Are Injuries Really Random?

Is this really random or do injuries lead to injuries?

I know 2019 Judge is injury-prone. With an injury on a 9, I estimate he should play 120 games per season. However, he is now sitting out his TENTH injury stretch of the season so far: https://365.strat-o-matic.com/league/in ... am/1545812

If Judge were to stay on my team (which he won't), in my first 118 games he he would play 53 games and miss 65 games (45% games played). That's messed up.

Your sample size of one aside, why would they not be random?

Palmtana, I am far from a conspiracy type of guy. My first reaction is that things in Strat are random. There is no evil agenda for why Strat-O-Matic would rig things. However, my second thought is that the game engine does do some funky things. For instance, in the early days of Strat online, "normalization" was turned on and dice rolls would be skewed to cool down players over-performing and heat up players under-performing. That feature was turned off along time ago, but there is other logic in the "advanced" and "super advanced" codes to trend outcomes.
Just asking.

The Injuries are probably as random as a computer can simulate randomness.

The problem is that this game, because of the finite number of at bat outcomes, has the occurrence of injury 10 or 20 times greater than what would be realistic. I think the duration of injuries is somewhat closer to real life.

And that's the problem. If a player on your team had a real injury that would land them on the 60 Day DL, in most all cases, because this game, in spite of being specifically centered around the injury, has no system for managing them (ie Disabled Lists and/or extra salary), you would just release the player and pick up someone new.

So instead, the sim is set up to simulate that 60 day absence by having a player get hurt 10 to 15 times for between 2 to 10 games, which is like missing 60 days but in a manner that makes it harder to simply release the player.

I'm one of the guys that bought two trial teams because I'm missing real baseball and fantasy baseball. The primary focus on managing injury makes this game pretty darn awful (although there is a lot elsewhere to like). But it's like they took the very worst part of fantasy football, and decided to center a game around it. I was hoping for more having played the board game as a kid, and the injuries were there, but I never played a full season (typically my brother and I would play a best of seven series and we diminished injuries to being out for the game and next game).

UB, I think the injury system in the online game works pretty well. If you didn't know, injuries are limited in these cases...

hitters with 680 or more AB + BB cannot be injured
hitters with 600 or more AB + BB can only be injured for three games
If you have two catchers and one gets hurt, the other is immune to injury (a couple of odd circumstances can override this)

I,too, played cards & dice as a kid, and we never finished a season either. That is one cool thing about the online game: You will be able to finish every season you start! And, of course, the game compiles all the stats for you.

And to answer the original poster, injuries are random. Sometimes a certain player will have bad luck and get injured way more than you would expect. We notice this. What we don't notice are players who go relatively unscathed throughout a season. Also, some seasons your team will make you feel like you're running a M*A*S*H unit, and other seasons injuries will only be a minor annoyance.

And to answer the original poster, injuries are random. Sometimes a certain player will have bad luck and get injured way more than you would expect.

I’m pretty sure TBM already knows this.

For some odd reason I have a recollection that there’s an equalizer mechanism for injuries. In other words, when you have the crazy bad luck streak early on, further down the road the injury games missed become more limited.

But like all things in old age...

Golfer 1: Watch my drive, I don’t see so well anymore.
Golfer 2: Gotcha!

THWACK!!!

Golfer 1: Did you see it?!
Golfer 2: I saw it perfectly!

Golfer 1: Well, where did it go!?
Golfer 2: I can’t remember!

So I don’t know if that’s urban legend or something I actually read somewhere.

The unanswered question I have always had about injuries is that when I have eight teams running, and Freese (or whomever) is on four of them and gets hurt, he ends up hurt on the other three teams on the same night. It seems to happen WAY to frequently to be random chance, but there it is.

There are a lot of things like that in the game...the nights when you know your teams are all on (or all off)...the inevitable rally in the 9th inning that almost falls just short...the way it is very hard to score in extra innings...the way the worst team in the league rises up to clobber the best team...the way it seems very hard to get past the 100 win barrier...the way a team when it gets on a roll seems particularly hard to beat.

The human brain has an insatiable need for causality (some explain the origin of religion as being rooted in that need). And whether we are detecting anomalies in the game...or noting only when things go bad and forgetting the opposite...well, who knows? Probably the latter...but things do seem odd sometimes.

Simple randomness can seem...not random...even though it is.

For example, next time you're in a group of 30 people, poll everybody's birthday. You'd probably be surprised that two people share the same birthday. Yet, the odds of that happening are about 90 percent!

The unanswered question I have always had about injuries is that when I have eight teams running, and Freese (or whomever) is on four of them and gets hurt, he ends up hurt on the other three teams on the same night. It seems to happen WAY to frequently to be random chance, but there it is.

This has been brought up before but it's an Urban Legend to me until I see some data to back it up. Why would HAL choose a particular high injury player on a certain night and knock them out across multiple teams? What would be the purpose of that programming? Does HAL have a quota for that player and needs to catch up across all leagues? If an injury player is KO'd on one team and not the other three is HAL up to date on that players quota?

Time for another deep dive, J-PAV?

I used to wonder if it was just a result of the number generator itself. For sake of discussion, let’s assume the nightly number generator is a defined string of rolls out to infinity, but each game uses the same string at the start of a game. If I bat Freese in the same spot, there’s then a likelihood he’ll actually get the same rolls in each game (up to a point of course) across separate leagues, if you’re following what I’m saying.

Different split rolls could determine injuries of different lengths then. And even though the number generator will yield all kinds of different results over the course of games, it isn’t so far-fetched that sooner or later a roll might match up across all the games at some later point again.

I recognize this was wild speculation on my part, but it’s the chronic over-analyzer in me that can’t stop searching for patterns.

The more likely explanation is that it’s completely random and injuries just work out that way sometimes. Truth be told, it’s not that I really care much because I use injury players a lot and have plenty of ways to work around those expected missed games. But it IS an observation that refuses to go away. #ConspiracyTheories