motnahp -> RE: Taking one for the Team (Too Often) (8/19/2007 5:43:48 PM)
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Running with 1.65b, doing a 2006 replay and acting as manager of the Braves. The problem mentioned in this thread is still popping up. AI managers will put a scrub pitcher in the game and leave the poor soul in to receive abuse no pitcher should endure. After I manage my game, I sim the other games of the day. I try to keep my eye open for any games where the winning team scores 20+ runs. When I catch one, I look at the box score and see what happened. Almost without exception, an AI pitcher gives up double-digit runs over an inning or two, often with an unrealistic number of walks. A recent example: Atlanta and Houston were tied 1-1 going into the top of the 7th. The Houston AI manager brought in Phil Barzilla to start the 7th inning. 16 runs, 5 hits, and 14 walks later, the Braves had a 17-1 lead. Incredibly, AI sent Barzilla out to start the 8th inning! As the Atlanta manager, I bunted a couple of times, the only way I could think of to end the madness. In fairness, I know that the AI would keep this pitcher in the minors indefinitely if given the opportunity to do so. Because I want the AI teams to use the rosters they had available on a given day in real MLB, I forced Barzilla and his "5 Stuff / 5 Control" to stay on the roster. Luckily for AI Houston, this pitcher only stayed on the roster for a few days, then went back down to the minors to stay. I'm not sure what the perfect solution would be to this dilemma. In a past version of PS, those seldom-used pitchers and batters were changed to "5 point-scrubs". IMO, a conversion/lowering of these players was needed, but to take them all the way down to 5-point scrubs was a bit of overkill. A player good enough to make it to the major leagues is very rarely so much worse than his peers. Even the worst pitchers in history aren't allowed to walk double-digit numbers of batters in an inning. I don't claim to be a prophet, but with the new feature of September call-ups.....guess what? More AI teams will have more of these low-rated players playing more often, leading to more of these anomalies. A scrub batter doesn't have a great impact on a game, but a 5-point scrub pitcher, left in the game too long........different story. I'll do an experiment soon, copying my association and manually raising the ratings on 5-point pitchers to see how they fare. I'll post my results later.
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