Strat-O-Matic Baseball 365

I’m a first time player in a 1982 league. We used $100 mil so as to not make it super hard to get up and running with all first timers.

Steve Carlton is (supposedly) the mainstay of my pitching staff. Won the NL Cy Young and not in a crappy Pete Vuckovich kind of way either. Lots of Ks, good RAT, reasonable HR allowed.

He is getting absolutely annihilated, like EVERY game, with a 3-11 record and a ERA close to 6.00. While numerous “lesser” pitchers are doing great (looking at you Tim Lollar). My “team D” ought to be decent, not great.

Is this commonplace, or some kind of issue which all lefthanders face in a shallow league?

Also, and maybe more to the point, I was super happy to be able to draft him based on relatively cheap ~$5.5m salary and strong stats. And I thought he was misprinted, given those stats.

But when I look at his “card” the stripe key on his just eyeballs much worse, to me, than a guy like Lollar whose real numbers were just a bit worse across the board.

Any ideas on these things, or, just the way it goes?

I'm starting to think lefties in general, for whatever reason, are not good in this game.

Not many teams so far, but the most recent season I started...
4 * SP
1 RH / 3 LH
six games played...
the RH is 2-0 with a 1.38 ERA
the lefties are a combined 0-4

If a quality left-hander is constantly facing 8 of 9 batters who are right-handed, that is likely inconsistent with real life, in which a quality left-hander might face 7 of 9 batters who are right-handed. The game encourages "stacking the deck" against a pitcher in ways that often are detrimental to left-handers who had good success in real life.

The more I play, the more nervous I am about having lefties in my rotation. And from reading the forum, I know I'm not alone. I think Paul8210 summed it up pretty well... It's just too easy for your opponents to build a lineup that crushes LHPs.
Also... pay attention to salaries and the stripe key, not to Cy Young awards. You can call Lollar a lesser pitcher, but he costs more than Carlton, and he should be expected to out-pitch him.
Why Lollar got a better card, I don't know (there are lots of factors involved in creating the cards, such as their real-world opponents that year, and so forth)... And why he isn't getting clobbered by right-handed hitters in your league, I also don't know... sometimes that is just the way it goes.

jjii66 wrote:The more I play, the more nervous I am about having lefties in my rotation. And from reading the forum, I know I'm not alone. I think Paul8210 summed it up pretty well... It's just too easy for your opponents to build a lineup that crushes LHPs.
Also... pay attention to salaries and the stripe key, not to Cy Young awards. You can call Lollar a lesser pitcher, but he costs more than Carlton, and he should be expected to out-pitch him.
Why Lollar got a better card, I don't know (there are lots of factors involved in creating the cards, such as their real-world opponents that year, and so forth)... And why he isn't getting clobbered by right-handed hitters in your league, I also don't know... sometimes that is just the way it goes.

What is a stripe key?

tdkearns wrote:

jjii66 wrote:The more I play, the more nervous I am about having lefties in my rotation. And from reading the forum, I know I'm not alone. I think Paul8210 summed it up pretty well... It's just too easy for your opponents to build a lineup that crushes LHPs.
Also... pay attention to salaries and the stripe key, not to Cy Young awards. You can call Lollar a lesser pitcher, but he costs more than Carlton, and he should be expected to out-pitch him.
Why Lollar got a better card, I don't know (there are lots of factors involved in creating the cards, such as their real-world opponents that year, and so forth)... And why he isn't getting clobbered by right-handed hitters in your league, I also don't know... sometimes that is just the way it goes.

What is a stripe key?

I think he means that colored bar graph thing at the bottom which I never look at.

Those 100 million dollar lineups aren't helping any pitchers. He should be performing better, and if you hold onto him I bet he will.

Just keep in mind that the lineups he is facing are so much tougher than the real lineups he faced in 1982.

Like others have pointed out, it is very easy to stack a LHP killing lineup. Unless a LHP is a top 10-15 in SP salary I am VERY wary of using them. Think Kershaw and Randy Johnson in his prime. The cards are made from stats sometimes, a guys stats belie what awards he won, because he had great run support or a fantastic defense behind him, etc. Also as others have pointed out, by going the 100 mil route, you've now made the other teams playing against you even more formidable as the game is balanced for the 80 mil level. Carton didn't face the kind of lineups IRL he will in a 12 team simulation.

Granted, yet that ought to be true for pitchers across the board (also, hitters, facing better pitching).

And in the case of Steve Carlton, he is the #15 SP only in salary. Which seemed blatantly low. And his Cy numbers included 3.10 ERA, 1.15 RAT, nearly 9K/9IP, etc. Versus Lollar, 3.13/1.20/~6.5K/9 but a much better card. And a much higher salary.

Which I guess is, it is a game, not a hyper-accurate sim.

surfdoc37 wrote:Granted, yet that ought to be true for pitchers across the board (also, hitters, facing better pitching).

And in the case of Steve Carlton, he is the #15 SP only in salary. Which seemed blatantly low. And his Cy numbers included 3.10 ERA, 1.15 RAT, nearly 9K/9IP, etc. Versus Lollar, 3.13/1.20/~6.5K/9 but a much better card. And a much higher salary.

Which I guess is, it is a game, not a hyper-accurate sim.

It's a hyper accurate sim, if that's what you are actually doing. If you used Carlton the same way he was used for the season his card represents, pitched him the same number of games against the exact same lineups, and the exact same innings, the card will come very very close to reproducing Carlton's stats. What you can't expect is the hyper realism to be replicated when you take him out of that environment and place him in the one used by the online game.