Lately

there has been a spate of no-hitters at the 200M cap. Prior to the last few months, I can't remember having seen any. Anyway, here's one from the first series of the season...

http://onlinegames.strat-o-matic.com/game/348379/11

I think that this is my 17th no-hitter since I've been playing. As I've mentioned before, my very first game was a no-hitter by Osteen back in ATG II. Only had three perfect games, but never even a no-hitter at 200M.

I've noticed a reduction in scoring lately for my teams across all caps. I'm seeing my teams and other teams get shut out more often. For example, at $80 mil no DH recently, Kaat, Gabler and Higbe recently pitched consecutive shutouts for my team. None of them are exactly Pedro Martinez. Kaat's shutout was a 1 hitter. With more than 125 teams, I've never previously come close to shutting out an opponent for an entire series.

A day or two later, Higbe threw a 1 hitter at home in Forbes '57 against one of my fairly high powered lefty teams (1st place, leading the league in runs and run differential after 24 games) in a $100 mil no DH league, with Mantle singling after 8 2/3 to break up the no hitter.

I first noticed this trend towards lower scoring 3-4 weeks ago. Aside from the unusual and unprecedented spate of no hitters at $200 mil mentioned above, has anyone else noticed a reduction in scoring?

Maybe scoring isn't down so much, just the number of shutouts and low run games being up, as looking at my current teams, there seems to be no shortage of big offensive games. For example, the next game after being 1 hit by Higbe, my team had 22 hits and scored 11 runs.

Although no formal studies have been done, meaning that the evidence is largely anecdotal, I'm wondering if the powers that be at SOM, in response to comments about the "arcade game" level of offense, have secretly taken steps to reduce offense or are experimenting with the balance between pitching and hitting. Perhaps season long "normalization" is taking place.

Come to think of it, with the recent problems with starting pitchers knocked out early coming back to start after 1 game of "rest" when the changeover to a new server was made, and with such problems with starting pitchers NEVER having occurred previously, despite the myriad changes made over the years to the site and game engine by both TSN and SOM, it doesn't seem unreasonable to conclude that SOM is experimenting with changes to the online game settings, as starters knocked out early coming back on less than 3 days rest to start again has long been part of the CD ROM computer game, but has never been part of the online game.

What do you think guys?

Oh no! Not the "N" word!

Normalization would kill an already dying online game...

I suspect that it is merely a shift in the ballpark mix as more guys try pitchers' parks. Munich Man where have you gone?

he's taking a timeout

I noticed something odd the other day when the system crashed that caught my attention (not to add to the vast conspiracy theories that have been propagated on these boards dating back to the Sporting News boards). My team lost a Finals series, was told I was getting my one credit along with the "unfortunately, your season has come to an end" message, yet the game that would have eliminated me was not run. The next day, the results of the game that I lost was posted on my team page. I began to wonder, are the results preordained as to who wins and who loses? How can the system give me a credit w/o the results being posted? What kind of programming flowchart would do something like this-it's putting the cart in front of the horse so to speak. Any of you tech guys have an explanation for this? I remember Bernie mentioning something that the normalization was on way back when (which may explain the low scores you guys are talking about), but I wonder if there is a normalization based on how much money we actually spend on teams vs. how many free credits we are allowed - maybe that is normalized too? It would actually make good business sense.

Johnny:

My theory on that one: My guess is that the games had run but were not displaying due to a glitch.

I know I had a team starting that night and was hoping to get in to make last second changes. I was disappointed to see my main page as showing regular season instead of preseason which means opening night games have run. When I went to check scores though they not there and thought they had not run (the display on the front office page though was not typical for either preseason nor regular season). When I started to make a roster move it was charging me the 5% drop fee as though the season had started. No stats were in for my players but hence my guess that the games had run but there was an issue with displaying them. I did not check the standings to see if anything showed up there. Course your theory could still be correct.

Is "normalization" Randy Johnson going from 11-2 to 13-9?