How do you limit Injuries

[daves]

When setting your league with normal injury settings, what steps do you make to limit injuries? Do you make sure position depth players rotate into the lineup? Is multi position bench players imperative to avoid injury and keep players rested?

[jimmysthebestcop]

Sacrifice buckets of fried chicken to Jabu and the OOTP gods. I think its mostly random. I try to have enough AAA players to fill in if it happens to be an injury plagued season.

I rest players immediately. For pitchers I usually go with 13 arms and limited bench to 12 bats. Which means 2 utility fielders and a backup catcher.

Experimenting going with mostly average to above stamina bullpen.

[Orcin]

Trainer with outstanding or better prevention helps.

[Critical Mass]

I avoid anybody whose Injury Proneness is FRAGILE or WRECKED.

[gamefan1978]

I play in challenge mode so I guess you can't really limit them. They happen.

[Juggernt]

Originally Posted by Critical Mass

I avoid anybody whose Injury Proneness is FRAGILE or WRECKED.

Yeah, I'll trade away very good players who are in either of these categories. Even with injuries on low, they're going to go down for a while, and it's a spiral to uselessness.

[texasmame]

Can't recall what I have my injuries set on - LOW, I believe of the top of my head. I do have a couple of house rules to help with injury durations:

1. The duration of spring training injuries are halved.
2. If a player suffers an injury and are 100 or over on any of the "proneness" scales, I halve the injury time and set all injury proneness ratings to 99 if they were injured a lot IRL (think Rocco Baldelli, for example) or to half of the initial proneness if they were of at least average durability IRL.
3. Any "career ending" injuries are change to 365 day duration so they still really sting unless the player suffered a career-ender IRL (think Dave Dravecky).

[Timofmars]

I don't play any position player that is fatigued. I always want them 100% rested.

I very rarely play anyone with a day to day injury, unless the injury is not related to what they do (so running doesn't affect pitcher, throwing doesn't affect DH). Though it might be better to let them rest even in that case, since I'm not sure if day to day injuries might increase further injury risk even when they don't use that part of the body.

I have a very quick pull on relievers. They seem to never pitch while even slightly tired, which is good.

I use pitch counts on starting pitchers. The game uses some form of the Pitcher Abuse Point system, but I'm not sure if it goes by a set pitch count number (over 100 pitches starts adding "abuse) or if it depends on the pitcher's stamina (so maybe just any pitches while tired add abuse). I choose a cautious pitch count in part because I also like the pitcher to go fewer times through the lineup, and if I have a good pitcher with high stamina, I can start him every 4 days.

[Elendil]

Prophylactic rest seems to help a bit for centerfielders, which I find to be a quite injury-prone position. I always make sure to have two defensively adequate centerfielders on the roster and start the depth guy at least 20% of the time.

[jokerhusky1129]

Install grass

[Westheim]

Injury proneness matters, but it's not like no "wrecked" guy has ever played 160 games in a season.

Regarding rest, my rule of thumb is that if the team goes 10 or more days without an off day, every everyday starter should get cycled out for a day off once. I feel like this keeps them a bit healthier, but I have no numbers to back this up.

[Critical Mass]

Originally Posted by Westheim

Injury proneness matters, but it's not like no "wrecked" guy has ever played 160 games in a season.

Of course, just like there's no guarantee a Durable guy won't get injured. However, the track record shows that one has completed more 160 game sees easons than the other.

If the guy is a $ 2M bench player, I may not care. If he wants to be my star pitcher and wants $30M a year, I look at injury history. If he misses 3 months, you're basically paying him twice as much per game.

[Cobby]

I once forgot to hire a new trainer after my previous trainer had retired. During the next season, with most of my team on the DL, I went storming into my trainer's office ready to chew the guy out for being such an incompetent buffoon. That's when I discovered that the trainer's office was empty. Oops.

So yeah. Definitely hire a trainer.

[BirdWatcher]

Originally Posted by Westheim

Injury proneness matters, but it's not like no "wrecked" guy has ever played 160 games in a season.

Regarding rest, my rule of thumb is that if the team goes 10 or more days without an off day, every everyday starter should get cycled out for a day off once. I feel like this keeps them a bit healthier, but I have no numbers to back this up.

Not exactly a direct response to the post above, but it did get me thinking about something. As a relative OOTP newbie still, I am wondering if there are any perceived differences between a fragile pitcher and a fragile position player. What I mean is, in my admittedly too small sample size of experience thus far, I have noticed that when I have fragile pitchers it is very rare for them to make it through the majority of a season without at least several relatively minor injuries and/or at least one major injury. On the other hand, I have seen a few fragile position players go several season at least with only a few stretches of games lost to relatively minor injuries.
I assume I am probably just perceiving the quirks of small sample size, but then again, given that pitchers are (I believe) more likely to suffer serious (and often career-altering or career-ending) injuries than position players IRL, I am wondering if a fragile position player is maybe a slightly better risk than a fragile pitcher?

[Critical Mass]

.

[MizzouRah]

Originally Posted by Orcin

Trainer with outstanding or better prevention helps.

THIS.. and what Critical Mass said.


I have a legendary trainer and never ever go for a fragile or wrecked player.

[Snake Eyes]

Do you find that it is more important to have a trainer with more emphasis on recovery or prevention, if you can't find one that is legendary all across the board?

[MizzouRah]

Probably prevention, I believe recovery is good for coming back early from an injury.

[NoOne]

prevention with durable players. settings may hide their injury ratings. you'd have to scan their history and accept that you;ll miss a guy or two due to small sample and rash of injuries.

know what elevates risk. playing tired elevates risk. maybe that is necessary to make playoffs?

figure out exactly the # of games it knocks them down from 100% per position. depending on how it works either need to rest them 1 day earlier or as they 'turn' 97% or whatever threshold you want them to drop to. this is mostly for catcher, but a couple other positions may drop low enough during a 20+ game stretch to warrant some rest. if 100% they are ... 100% nonetheless, a preemptive resting is often times beneficial in a very long stretch of games early on in that stretch.

e.g. with a starting catcher you may squeeze out one more game with well-timed days off, or at least if you multiplied each game * fatigue% it would be a higher cumulative value..

[Dyzalot]

Originally Posted by Timofmars

I don't play any position player that is fatigued. I always want them 100% rested.

I very rarely play anyone with a day to day injury, unless the injury is not related to what they do (so running doesn't affect pitcher, throwing doesn't affect DH). Though it might be better to let them rest even in that case, since I'm not sure if day to day injuries might increase further injury risk even when they don't use that part of the body.

I have a very quick pull on relievers. They seem to never pitch while even slightly tired, which is good.

I use pitch counts on starting pitchers. The game uses some form of the Pitcher Abuse Point system, but I'm not sure if it goes by a set pitch count number (over 100 pitches starts adding "abuse) or if it depends on the pitcher's stamina (so maybe just any pitches while tired add abuse). I choose a cautious pitch count in part because I also like the pitcher to go fewer times through the lineup, and if I have a good pitcher with high stamina, I can start him every 4 days.

I don't do any of this and I play with injuries on "high". No pitch counts. I play guys with DTD injuries all the time depending on injury proneness, type of injury (what part of his game is affected) and how important they might be to a pennant drive. I set up my reserves to replace the starter every few days depending on injury proneness of the regular. For "wrecked" I sub in every 4-5 days. For "fragile" I sub in every 7 days. For "normal" I sub in every 15 days. For "durable" I sub in every 20 days and for "Iron Man" I leave the sub set to play only when the starter is tired.

I tend to sim a week at a time so I don't control the daily lineups much outside of how I have them configured on the lineup screens.