Quote:
Originally Posted by ALB123
112 pitches 5 days ago and he's not 100% rested? That was the first time I noticed it, but I have since seen it twice more like that. And based on prior experience, I don't believe Mariano will be back to 100% until 3 more days.
Am I making too big of a deal about this? Again, maybe I just don't understand that a 77% Mariano Rivera (or any other decent reliever) is still pretty awesome? If pitcher fatigue is a perfectly linear drop in performance from 100% to 0% then a 77% Mariano can't be nearly as good as a 100% Mariano.
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Garlon's point about the league stamina setting is, I think, correct. As I mentioned earlier in this thread, there are two stamina ratings and together they measure two different things. There's the league stamina setting (found in the league's Stats & AI page) and each pitcher's individual stamina rating. Those, in turn, determine both in-game stamina (how many pitches a pitcher can throw before getting tired) and between-game stamina (how long a pitcher takes before recovering fatigue).
I'm not entirely sure how the stamina ratings work together, but I think the league setting establishes the "scale" and the individual pitcher ratings are a percentage of that scale. So, to use some made-up numbers, if the league setting is "high," and that setting establishes a scale of 1-100, then a pitcher with a 75/100 stamina rating would have a 75 "adjusted" stamina. If, on the other hand, the scale was 1-50, that pitcher would have a 37.5 "adjusted" stamina.
In your example, I don't know what the league stamina setting is, but my guess is that it's either "low" or "very low." In the replays that I've done in conjunction with my exploration of pitcher usage in the pre-reliever era, league settings have been set at "high." At a high setting, a pitcher like Martinez with a 65/80 stamina who threw 112 pitches in a game would probably be back to 100% within four days.
With regard to relievers, I don't know how quickly they recover or what their effectiveness would be if they pitch when they're less than 100% rested. Not surprisingly, relievers haven't been my focus when I've been looking at the pre-reliever era. I can say, however, that, in my experience, the AI is very reluctant to pitch anybody who is less than 100% rested - that's true for both starters and relievers.
At times, that leads to some very strange results. For instance, in my replays I try to keep rosters at more-or-less historical levels. That means that sometimes there may be only one or two pitchers in the bullpen. If those guys aren't 100% rested, the AI will simply stay with the starter, even though it might be better to pinch-hit for him. The AI sees the bullpen pitchers as unavailable because they're not fully rested, and it sees the other starters in the rotation as unavailable because they're either fatigued or else because the AI just doesn't like using starters in relief. As a result, the starter will stay in the game and throw an ungodly number of pitches. In my 1912 Senators replay, for instance, it wasn't unusual for Walter Johnson to throw over 200 pitches in a game.
That's not to say that starters in that era didn't throw a lot of pitches - they did. But the AI logic is premised on a strict split between starters and relievers, and it's very difficult for a pitcher to straddle the line between the two roles. Pitchers, however, did that all the time in the pre-reliever era. In that sense, the real-life managers had more options available to them than the AI allows them. If a starter like Walter Johnson got tired, his manager, Clark Griffith, would view every pitcher on the bench as a possible reliever. In OOTP, on the other hand, the AI looks first at the pitchers who aren't in the rotation. If they're unavailable, then the AI far too often is stumped. It won't use a top-end starter who is even minimally fatigued and it won't use a bottom-end starter because they're usually not very good. Griffith, in contrast, would have taken the game situation into context and said: "if it's close, I'll use my best pitcher, unless he's completely exhausted. If it's not close, any of those knuckleheads at the end of the bench will do." Having the AI assign secondary roles to pitchers might, I think, be one important way to address this problem.