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Originally Posted by Lukas Berger
What the beta testers are talking about has to do with historical play, not fictional and not really so much to do with outliers in general but with certain specific pitchers who tended to consistently outpitch their FIP related stats in real life not getting that 'extra' boost in OOTP because it's not actually reflected in the stats we use to model them. Mariano Rivera or Catfish Hunter etc.
As far as fictional play, if there are any issues with outliers not happening enough there, this is the first I've heard of it. I'm not aware of any issues there (Doesn't mean there aren't any, of course).
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OK, if this is a separate issue... I can tell you straight off, with Mariano Rivera his BABIP is lower than you expect and I think the reason it's lower is that he's a one pitch pitcher. This has very little to do with this issue of course but *any* pitcher that throws one pitch the vast majority of the time seems to have a lower BABIP than expected IRL. Also, pitchers who throw a lot of Ks, which I think y'all also don't model.
Catfish is a different animal; it looks like he had a lower than normal BABIP throughout his career, like 30 points lower, and he wasn't a 1 pitch guy like Rivera. He *was* basically a 2 pitch guy; according to Neyer and James, it looks like although he's listed with "4" pitches, he basically never threw 2 of them (a change and a curve; he notes that in his perfect game he threw those two pitches combined 4 times) and then on top of that it looks like he mostly used his fastball situationally.
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Originally Posted by A's pitching coach Wes Stock, per Neyer and James
You try to judge Hunter on his fastball and you're missing the point. The man is an artist. He is always ahead of the hitter because he's always got his control. Usually he doesn't show the fastball until he's got the hitter off balance. Then he pops one and it's strike three.
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It's implied that he used the slider the way Charlie Hough used his knuckleball or Mariano Rivera used the cutter, which is to say "all the time unless he needed to get something over the plate". That said, I'm not sure how you can reconcile that with the way you've modeled pitching currently.
The only other non-knuckleballing starter I can think of who just went out and threw one pitch over and over again was Steve Stone in 1980. While Stone's lifetime BABIP numbers are pretty well within statistical noise of average (.275 career in a league that averaged .281 overall), his 1980 season, which was the one where he just threw nothing but a curveball over and over again, his BABIP was a low-ish .265.
But yeah, all of that has little to nothing to do with the issue we're looking at here, which is that the distance between average and great tends not to be far enough with pitchers and kind of only with pitchers. I've stated my theory but I do wonder if, if nothing else, the BABIP bonus from having unhittable stuff getting implemented / having a bigger impact might help with that.