ATG VII is here.

Well said visick. I have been guilty myself of focusing more on the RPs than on the hitters.

How did the ATG VII thread devolve into yet another super reliever discussion?

I really dig the idea of the shuffled deck. That sounds good. A lot of times I feel like I get in a rut picking the same players over and over and over again.

I want to address several points. It is hard to determine (without asking each manager in each league) who is new to the game and who isn't. But I would argue that changing the pricing impacts vets more than newbies, we know the prices and over time learn the better values. For a newbie they probably haven't learned the better values yet and so would not be as affected by the change in pricing.

As far as the super-reliever "issue" goes, it is a strategy that doesn't really reflect how real baseball was or is played. A simple fix might be just adding one rule to their usage, especially as SOM seems wedded to the quick and dirty approach to ATG-7. Since we don't use the closer rule (and given that it's ATG why should we) relief pitchers are constrained primarily by the POW + 2 innings rule,and being forced to rest after pitching two games in a row. I would simply add a rule that if a relief pitcher reaches his POW in a game, he must rest the next game. I am fully aware that we use pitch counts with the online game but the POW could still be used to track and limit relief appearances.

Two other issues for me are realism issues: catcher errors and hitter injuries. In real baseball throwing errors count as errors and are reflected in the total number of errors committed by a catcher. But in strat you have the catcher e rating and throwing error ratings, the combination of which grossly inflates the number of errors a catcher is likely to make compared to what they actually made in real life. This really needs to be fixed. The hitter injury system also seems riddled with mistakes. Just one class of examples is that many guys in the deadball era played in every game (and several guys would play in 156 games) and still be able to be injured. I really think that should be fixed.

I agree on the injuries. There should be some metric that can be applied across any length season. If the 600PA rule is based on 162 games, this assumes 3.7 PA / game. Apply that rate to each season based on total possible games, and recalculate injury risk. For a 154 game season, the injury threshold drops to 570. For the 1981 strike season, shortened to 110 games, the injury threshold is around 410.

More confusing? Possibly. But SOM already has built in the solution with the color coded injury rating for each player. Make sure the injury code legend is included in a small box on the bottom of each free agent page for quick reference.

Some really great ideas about fixes to the game ... but just to offer a defense of the super reliever. (Maybe this has all been hashed out before -- my first time though, so apologies.) Even though there's no question that the super reliever is obnoxious, at least it provides the game with a little something to counter the over-the-top offense. I'm in so many leagues where "great" pitchers like Johnson and Mathewson wind up with ERAs around 5. Bernie added quite a few expensive pitchers a few months ago, but they mostly seem to get hammered too. The Sutters and Murrays are among a handful of truly reliable pitchers whose ERA in the game reflects their actual accomplishments. If we take out the super-reliever strategy, the offensive numbers will continue to inflate. And if realism is the goal -- there's nothing realistic about that.

Well said Tom.

There are lots of other instances where there really is no "realism".

There seems to be a strong correlation between cap size and pitching realism i.e the larger the cap the
higher the ERA's. 60 M yields the most realistic stats and a great pitcher there can get an ERA under 2.00.

However, I also think that the ball park effects - particularly #'s -- inflate performances and reduce realism at least in ATG. Part of this is that people like bomber parks but I think the ballpark HR effects are just overstated in general.

There is also the fact that rolls come from both hitter and pitcher cards, that have nothing to do with ballparks.

ie. Maddux walking 50+ hitters in a season.

Define "realism" in the context of this game. One issue here is we throw that word around as though we all have the same view of what is realism here. I think it is safe to say that everyone has a different view.

We also have to realize that there is never going to be absolute realism under anyones definition. This game tries to answer the unanswerable......how would this hodgepodge of players from the past 130+ years fare in an environment that is completely different than they actually faced?

In my view the super reliever stuff is more unrealistic than the rest. I also agree that this game overstates the impact of ballparks.