Wed Feb 11, 2015 3:28 am
To answer your latest question about individual IBB: if you click on the "leader" section of the stats page, you have a list of the league's offensive leaders in intentional walks. Usually, you can find your top player who's being intentionally walked with that. But I am not aware that this is available for pitchers.
To come back to your intial question:
First thing I do when I assess my team on the run is to look at the inning distribution of my pitching staff. Is my best reliever underused? Which reliever is being the most used? Is the ratio of innings pitched from my SP vs my RP correspond to the strength of the team? In your case, Hoffman is the best reliever, by far, and yet he's one of the least used reliever in your team. Considering that there is no closer rule in your league, there is no need to limit Hoffman to the 9th inning. And in any case, you have Gordon, who is almost as good as Hoffman: he can take the load of closing situations and, since he's a 2-inning guy, there is increased chances that he won't get tired if there is a few bloop singles coming from Ebbetts Field. Hoffman should have at least 120 innings when the season ends, and yet he's on his way to less than 40. (I'll leave aside the question of what are the best settings for now). Whitey is your most used reliever. It's not clear to me if I would feel okay with that or not. He has a very good card, but Dibble has a better card, especially when you play at home. So unless there is an added value of turning switch hitters over the plate, which I doubt in your league, I wouldn't feel good with having my 4th or 5th reliever with the most innings in the bullpen, even if most of these innings come from mop-up situations---there are too many runs being scored in your league. So I guess I would try to maximize Hoffman use, have Gordon as the second setup/closer role, and have Dibble to pitch more often. Because you have 12 players, I think I would set up a R4 or R3 reliever (either Ryan or Marshall) to not come before the 8th, to make sure you have someone available and who can be fresh for a long time if the game is tied and goes to overitme.
Second thing, I go at the lefty/righty page to check if my specialist relievers are being used correctly. In your case, they are being used quite efficiently. I also look at the lefty/righty distribution of my SP to see if there is a trend in my league with regards to lineups being loaded of lefties or righties. In your case, there is a slight trend towards facing more right-handed hitters---might be something to consider if trade talks begin. I do the same for the offense, especially to make sure that my lefty-killers are not being overly used vs rhp. In one of my team, I had 8L Jeter who was constantly being used when my injury-prone dh would be hurt, so much that Jeter had as much at-bats vs rhp than vs lhp. Not sure why that was the case, but I simply dropped Jeter for another bat vs lhp.
Third thing, I switch to the sim-misc page. I look basically at everthing. I look for trends of "unlucky" rolls for the ballpark FX and the Hit/Pit Rolls. If there is a chance that my settings cause one of my reliever to be overused, the Hit/Pit ratio will show it by having much more hit rolls than pit rolls---that's how STRAT implements the "fatigue" mode on the computer game; by having more rolls on the offensive side. In your case, the only outlier among pitchers with more hit rolls than pit rolls is Brown, and I'm pretty sure this is a sign of bad luck rather than reflecting that you try to force him to pitch in a fatigue mode. On the offense side, I look at the clutch outs. Duffy already has 5 clutch outs. Would it make sense to have hit second hitter? or way low, at 8th or even 9th spot? You have stellar number for baserunning, I wouldn't touch anything on this. But it seems that your team has not tried a single time to pinch hit. Even though your starting lineup is quite potent, it's hard to believe that Matt Williams would never come out of the bench and try to hit a homerun vs lhp? I would certainly change the settings, try different things to induce Hal to use your bench.
