Quote:
Originally Posted by MathBandit
(and also if they did somehow manage to create the Ultimate Baseball Manager, 95% of the fanbase would complain that it is both very unrealistic- since it won't look anything like most MLB lineups/rotations/etc- and very unfair- since it will significantly outperform user lineups who think doing what MLB teams is doing (great hitter batting 3rd, 5 starters all expected to throw 5+ innings, etc).
|
Yeah this is also true and I really should emphasize a particular point here that makes AI differ greatly from human managers: all real-life managers, even the innovative ones, play to not get fired, not to experiment and run the most optimal setups. We've seen a lot more use of openers and some reworking of lineups in recent years because the data back up the change but also because teams have been successful with them. This is really important, I think: in the late 80s we had this big change of opinion on the role of bullpens, not because that was "optimal baseball" but because the A's had 3 short relievers who carried them in the regular season and the playoffs. That's one of many examples.
If, on the other hand, a human manager decided to run a 3-man rotation and give all of their starters 80 pitches, if they fail to win - even if the failing to win has nothing to do with this strategy - that manager would get fired and would find it very hard to find a new job. Even if they won but one of their pitchers got hurt, there's a good chance they'd get fired for it (unless they won a lot) because all anyone would talk about is how their weird strategy is "ruining the game" or what have you. It's only natural that human managers play conservative: taking big risks means you have to find work outside of baseball.
Baseball wisdom is built on like 150 years of assumptions and results. Very often, stuff that we think is new thinking is in fact just repurposes old thinking - one big example for me is the idea behind FIP, where it was an accepted thing for decades that the job of a pitcher is to let their fielders make plays and not get themselves into trouble, but I don't know, a couple generations of guys growing up on Strat-o-Matic or something made some statty types think that pitchers have an ability to affect hits on balls in play. Baseball Prospectus came out with a book around a decade or so ago that talked about how a lot of stat guys were coming around to accepting that conventional wisdom had a lot of good data behind it in many cases. But bucking that wisdom, in baseball or in any other sport, comes with a cost.