[Syd Thrift]

So FWIW that guy (Michael Pesco - it's a fictional league) is still a good, solid player although maybe not the same pitcher he was after missing most of last season. He's 14-11 this year with a 3.53 ERA that's only a little above average with 164 Ks in 209 IPs, which is well above average for 1971 but not really leading-the-league levels anymore. I think the ERA is mostly him being hit-unlucky this year, which, he has an excellent defense behind him so I think it *is* mostly luck.

The new strikeout king, and I bring this up mainly because I kind of just noticed this, is a 25 year old kid with your standard fireballer repertoire: he'd hit 101 on the gun if this was 2023 (I subtract 4 mph when I share velo because radar gun technology wasn't as solid back then and IIRC they measured velo at the moment the ball crossed the plate instead of at the moment of the pitch like they do now). Also, I play with ratings off but the scouting report says his repertoire features "an outstanding changeup-, and outstanding fastball, an outstanding forkball, and outstanding splitter, and an outstanding slider". That's... a lot of outstanding pitches and not a curve in sight.

He's got 173 Ks in 166.1 IP, which is an insane total for 1971, when the league-wide K rate was 5.4 per 9 innings. Only one man in real-life baseball had more strikeouts than IPs that year (at least among qualifiers): Tom Seaver, who had 9.1. Ortiz is on pace to finish with 9.4. He does have the dual issues of relatively average stamina (I'll probably manually raise that as he enters his late 20s, assuming he doesn't get hurt) and awful control (he led the league in walks last year with 140 in 221 IP and is on pace to walk 167 guys this year, albeit at about the same rate he did last season). So... this kid is basically Nolan Ryan.

One of these days I'm going to use my DB skillz to make similarity scores between my fictional leagues and real-life...