[grmagne]

Originally Posted by Matt Arnold

Thanks! That's a lot to take in. We certainly try to get it as accurate as possible, but I'm sure it would take a ton of studying to figure out, for example, why there's relatively speaking more LH bats at older ages than RH bats. Is it based on the type of player? Platoon advantages? Manager preferences? Or are they actually developing/aging differently?

Certainly interesting case studies.

Thanks for the response. Don’t worry, I am consistently impressed at how closely OOTP matches MLB and I think the developers have all done an amazing job – and the game gets better every year! I wouldn’t have bothered doing all this analysis except for the fact that right-handed platoon hitters sit on the bench too much during a season and it would be nice (and more realistic) if there were more left-handed pitchers in the league. There isn’t a user option to increase the number of left-handed pitchers so instead I did a full analysis to share my observations with the developers in the hopes that someone can address it.


Honestly, it seems to me that there is an extremely simple fix for this, and I can’t imagine any side effects to other parts of the game from increasing the number of draft-eligible LHP….except that right-hand platoon hitters would get to play more.


Here are my suggestions and I really hope the solution is as simple as it looks:

1. It seems right now that newly generated fictional pitchers are about 29% left-handed and 71% right-handed. If you bumped that up to 35%/65% I think that would immediately solve the problem of too few left-handers in the majors. There'd be a few too many in Rookie ball, but I can't imagine anyone other than me would ever noticed 2%-3% too many LHP in the Rookie leagues.
2. If you're willing to do #1, I'd like to make a 2nd request: can you bump up the number of switch-hitters? Right now it looks like about 10% of newly generated fictional hitters are switch-hitters. Somewhere in the 12%-14% range would be more consistent with modern-day MLB (taking away a corresponding number from LHH & RHH in equal number would make sense).