Quote:
Originally Posted by Syd Thrift
…from my observations, a bad defender affects a high-strikeout pitcher pretty much exactly as much as he affects a low-K guy (I know this to be the case with SOM because I played that game for years before turning to OOTP).
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I also played SOM for years, though not in the past four years. My experience was more with the good fielders than the bad. In any given season my Dodgers would have five to seven Gold Glovers on the field. Between that and Dodger Stadium being a pitchers' park with very wide foul ground, my pitchers tended to do much better for me than they did historically.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ctorg
That's why I prefer OOTP to DMB or SOM or other games. It gets more into what makes the players perform well rather than just trying to get them to put up similar numbers.
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Sometimes the numbers aren't all that similar. The manager who had Mark McGuire during his heyday never got 60 homers from him, and neither did the manager who had Sammy Sosa. Few people stole as many bases in the game as they did in real life because we tended to make our catchers with the good arms our everyday catchers, and leave the good hitters for injury/late inning/pinch hitter/fatigue relief purposes.
On the flip side of that, the manager who had Barry Bonds was in clover. That guy regularly hit more out in our game than he did in real life, AND he drew more walks. One of the major shortcomings of that game engine was that it counted real life intentional walks the same as any other. Thus, Barry would draw 100+ IPP in real life, and that would make our pitchers have to give him what were in effect intentional passes in stupid situations in our game. Add to that the real intentionals we fed him in important game situations, and he set records that should never be approached.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Charlie Hough
Now, a game like Strat-O-Matic will make sure that Ed Lynch gets injured like he did in real life, at least at some point in the season, and he'll be limited in most sims to about the same usage he enjoyed in real life.
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Not in the versions I played. There WERE three settings (ignore real life usage, enforce real life usage, try to get close to real life usage). Since did a lot of trading, enforcing real life usage might result in having to forfeit the last fourteen games of the season due to an insufficient number of players being available. We opted for trying to get close to real life usuage, but it wasn't always real close.
For the 1997 season, Mike Piazza went down with a 15 day injury on May 1st and never returned because the computer GM was too stupid to bring him off the disabled list. (We simmed a season in fifteen minutes.) Instead it started his backup, who played two games in real life, for over 130 games, and that team missed the playoffs by one game.
On my own club two relievers who totaled 20 innings in real life combined for 200 in the game. Since they both had ERAs below 1.00, I was a happy, happy man, but all of the managers were disgusted enough that we put some safeguards in place to prevent that from happening again.
On a non-SOM note to Charlie, why is the situation at the start of the season so much more important to you than (for example) the situation at the All Star break, the trading deadline, or September 1st?