Strat-O-Matic Baseball 365

Quite often lately I have just left my lineups blank for the first few series in a season to see what Hal comes up with. Usually, his lineups are pretty good, even though l'll always change a few things.

In a 140M league, my corner outfielders are the expensive Musial and expensive Babe Ruth. Hal has Babe hitting second, which I guess makes some sense, even though Babe isn't exactly taking to it yet, with 12Ks and 1 BB in six games. For some reason, Hal plays Musial 2(+1) e7, in RF and the Bambino 3(-1) e8 in LF. I figure if each gets the same number of chances -- which I thought they did -- the better arm should be in RF. Isn't Hal doing this backward, or does he know something I don't?

I suspect Hal has a linear approach to assigning lineups when left totally blank. As a programmer one has to make a decision on how complicated the logic should be. Simplest would be take one position at a time and select the best player for that position. So maybe I fill out the infield first. I could write complicated routines for each position and take a million factors in to consideration resulting in a huge decision tree. Or I could simply take the most expensive player rated for that position. I would think Strat has something in between. The more complicated you make that decision tree the more lines of code are required and the more computer cycles are required for executing.

There are many factors of course that could be used in slotting who plays where. There should probably be limits to how much Hal should be expected to take in to consideration.

When HAL has to make a lineup decision, one of the factors is appearances (AB + BB for hitters, IP for pitchers). In the absence of direction to the contrary, when two players have the same primary position HAL will play the one with the most PA's.

That makes sense. Given that Hal was likely programmed with the idea in mind of working with a complete real life team. The player with the most primary PAs at a position for a team could reasonably be expected to have been that team's real life starter. It may be inconvenient in ATG where most PA might not mean the best fit but ....