Sun Sep 07, 2014 10:01 am
The basic problem with this (and most other baseball sims) is that half of the results come from the batter card and half from the pitcher. In reality, 80-90% of the result of a typical plate appearance in the major leagues is controlled by the pitcher. If the pitcher hits his spots with an intelligent pitch sequence, there's damned little that even the best hitter can do with it. Greg Maddux was living proof of that; stuff-wise he wasn't in the same area code as Clemens, Ryan, Randy Johnson, or Pedro, but results-wise he was right there.
I think most players here define "realism" as, "When I get my favorite players, my team should always win at least 110 games."
I have occasionally lobbied for the simplest of all fixes to the Gates Brown and Super Reliever problem - when a guy gets to his actual PA or IP total, he becomes irrevocably injured for the rest of the season in that league, with the appropriate add/drop penalty required to replace him. As for the argument that this rule should only apply to pitchers, that presumes that Gates could have kept up his 1968 stats for a full season as a platoon regular. This assumption seems unwise to me, since in 1967, in 105 PA's, his triple slash line was .187/.286/.286 and in 1969 his triple slash line for 100 PA's was .204 / .250 / .290.