Simulations based on "Now Taking the Field" book's rosters

[TomStone123]

Hello!

Long message here, but I hope it will be worthwhile for some of you OOTP players to read and respond to!

My name is Tom Stone, and I'm author of the book "Now Taking the Field: Baseball's All-Time Dream Teams for All 30 Franchises", which was published earlier this year from ACTA Sports. Some of you might have seen it... as this year I've done 50+ radio interviews, I was on MLB Now on the MLB Network in February, I presented at the SABR convention in June, and spoke at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown in July.

A current project I have is to run simulations of entire-seasons of the 30-man rosters for each team from my book, to see what would happen. I get asked this in interviews all the time, usually in the form of "The Yankees would win the most, right?" I've always hedged, and said surely the Yankees would do well, but many other teams, particularly those with strong starting pitching, would also do well. I am starting interviews again this month on radio, and want to have some real answers here based on sim gaming, and I've chosen OOTP 20 as my primary platform. I also hope to get back on MLB Network to discuss the sim results, so all of this could turn into some very nice publicity for OOTP!

That said, I am a NEWBIE to OOTP, so I need some help. What I've done so far is start with the All-time teams quickstart that comes with OOTP 20. I then modified all the rosters to match the ones in my book (plus some additional relievers, as my book was light there). I then ran a full season... and the results were very interesting!!! Yes, the Yankees, Red Sox, and Cardinals did well, and many of the expansion era teams not so well. But the final world series matchup? It was the Twins/Senators vs. the Phillies, with Philly taking it in seven!

Before I run the sim again... and again, and again... as I really want to get a nice range of results from this to report on in interviews/etc.... I have a number of questions about things I think I need to setup in my game. There were MANY things that made sense from season 1, that seemed reasonable and within the realm of possibility. But some results seemed rather odd, off in ways that I am hoping I can tweak so they don't occur again. But I don't want to mess with the way things work either, so that is where I NEED THIS COMMUNITY's HELP PLEASE! :-) I have read the relevant sections of the manual, learning about the different player ratings, etc. -- but again, I am new, so have questions for you all.

So with that lengthy background (sorry), here goes:
1. Are there any factors that I should make sure are turned off, so that each season I run each team has everything equal -- besides the talent of their players, their home ballpark, etc? I see things like Team Chemistry / Morale? Does that impact player results? I kinda don't want such extra factors involved in my simulated seasons.

2. Based on how players were created (from the quickstart I used plus some players I needed to import), some have stats in their history from previous real-life years, and some do not. How do I delete those real-life season stats, so that I can run reports and see only the accumulated stats from my simulated seasons? After ten seasons, I'd love to see aggregate numbers as that will help to average out the kind of blips from oddball seasons I get.

3. The biggest statistical anomaly from my teams is seemingly too many hits / too high of a batting average. What could I tweak to lower this? The overall league average was .290 which is rather high, though I'm OK with Tris Speaker batting .395 as the league leader. The league leader in hits was George Sisler with an amazing 271, and 8 players had 240+ hits. Some teams had no batter with over 200 hits, and that is fine. I think one issue is that some teams have SO MANY good hitters in these lineups, that they are getting a LOT of at-bats because they are scoring a lot of runs and just batting around the lineup a lot -- even against the really good pitching that these All-Time Teams also have. So what levers in the sim can I pull to even this out a bit?

3a. Conversely, pitching WHIPs are way to high. Only two qualifying starters had a WHIP below 1.20: Pedro at 0.99, and Curt Schilling from Phillies at 1.15. So many good pitchers on these all-time team rosters... all the Hall of Famers... while I realize they are going up against great lineups, I would think more than just two would have a WHIP below 1.20 (and I don't think Walks is the cause, it is too many hits).

4. Related to this, too many runs are being scored, so pitching ERA numbers are far too high. The overall ERA was 4.86, which is like the PED-era. Only three qualifying starters were below 3.00: Pedro 2.25, Mathewson 2.50, Gibson 2.93. Those three being best is fine, but only three below 3.00 is my concern.

5. Perhaps one issue is that the number of strikeouts also seemed a bit a low. There were only 5.61 per game, which compared to real-life baseball would be the lowest since 1989. Only seven SP had 200+ Ks, with only Pedro having 220+ (253). Granted, I'm using 5-man rotations, so I can't expect to see a lot of 250+ K seasons, especially against great hitting lineups -- but again, the results just seemed low to me.

6. Speaking of innings pitched, not many had over 200 IP. No one has any pitch count settings... so what setting do I need to tweak to have starters stay in games longer? Or will that likely make the ERA situation even worse?

7. On a related issue, how do I tell the sim to not just use the five starters and never use an "emergency starter"? Would that only happen if I turn on injuries? It was just odd to see every single team have all five SPs pitching 33 or 32 games, with none of the extra starters doing anything except long relief. I see I can have a six man rotation, but what I'd prefer to do is stick with 5-man rotation, but in some cases have the 4th or 5th guys skipped in favor of a 6th or 7th guy to give them a start here or there. I say that because I don't want Walter Johnson or Bob Feller getting fewer starts because of a 6-man rotation. :-)

8. There were some starters and some relievers who were just awful! Why would that be? Do I just need to look at their rating numbers and raise some of them if they look too low? I realize this is just one simulation season, so I don't want to overreact. But some really good starters and relievers had ERAs well over 6.00, and over 7.00 in some cases, which just seems wrong. Again, part of that is too many hits/runs per above, but it seemed to really impact some pitchers more than others.

9. I'll note that there are NOT too many HR being hit. The league leader, Barry Bonds, only had 38 -- so if anything that is a bit low. Perhaps the many good pitchers' movement ratings are such that not a lot of HR can be hit? But I'm not concerned with the HR numbers really -- it is more the large number of total hits, and ultimately runs, that is the issue.

One issue though with HR... is that some guys with very little (historical) power hit way too many HR. Like Nap LaJoie had 25 HR and Pete Rose had 25 HR also. Those are not realistic results. Does the Gap Power setting impact HR at all? Or does that only impact doubles and triples? I might just need to lower those guys', and a few others', power ratings. Many others who shouldn't hit a lot of HR were fine -- like Tris Speaker hit 3 homers, things like that. But there were some really odd exceptions I don't want to see happening.

10. Lastly, the SB success rate % seemed really high for this first simulation season... it was 79%. Is there anything I can adjust to lower that a bit across the board, or is it just a factor of the runners ratings and the catchers ratings in each instance? Some guys had like 50 SB and 2 CS, so those extremes really jacked up the overall %... and almost no catchers had a better than 30% rate at throwing runners out, even though the league has all the greats like Ivan Rodriguez, Johnny Bench, etc.

Thanks for reading... and if some of you can chime in with advice I'd really appreciate it! I hope to get some really fun results doing this, and to be able to raise some good publicity about OOTP during my upcoming interviews, etc.

Best,

Tom Stone

[Pirates]

Can you please post a link where I can look/buy this book.

Thank you.

[Boomcoach]

Originally Posted by Pirates

Can you please post a link where I can look/buy this book.

Thank you.

I just ordered mine, plus one for a gift, from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0879466669

[sprague]

ok I will bite as a helper, as I like the idea you are doing.

Step one is the quickstart itself you are using. Do you like how the players have been rated? I mean I think the QS uses a players best year, but if I recall some of the players ratings are a bit strange at the same time. The ballparks I do not remember if they are properly rated or not..I recall last time I looked at this QS (18 or 19) Yankee stadium was way under rated and other parks over rated. Same is true with many of the SP, a lot I think need adjustments.

So you will first have to check through the players ratings to see if you like what it there. If you were like me you will probably want to make adjustments.

So for the rest: 1 turn off everything you can. coaches, scouting, morale, personality...you want just the players and thier ratings, at least that will be the least outside factors.

2 if you want to erase stats, in game options you will find that "erase all player stats"\

3 in the game options last page is the league modifiers. choose the totals you want the league to play to (or choose a year if you want a specific year) then hit AUTO CALC modifiers. That will sim a season and adjust with a modifier (Such as 0.875 or 1.059) to help get the league numbers up and down to what you are asking the game to give you.

A number of the questions you asked after, about any stat output, should be solved by applying #3 answer above.


So get the league total and modifiers right and that will help alot
but as you see you are going to have a lot of work to do with defense ratings, SP and RP ratings and whatnot.
I started a project similar to this 30 best franchise teams post 1990. Took me a lot of time just to get the NL teams teams rated what i feel is proper. still a long way off to the AL
I don't like FRANCHISE teams per sey as too many good players wind up on the bench...so I break mine up into eras like 1990-2020 above.

That is what came off the top of my head...ask me more if you want help...but I leave for Rome on Thurs for a week so If I dont reply after that, not being a snob, just on a trip.
Good luck

[TomStone123]

Thank you @Sprague for your advice and suggestions. Lukas at OOTP also sent me some info on my questions via email, so between what you are saying and what he provided I have plenty of next steps to try. I'm going to do a backup, make some of the changes, then run a season, see the results, then tweak again as necessary. That way I can better see the impact of specific changes. And yes, I think at least some of the player ratings -- perhaps especially some from the QS I started with -- need a little tweaking. I might do that in part by loading up a another version of the player, based on a season I want to use for him, and compare with what was there.

Thanks again... and I'll post an update on this thread when I have something to share.

-- Tom

[sprague]

Originally Posted by TomStone123

Thank you @Sprague for your advice and suggestions. Lukas at OOTP also sent me some info on my questions via email, so between what you are saying and what he provided I have plenty of next steps to try. I'm going to do a backup, make some of the changes, then run a season, see the results, then tweak again as necessary. That way I can better see the impact of specific changes. And yes, I think at least some of the player ratings -- perhaps especially some from the QS I started with -- need a little tweaking. I might do that in part by loading up a another version of the player, based on a season I want to use for him, and compare with what was there.

Thanks again... and I'll post an update on this thread when I have something to share.

-- Tom

your welcome


really check the yankee ratings...again it has been a while, but I seem to recall that almost of the hitters seemed under rated "in my opinion"

[joefromchicago]

Tom: Welcome to the OOTP community! I can address a few of your points:

Originally Posted by TomStone123

1. Are there any factors that I should make sure are turned off, so that each season I run each team has everything equal -- besides the talent of their players, their home ballpark, etc? I see things like Team Chemistry / Morale? Does that impact player results? I kinda don't want such extra factors involved in my simulated seasons.

I'd turn off trading (of course) and injuries. Trading is under the League Settings/Rules tab. To disable injuries, go to the Global Settings/Players & Facegen tab.

You'll have to make some sort of decision about team strategies, unless you're running all of the teams yourself. I'm not sure how gamers make that decision when they're running an all-time league like you're doing. Someone with more experience with this sort of thing will have to weigh in on that.

Originally Posted by TomStone123

3. The biggest statistical anomaly from my teams is seemingly too many hits / too high of a batting average. What could I tweak to lower this? The overall league average was .290 which is rather high, though I'm OK with Tris Speaker batting .395 as the league leader. The league leader in hits was George Sisler with an amazing 271, and 8 players had 240+ hits. Some teams had no batter with over 200 hits, and that is fine. I think one issue is that some teams have SO MANY good hitters in these lineups, that they are getting a LOT of at-bats because they are scoring a lot of runs and just batting around the lineup a lot -- even against the really good pitching that these All-Time Teams also have. So what levers in the sim can I pull to even this out a bit?

Well, there are a bunch of factors potentially at play here, some of which you've already identified. For instance, are you playing 162-game seasons? If so, that gives players from the pre-1960 era eight additional games worth of stats, which will boost their numbers.

Not sure how to make HOF-caliber players less likely to produce HOF-caliber stats. Setting up a league composed of all-time greats will lead to some strange results. It's not like Stan Musial is going to bat like Mario Mendoza just because he's facing great pitchers all the time.

Originally Posted by TomStone123

4. Related to this, too many runs are being scored, so pitching ERA numbers are far too high. The overall ERA was 4.86, which is like the PED-era. Only three qualifying starters were below 3.00: Pedro 2.25, Mathewson 2.50, Gibson 2.93. Those three being best is fine, but only three below 3.00 is my concern.

What are your pitcher settings? You say you have five-man rotations. How many bullpen pitchers do you have? What are the settings for relievers? Most of that information can be found in the League Settings/Stats & AI tab.

Originally Posted by TomStone123

5. Perhaps one issue is that the number of strikeouts also seemed a bit a low. There were only 5.61 per game, which compared to real-life baseball would be the lowest since 1989. Only seven SP had 200+ Ks, with only Pedro having 220+ (253). Granted, I'm using 5-man rotations, so I can't expect to see a lot of 250+ K seasons, especially against great hitting lineups -- but again, the results just seemed low to me.

If you're only drawing players from the 2000s, that number would indeed be low. If you're drawing players from all eras, though, that number sounds about right. Batters didn't strike out a lot in the early days of baseball. Babe Ruth had a career K total of 1330, and he struck out a bunch compared to his contemporaries. Rob Deer, I think, struck out that many times in one season.

Originally Posted by TomStone123

7. On a related issue, how do I tell the sim to not just use the five starters and never use an "emergency starter"? Would that only happen if I turn on injuries? It was just odd to see every single team have all five SPs pitching 33 or 32 games, with none of the extra starters doing anything except long relief. I see I can have a six man rotation, but what I'd prefer to do is stick with 5-man rotation, but in some cases have the 4th or 5th guys skipped in favor of a 6th or 7th guy to give them a start here or there. I say that because I don't want Walter Johnson or Bob Feller getting fewer starts because of a 6-man rotation. :-)

You can use either the "start highest rested" or the "strict rotation, occasionally highest rested" settings for your starting rotation mode (League Settings/Stats & AI tab). In my experience, though, using either of those settings with a five-man rotation won't spread out the starts the way you want. I'd suggest a six-man rotation instead.

Originally Posted by TomStone123

One issue though with HR... is that some guys with very little (historical) power hit way too many HR. Like Nap LaJoie had 25 HR and Pete Rose had 25 HR also. Those are not realistic results. Does the Gap Power setting impact HR at all? Or does that only impact doubles and triples? I might just need to lower those guys', and a few others', power ratings. Many others who shouldn't hit a lot of HR were fine -- like Tris Speaker hit 3 homers, things like that. But there were some really odd exceptions I don't want to see happening.

Gap ratings don't affect HR totals, except possibly for inside-the-park HRs. You have to remember, though, that all the ratings are supposed to work together. Lajoie has a high power rating because, for his era, he was a power hitter (he led the AL in 1901 with 14 dingers). But the pitchers in that era also have really high movement ratings, so it all averages out. But if you put Lajoie up against, say, Fergie Jenkins, all of that pent-up power is going to be released.

Originally Posted by TomStone123

10. Lastly, the SB success rate % seemed really high for this first simulation season... it was 79%. Is there anything I can adjust to lower that a bit across the board, or is it just a factor of the runners ratings and the catchers ratings in each instance? Some guys had like 50 SB and 2 CS, so those extremes really jacked up the overall %... and almost no catchers had a better than 30% rate at throwing runners out, even though the league has all the greats like Ivan Rodriguez, Johnny Bench, etc.

It may have to do with your strategy settings, it may have to do with the number of players you have from the deadball era - not sure what's going on here.

[TomStone123]

Thanks so much @joefromchicago... I really appreciate all the advice on my various questions. Aligns with what I got from Lukas, so after a busy week at work I'm going to finally implement some of these changes, a few at a time, and test out to see the results. I particularly appreciated your comments that temper some of my concerns about the results I saw from the first simulated season -- perhaps some of the results aren't as off-base as I was initially thinking. -- Tom

[Lukas Berger]

Originally Posted by TomStone123

Thanks so much @joefromchicago... I really appreciate all the advice on my various questions. Aligns with what I got from Lukas, so after a busy week at work I'm going to finally implement some of these changes, a few at a time, and test out to see the results. I particularly appreciated your comments that temper some of my concerns about the results I saw from the first simulated season -- perhaps some of the results aren't as off-base as I was initially thinking. -- Tom

Another thing you can try rather than just change the modifiers one by one, is that if you have an idea of what sort of stats you want, pick a typical year from an era with similar stats, select that year in the dropdown box by the modifiers, then recalc the ltm's

Then the league will be set up with modifiers that will make it play with similar stats to whatever year you picked. You might still need to adjust a few modifiers, but that might be a bit of a shortcut.

[TomStone123]

Hello... to those of you interested in this thread!

Update... I'm making progress on getting the kind of overall results I want to simulate seasons using the rosters from my book Now Taking the Field: Baseball's All-Time Dream Teams for All 30 Franchises. I made a bunch of changes to league-wide settings, and also various tweaks to individual player ratings... all of which I noted so I could check on impact -- and potentially undo some things before subsequent seasons -- if results were not as expected. I did this as advised by all of you here, a few changes at a time, and played a month or two into a season, and then aborted and tweaked again, etc. Eventually I educated myself enough to start to understand!

No doubt the biggest change I made was to the league-wide modifiers -- a concept I wasn't understanding until after my first season and your advice on how to proceed. Suffice to say, by basing the league-wide modifiers on the 1973 season -- not as extreme as 1968, but nonetheless still a strong pitching-era season -- my issue of too many hits, too many runs, high ERAs, and high WHIP stats of course went away! (I chose 1973 to test for fun because I was born that year.)

There were some very interesting results... the Yankees won the World Series... over the surprising Expos/Nationals! For the most part, the teams you'd expect to do well in an All-Time Dream Teams scenario did... and the expansion-era clubs generally did worse... except the Expos/Nationals did quite well (which is interesting since they just won their first World Series in real-life this year!). Lots of interesting results of individual players... with just one I'll mention now... people like to argue these days about Kershaw vs. Koufax as All-Time Dodgers pitcher... well they TIED for the overall league ERA title with 2.46 each. Ha!!!

That said, I now need to tweak further because this season resulted in far too few HR, doubles, SLG, RBI, Runs... and things like batting average and SB could increase a bit too. (At end of this post are a few comments on league leaders if you are curious.)

Besides tinkering with the league-wide baseline season / modifiers further, here are my remaining questions:
1. Repeat question, sorry... I really wish there was a way to have say 3 SP locked into a rotation, with the 4 and 5 slots be a committee from a pool of say 4-5 guys. Some teams have 3 awesome HOF hurlers, but then a mix of guys rounding out the staff, and I'd like to let them all play. Right now, several fine starters see hardly any action because they aren't in the rotation, and the bullpen is large. I don't want to use a six-man rotation except for a couple teams, as i don't want the top of the rotation guys to get fewer starts. I *thought* I could accomplish what I want by indicating 5-man rotation, but then only listing three starters... but that didn't work... it treated those three as a 3-man rotation and I quickly aborted that season, as guys were going to end up with 400+ innings!

2. For some reason this time the Closers were used a lot (60-70 games each) -- even those I lowered usage of closers from Very Often to just OFten. The rest of the relievers were not used much, even relative to the bullpen depth I have on these rosters. Which settings are most relevant here? Pitcher stamina? Hook for starters? Hook for relievers? Something else? Maybe I really just have too many middle and long relievers on these rosters, so the IP are being spread thin?

3. For some reason (the quick start mixed with my imported players), some rather slow guys have relatively high "Stealing" ratings. I'm talking about guys with very low speed ratings, like 1-5, having Stealing ratings of say 10-16. That seems odd to me. Some slow guys have low number for both, but MANY are weird this way. Shouldn't people who almost never steal bases alway have low numbers for both Speed and Stealing?

4. Not a huge deal I guess... but what generates the “Hold” rating for pitchers? I am seeing a lot of variance here, with some really low and high numbers. And I can't figure out what this corresponds to in real-life, what stats from Baseball-Reference.com I mean?

5. A lament, perhaps not a question... being All-Time Dream Team rosters, some really good players hardly get any playing time, because they are blocked by a total stud -- like Mattingly stuck behind Gehrig at 1B for the Yankees, not to mention the many DH candidates he is up against on their roster. I can list such guys as PH in both the LHP and RHP lineups, but other than saying I want such guys to play every 6th game or the like, there is nothing else I can do to get them more playing time right? Hard to bench the A+++ superstars, so it just means some really good players won't play much I guess.

6. Playoffs... how can I adjust things at the end of the regular season to have the aces pitch, and shift down from a 5-man rotation to only 3 or 4? In real-life managers line up starters as best they can leading into the playoffs... so I don't want to have someone pitch a wild-card or other playoff game on very little rest. But... while it was interesting to see the Expos/Nationals take the NL Pennant, I noticed after the fact that the Dodgers rotation was aligned such that Koufax didn't pitch! Not that Kershaw, Vance, Sutton, and Drysdale are not good, but clearly in a playoff series Koufax would have pitched once or twice! How do I do this?

-------END OF QUESTIONS-------------------

In case you are curious... here were my league leaders:
- Hits leader Cobb had 219, with seven having 200+
- Qualifying BA leader was Hornsby at .352, with ten guys at .320+
- Triples leader was Ed Delahanty with 18, and twenty guys had 10+
- Strikeouts leaders were Bryce Harper (193) and Jim Thome (192) and many others had 130+.
- SB leader was Henderson with 59 (would have been higher except he batted .265 with .354 OBP). A dozen others had 40+ SB, so will only look to bump SB up a little.
- Only five 20-game winners, with Koufax leading the way at 24-6, followed by Mathewson at 23-5.
- ERA... as noted Koufax and Kershaw tied with 2.46, and 11 guys were below 3.00. Only about 15 qualifiers had an ERA over 5.00 -- so far fewer than before.
K - Curt Schilling (PHI version) led with 238 followed by Pedro (BOS version) with 237.

Some stats that I definitely want to see higher as I run these seasons -- and so I'll adjust modifiers / baseline seasons accordingly are:
- HR leader was Jim Thome with 34, followed by Mantle and Ruth with 33. I'd like to see the league leader be more like 45-55. And to see lots of top sluggers, like Mays, Harper, Foxx and others only hit around 15 HR... just looks odd!
- Doubles leader was again Delahanty but with only 40, which is quite low. Lots of great doubles hitters had well below 30.
- SLG Pct... with low HR and Doubles, SLG was very low. Helton led with .565, but only six guys were at .500+.
- RBI leader was Al Simmons with a healthy 135, but then it fell off quickly with only seven with 100+. Presumably with more doubles and more HR, there will come more run scoring and RBIs.
- Runs... Cobb led the way with only 110, with only 9 guys having 100+.
- Walks / OBP: Bonds (SFG) had 110 walks, but only five guys had 100+... and Hornsby led with a .417 OBP, but only seven had .400+.
- Saves... Thigpen led with a modest 36, so I'd like to see a higher leader there.

[joefromchicago]

I'll let others handle the bulk of your questions and just address a couple:

Originally Posted by TomStone123

1. Repeat question, sorry... I really wish there was a way to have say 3 SP locked into a rotation, with the 4 and 5 slots be a committee from a pool of say 4-5 guys. Some teams have 3 awesome HOF hurlers, but then a mix of guys rounding out the staff, and I'd like to let them all play. Right now, several fine starters see hardly any action because they aren't in the rotation, and the bullpen is large. I don't want to use a six-man rotation except for a couple teams, as i don't want the top of the rotation guys to get fewer starts. I *thought* I could accomplish what I want by indicating 5-man rotation, but then only listing three starters... but that didn't work... it treated those three as a 3-man rotation and I quickly aborted that season, as guys were going to end up with 400+ innings!

I wish we could have that option too, but right now you can't do what you want to do. In effect, what you want is for OOTP to have the option of allowing relief pitchers to start occasionally. I'd love to see that too, but that's not an option, even though OOTP does allow starters to pitch in relief.

I've written extensively in these forums about pitching in the pre-reliever era, and some of what I've found is relevant to your situation. You can look at my thoughts on how OOTP handles five-man rotations here. In short, OOTP doesn't spread out starts in a five-man rotation the way that you want, and it can't have a "pool" of three or four back-end starters who pick up starts on an occasional basis unless you manipulate the rotations yourself.

I think you need to evaluate what exactly you want to accomplish in this project. If you want the teams to adopt strategies that will win ballgames, then you'll have to reconcile yourself to the fact that some players won't be able to crack the lineup. If it were me running these sims, I'd take the little-league approach instead: everybody plays. Sure, in a lot of cases you won't have "realistic" results, but it's not a realistic simulation. You want everyone on the roster to get into the game because everyone is a star. It's no fun if you pick Don Mattingly as one of the greatest Yankees of all time and he doesn't get any at-bats.

Originally Posted by TomStone123

2. For some reason this time the Closers were used a lot (60-70 games each) -- even those I lowered usage of closers from Very Often to just OFten. The rest of the relievers were not used much, even relative to the bullpen depth I have on these rosters. Which settings are most relevant here? Pitcher stamina? Hook for starters? Hook for relievers? Something else? Maybe I really just have too many middle and long relievers on these rosters, so the IP are being spread thin?

I think that's just how relievers work, but the effect might be exacerbated by your league settings. In 1973, it was pretty common for a team's top reliever to get a lot of IP, at least relative to today's top relievers. Mike Marshall appeared in 92 games for the Expos that year, and he was one year away from his monster season with LA, when he pitched over 200 innings from the bullpen. The problem here might be that all of your closers are actually "stoppers," which has a specific meaning in OOTP. A "stopper" is a pitcher who is used in high-leverage situations late in the game, unlike a "closer" who is only used in the ninth inning (or, rarely, in the eighth) and only in save situations. Stoppers tend to pile up more IP than closers.

[TomStone123]

Thanks JoeFromChicago! You've answered the two questions that I figured most likely had a "nothing you can do about it" answer. For the rotation issue, it just is what it is. For the bench playing time issue, you are right I need to think about it more and decide if I want to have more guys marked as "play every 6th game" or the like. I do that in a few spots, and I have plenty of R/L platoons, or guys that are just very similar in value splitting duties (e.g., Pedroia and Doerr at 2B for the Red Sox).

And yes, I think with some tinkering of settings I will get the relief innings mix I am looking for. There are both the global settings to consider, and also how I set individual relievers. For a few teams I'm going to try co-closers, e.g., where there isn't one that is clearly superior. In other cases I'm shifting some of the setup men to be 7th inning or later instead of some being just 8th inning or later. And if there are specific middle relievers I want to pitch more, I'll indicate that with the usage setting -- though that will mean some pitch less of course too (OK because for some of the bullpens there is a big drop off in quality after the first 2-3 guys).

-- Tom

[tomnov]

Originally Posted by TomStone123

... For the bench playing time issue, you are right I need to think about it more and decide if I want to have more guys marked as "play every 6th game" or the like. I do that in a few spots, and I have plenty of R/L platoons, or guys that are just very similar in value splitting duties (e.g., Pedroia and Doerr at 2B for the Red Sox).
...
-- Tom

You can also fiddle with the drop down menus where it says "play every 6th game" and adjust those to "play every 3rd game" or your own choice to increase the usage of those stars otherwise languishing on the bench. I did this with my own "best of" league to a team I managed, but you may want to do it to all the teams in your particular league in commish mode (make sure you check the box in settings saying something about not letting AI override lineup changes).

[Garlon]

Baseball Greats is now available in the OOTP20 Workshop.