Quote:
Originally Posted by fintach
Ah, distracted posting. It can lead to the worst phrasing. Sorry about that.
Believe me. I hear you guys about not wanting hard and fast rules, or to know every detail of how the mechanics of it work behind the scenes. That's not actually my goal here, and I should've been clear about that from the outset.
It's just that, in all the time I've played this game, I've never really used spring training the way actual Major League teams do. And I wanted to give it a shot. Let a few of my top AAA pitchers start a few games instead of maybe seeing a few relief innings here and there. Have a real competition for my starting left fielder. That kind of thing.
But doing these things means risking opening-day readiness. In real life, I'd have meetings with my coaching staff for their opinions about who needs more work and so on.
But I can't do that. So I thought I'd check here, where I know there are players who make me look like a rookie. Figured maybe someone could give me ballpark numbers from their own experience, or maybe a sense of how much difference -- if any -- age or work ethic make.
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I guess my take is that it makes a big difference how you play the game. What I mean is, someone like me, who takes things very slowly, moving day by day through the calendar year of my league, even in the off-season, can treat the pre-season exhibition games at least somewhat like they are treated in real life. Meaning that at the beginning of the schedule I make sure that guys who are very unlikely to make the big league roster on Opening Day get plenty of playing time while my veteran big league starting players still get innings but not as many as they will later in the Spring.
I'll admit that I don't have hard and fast rules. About, well, pretty much anything in life. I'm definitely a more right-brained dominant person so with OOTP, like most things, I go by intuition mostly. But I do have fairly regular spots along the way during the exhibition schedule where I adjust my lineups and start to demote guys who are definitely going to be minor leaguers come OD. Usually I have maybe one or two guys who are destined to start the season in AA but are quite good prospects who I will "invite" to the big league camp for a time and these guys are usually the ones to get a demotion soonest, unless one of them is just tearing things up (which has been known to happen for me.) So with the 30 game preseason schedule, I make my first cuts usually after about the first 10 games, then some more at the half-way point, again at game 20, and then gradually from there I whittle things down to the point where I am at about 26-27 players by the last few games in the exhibition season.
That way, as I am whittling down I also adjust my lineups and frequency that a backup will start to get my sure big leaguers more and more playing time as we approach OD.
Same thing with starting rotation but with fewer tweaks needed. I mostly just set my 6 guys and let it go by strict rotation but down the stretch run of the pre-season schedule I'll narrow that down to 5. With the bullpen it is just a matter of monitoring how many innings the guys are getting and making sure I don't have so many guys in the 'pen the second half of the pre-season that my main guys don't get their innings.
But, although I do play out every regular or post-season game for my team, I should note that I rarely ever play out pre-season games these days. I find that if I have set things up with care and make adjustments along the way the AI does a pretty good job of evening things out.
And, like in real life, sometimes a guy has a tremendous exhibition season and seems to be in mid-season form only to get off to a horrible start once the regular season swings into action and vice versa. I do, again, go day by day and look over the box scores of every pre-season game my team plays, monitoring performance and playing-time trends.
I have certainly had seasons where I felt in hindsight that I had let young players take too much of the playing time (particularly while trying to teach them new or mostly unfamiliar positions) and the big league club got off to a slow start. But maybe it had nothing to do with pre-season at all. Who knows?
This season, having done pretty much exactly what I described to you above, my team has been red-hot to start the season and now lead the league on May 10th with a 23-8 record. So, is it proof that I managed the pre-season right? Again, who knows. But I'll take it, whatever the cause.
