I'll let others handle the bulk of your questions and just address a couple:
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Originally Posted by TomStone123
1. Repeat question, sorry... I really wish there was a way to have say 3 SP locked into a rotation, with the 4 and 5 slots be a committee from a pool of say 4-5 guys. Some teams have 3 awesome HOF hurlers, but then a mix of guys rounding out the staff, and I'd like to let them all play. Right now, several fine starters see hardly any action because they aren't in the rotation, and the bullpen is large. I don't want to use a six-man rotation except for a couple teams, as i don't want the top of the rotation guys to get fewer starts. I *thought* I could accomplish what I want by indicating 5-man rotation, but then only listing three starters... but that didn't work... it treated those three as a 3-man rotation and I quickly aborted that season, as guys were going to end up with 400+ innings!
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I wish we could have that option too, but right now you can't do what you want to do. In effect, what you want is for OOTP to have the option of allowing relief pitchers to start occasionally. I'd love to see that too, but that's not an option, even though OOTP does allow starters to pitch in relief.
I've written extensively in these forums about pitching in the pre-reliever era, and some of what I've found is relevant to your situation. You can look at my thoughts on how OOTP handles five-man rotations
here. In short, OOTP doesn't spread out starts in a five-man rotation the way that you want, and it can't have a "pool" of three or four back-end starters who pick up starts on an occasional basis unless you manipulate the rotations yourself.
I think you need to evaluate what exactly you want to accomplish in this project. If you want the teams to adopt strategies that will win ballgames, then you'll have to reconcile yourself to the fact that some players won't be able to crack the lineup. If it were me running these sims, I'd take the little-league approach instead: everybody plays. Sure, in a lot of cases you won't have "realistic" results, but it's not a realistic simulation. You want everyone on the roster to get into the game because everyone is a star. It's no fun if you pick Don Mattingly as one of the greatest Yankees of all time and he doesn't get any at-bats.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TomStone123
2. For some reason this time the Closers were used a lot (60-70 games each) -- even those I lowered usage of closers from Very Often to just OFten. The rest of the relievers were not used much, even relative to the bullpen depth I have on these rosters. Which settings are most relevant here? Pitcher stamina? Hook for starters? Hook for relievers? Something else? Maybe I really just have too many middle and long relievers on these rosters, so the IP are being spread thin?
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I think that's just how relievers work, but the effect might be exacerbated by your league settings. In 1973, it was pretty common for a team's top reliever to get a lot of IP, at least relative to today's top relievers. Mike Marshall appeared in 92 games for the Expos that year, and he was one year away from his monster season with LA, when he pitched over 200 innings from the bullpen. The problem here might be that all of your closers are actually "stoppers," which has a specific meaning in OOTP. A "stopper" is a pitcher who is used in high-leverage situations late in the game, unlike a "closer" who is only used in the ninth inning (or, rarely, in the eighth) and only in save situations. Stoppers tend to pile up more IP than closers.