Strat-O-Matic Baseball 365

I've been playing since ATG1 and I've never seen HAL botch a game this badly:

https://365.strat-o-matic.com/game/play ... 464665/106

Bottom of 13th
2 out
Runners on 2nd/3rd
4L Bill Lee pitching
IBB set to conservative, no indiv settings by me on Lee's card

...and HAL has Lee intentionally walk 9R Gates Brown to pitch to a 4L righty. Of course he gives up a single to lose the game.

There is no logical reason for HAL to do this other than he saw Gates with a "neutral" clutch (because he doesn't have any hits on his card!!) and Herman Bell with a -12 clutch. That's the only answer.

For those of you who think clutch doesn't matter, please think again. It's time to get it out of the game.

That's egregious, quite common, and I totally agree. Clutch causes quirky results and for the record, I try to minimize IBBs in every way so it only happens a couple times a season. I always set each pitcher to IBB less, and extra conservative to try and game it de minimis.
But it is still screwed up

I agree. I would love to get rid of clutch altogether. It doesn't serve any function in the ATG context, and most of the really good hitters have negative or neutral clutch.

In this case, though, I'm not sure I would blame HAL for making RHP Bill Lee intentionally walk Gates Brown. True, Lee is 4L, but he's also a RHP.Hi Bell, who was up next, is a 4L reverse RHB. So when is comes to Bell vs Lee the two 4L reverse righties sort of cancel each other out. OTOH, Gates is a 9R who murders RHP. If it were me, and I had a righty pitching (even a 4L), I'd be much more afraid of Gates than of Bell.

Outta Leftfield wrote:In this case, though, I'm not sure I would blame HAL for making RHP Bill Lee intentionally walk Gates Brown. True, Lee is 4L, but he's also a RHP.Hi Bell, who was up next, is a 4L reverse RHB. So when is comes to Bell vs Lee the two 4L reverse righties sort of cancel each other out. OTOH, Gates is a 9R who murders RHP. If it were me, and I had a righty pitching (even a 4L), I'd be much more afraid of Gates than of Bell.

Bill Lee '72 is a lefty.

Yep...and either way, pretty clear I don't know of anyone that thinks clutch is necessary in ATG but also not for anything that isn't a replay.

It is basically a manual adjustment to reduce RBIs by some players if doing a replay season. Like adding a constant to the regression equation to shift the solution a little bit.

That's true Frankie but I think by definition hit totals are affected as well. That is, a hitter with bad clutch will have more hits on his card than he would with neutral clutch, since some of those hits will be reversed in clutch situations.

To me clutch is not the problem since it's not a black box and it's easy to value. The problem is HAL over-weighting clutch in his IBB decisions.

MaxPower wrote: The problem is HAL over-weighting clutch in his IBB decisions.

indeed...root cause vs proximate cause

Whoopycat wrote:Bill Lee '72 is a lefty.

Ooops! My memory is really going. Very bad move, HAL. Very bad move!

I don't know a lot about clutch or why it is the way it is but I do like to have positive clutch and it seems very hard to get it. I don't understand why the best players in history have poor clutch in most cases. I guess it's to prevent the cards from being too strong? Not sure why that can't be reflected in the price like everything else.

so what does HAL do if you have a couple of hitters coming up with positive clutch?