I do not know exactly how long I have been playing OOTP Baseball, but I know it has been at least 10 years. And in all that time, the one thing I wanted to accomplish was to find and groom a player who could both pitch and hit. In all those hundreds of in-game seasons in various leagues, I never did quite manage it... although I came close once or twice. This was made all the harder by the fact that I play mostly as the general manager/manager and only play out two or three games a month.
But I tried. I had platoon-level position player once who was a pretty solid starter up to AAA... there was no way he would ever be good enough to be a starting pitcher for me, but I threw him into a blowout in relief once or twice a year. The stats usually weren't good, perhaps because there seemed to be a penalty to his velocity as a position player and after 5 seasons on my team and a combined 5.00 ERA is about 10 innings, I traded him away knowing he would never pitch again. On the other side, I had pretty decent relief pitcher who had ratings that might have led to .260 with some power, but the game would never use him as a pinch hitter or position player and the few at bats I gave him manually did not quite set the league afire.
But then a few years ago I was looking to make a trade to get rid of a couple of useful players who did not have a big role on my team anymore and I was looking through the top prospects list and that is when I first "met" Brad Sharpe. He was a teenager then, barely a year out of the draft and a five star potential right fielder. He had just been named the #11 prospect in the league and I had basically already slid him into the "not interested, will cost too much" pile when I happened to glance at his ratings page and noticed he was a pitcher, too.
This was the first player I had ever come across (though there may have been some that I had just never seen if they were in other organizations) that had ratings that could legitimately make him a major league starter on offense or defense. The opportunity was too good to pass up so I just had to trade for him. And it cost me a pretty penny... one true major league starting 1B, two starting caliber offensive prospects, one starting caliber pitching prospect, and a bench player, plus a 2nd round draft pick. But he was mine and I started grooming him through the minor leagues.
That was where I began to run into trouble because my method playing did not seem to match well with having a two way player. I would make him a starting pitcher and put him in the pitching rotation and then also put him in the starting lineup on whatever minor league team he was on and he would do exactly as directed, pitching every five days and playing offense two or three of the days in between... only problem was that his performance was never any good. He never did put up an ERA under 4.81 (most were quite a bit higher) at any level, even though I always made sure to place him at the minor league level that best matched his current pitching prowess, based on ratings. His offense was even worse, as he was general among the worst minor league hitters at whatever level he was at, even when his offense ratings suggested he was playing a level or two below where he should have been. Maybe some of this was fatigue, but it was painful to watch.
His development was curious, too. He developed pretty consistently on both sides, though he never really developed in Stuff... his cutter just would not get any better. Actually, his cutter was a really low-rated pitch when I first traded for him too, so it may not have anything to do with the two way player stuff... he was just not meant to be a big strikeout pitcher, I guess.
Luckily, I am stubborn. So I just kept putting him out there, watching his ratings until I thought he was ready to play in the majors. And I did a little reading here on the board to see if I could find any suggestions. Once suggestion I found was to force him out of the lineup the day before and the day after he pitched, although I never could find an easy way to do this simulating weeks at a time the way I do.
Finally I (or rather he) was ready to give it a shot and I decided on a technique that has a few drawbacks but seems workable. Rather than starting him as a regular part of the rotation, I found five other starters and put him as the last starter in a six man rotation. With the "always start highest rested starter" option selected, he essentially never gets started by the AI. But I also turned on the seven day lineups and put him as the starter on Tuesday, so every Tuesday he starts and every Monday and Wednesday (which includes almost all of the off-days in my schedule) he rests because there is another right fielder set in the lineup. He rests most Thursdays as well because I have him in the lineup, but the game seems to consider him too tired to play. And then Friday-Sunday he is the starter in right field.
Over the course of the season, this amounts to playing time at roughly the level of a platoon outfielder and a fifth starter, with about 400 plate appearances and 24-25 pitching starts. The rest of the time, sadly, he just takes up space. He's the best base runner on my team and a plus defensive outfielder, but in two-plus years he has been substituted into a game by the AI a grand total of one time, when the starting center fielder got hurt in the bottom of the eighth and then the only remaining center fielder gut hurt in the top of the ninth. When it comes to normal AI substitution, it seems to never even consider him as a pinch hitter or pinch runner or defensive replacement. Possibly this is because the game thinks he is tired, but more likely the AI just doesn't look deeply enough to "see" him as a starting pitcher with good offensive ratings. I tried to play out his full first year without him in the starting lineups (since the 7-day lineups overrode these anyway) so that I could list him as the top pinch hitter and pinch runner and defensive replacement, but the AI ignored him anyway, so I gave up and made him the de facto starter in the second season just in case it has some weird effect on his morale.
But nonetheless, playing this way with him for a couple of years now has been fun and he has turned out to be even better than I hoped he might. At 25, he has maxed out almost all of his ratings (except stuff, though his cutter has finally developed most of its potential) and turned into one of the best players in the league:
The only minor complaint I have is when awards times comes, the game seems to fail to notice him the same way the AI does during games. His combination of stats just doesn't seem to match up well with any of the awards. After his rookie year, I manually made him the rookie of the year, which was a bit of a cheat as the game did not even have him in the top three. But he was the second best rookie pitcher (in my estimation) and the third best rookie hitter (again, according to me) and so I broke my non-interference rule and made him ROY. In both of his full seasons, his offensive WAR plus his pitching WAR would make him far and away the highest WAR player in the league. I don't know the calculation of either of those statistics well enough to know if adding them together quite makes sense, but I figure it gives some sort of ballpark (no pun intended) acknowledgement of what he adds to the team. But since I only give out batter of the year and pitcher of the year awards and not an overall MVP, he has not won either.
Oh, one final and slightly annoying note: That lovely 7-day lineup plan of mine completely falls apart when it comes to the playoffs, because the forced off days would have him missing too much of each series. So short of playing out each game manually, I have instead switched him to a full-time position player in the postseason.
Well, mostly I just wanted to share my story. But of course if anybody has any advice or questions or just interesting history, I would enjoy hearing it all.