HR parks. They routinely get put in parks where the ball flies out. You're going to see favorable numbers. I hate stupid totals, too, but then again, I've gotten 150+ IP out of RP's, allowing them to anchor my staff. Works both ways. And an elite pitcher can slice up any lineup on any given day.