[jlech1805]

I love to play in commish mode and browse all the ratings.

One thing that stood out to me was relievers stuff ratings relative to starters. The game seemed way to juiced on stuff ratings for relievers.

I created a percentile rank for all pitchers with at least some time on a 40 man roster based off of stuff and split them into relievers vs starters. I found that 76% of starters were ranked in the bottom 40th percentile.

This had me a bit concerned. Brad Brach shouldn't have better stuff that Syndergaard. This made me wonder if an ideal strategy to win in OOTP would be to use all openers. I know more goes into the results of pitching that stuff so I did a test.

1) Locked all roster changes
2) Set injuries to null
3) Found the starting pitchers for all 30 teams
4) Replaced all relievers with duplicated versions of starters
5) Compared results as starter vs results as reliever for every pitcher and looked at the rate changes based on usage

I posted the results, but found that overall runs per inning was reduced 13% when throwing as a reliever. K's bumped 25%, Walks increased 14%, Balls in play reduced 10%.

The results weren't equal for every pitcher and I am sure I could find correlation between what traits would see larger bumps in performance as a reliever. I could also dive into the split differences for R vs R and L vs L.

Interested if anyone else has done a study like this