Quote:
Originally Posted by joefromchicago
By modern standards, Washington definitely used pinch-hitters sparingly. Part of the reason for this, however, may simply be due to the fact that the club didn't have a very deep bench. One of the advantages to using historical transactions is that it gives a pretty accurate picture of how many players were on a team's roster on any given day. My league settings gave each team a 20-man roster, but Washington rarely suited up 20 players for a game. Usually it was 18 or 19, and sometimes it dipped below 17. That not only restricted the availability of pinch-hitters, but I suspect that the AI kept starters in the game because it didn't think that there were a lot of pitchers available to relieve either.
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I want to return to this point because I don't think I explained it very well. For 1912, the standard OOTP setting for "pinch hit for pitchers" is "very rarely." In my replay, though, I think that the pinch-hitter setting, combined with the team's shallow bench, resulted in an
effective setting of "almost never." I don't know if this is indeed what was happening - the interaction between the pinch-hitter setting and the roster sizes was not on my radar when I went into this replay - but it seems logical. If the pitcher's spot in the lineup is coming up and there's only one guy on the bench available to pinch hit, I would imagine that the AI takes that into consideration when determining whether to pinch hit for the pitcher or not. Bumping up the league setting to "rarely" or even "normal" might be effective in counterbalancing this situation. I don't know, but that's something I will definitely look at in the future.
Another way to approach this problem would be through manager strategies. Again, that was not something that I was focused on for this replay, but I discussed it at some length in connection with my
1922 Tigers replay. Since that replay OOTP has done nothing that I'm aware of with regard to manager strategies, even though OOTP, in the recent past, radically revised strategy setting options, going from 36 game-situation sliders to 16. It seems to me that this is an area of the game that needs far more attention than it is receiving, as it could be a key component in making OOTP teams from the pre-reliever era actually behave like teams in that era did.