Historical Pitching rotations question

[risp2out]

What size pitching rotation and what setting (strict, start rested occasionally, start highest rested) do you all use? The out-of-the-box settings give some inflated IP #s in different eras. I'm in 1921 and was getting many pitchers in each league with IP #s in the 360-390 range. That's simply too high for 1921.

[Déjà Bru]

According to Baseball Reference, there were some pitchers still pitching 300+ innings in the early 1920's, but not many. This is from their season IP leaders list, sorted by year:

[Déjà Bru]

So I created a test historical league, wiped out history from 1920 on back, and made sure that the Strategic Settings looked appropriate from 1921 through 1930. I guess so; see below.

Then I simmed those 10 years, 1921-1930. See the attached pdf file for my single season IP leaders list. Yeah, comparing it to IRL above, I'd say you have a valid point, risp2out.

[Déjà Bru]

Anyway, to try to answer your question, the things that I can see to alter in Roster and Strategic Settings are setting Allow Starters in Relief to No, lowering Pitcher Stamina from High to Normal, adding one to the Number of Relievers, and bumping up Use of Relievers, Use of Closers, and Pinch Hit for Pitchers from Very Rarely to Rarely. You already have the 5 Man Rotation.

I would do the Pitcher Stamina adjustment first and test that. That alone may do the trick whereas fiddling with the other settings at the same time may get things out of whack historically.

All guesswork on my part, most admittedly.

[Reed]

I use 5 man strict rotation occasionally highest rested.
starter in relief-no
Use of relievers-normal
Closers-rarely
Stamina and everything else set to normal
In test league I used before actually starting my league, I have 7 pitchers that pitched over 300 innings, highest was 360 IP. That's with a 162 game schedule, 16 teams, 1901 to 1965. First few years (1901-1909) I had to make some manual trades to make sure all the teams had 5 starters

[risp2out]

Thanks for your responses, guys. I'm playing right now somewhat close to reed's settings (5-man, strict (occasionally start highest rested)). We'll see how it comes out. The way I play, I'm always anxious to get in and start playing out games, so I'm not very patient with test runs (I need to develop that habit). I could tell, though, even from pre-season predictions, that the out-of-the-box settings were going to give pretty wildly inflated IP #s. I hope the team will look into it for the 1901-1940 era. I got some strange results in OOTP17, too.

[henry296]

You also may want to boost injuries. Default historical is set to low.

[joefromchicago]

You're not going to get realistic numbers for your pitching rotations because teams in the 1920s didn't have pitching rotations. Instead, every pitcher on the club (with a few rare exceptions) was expected to be a starter, and every pitcher had to be ready to pitch whenever the manager called on him. The 1920 Indians, for instance, had nine pitchers who threw over 40 innings, and each of them started at least twice and all of them appeared at least once in relief.

Furthermore, the club probably carried only seven or eight pitchers at any one time, which means that it had, in effect, an eight-man rotation. You can't do that in OOTP. At most, you can have a six-man rotation. So if you want to get close to recreating the conditions of 1920s baseball, you should have the following settings:

• six-man rotation
• start highest rested
• starters allowed in relief
• no closers or other relief specialists

[risp2out]

Originally Posted by joefromchicago

You're not going to get realistic numbers for your pitching rotations because teams in the 1920s didn't have pitching rotations. Instead, every pitcher on the club (with a few rare exceptions) was expected to be a starter, and every pitcher had to be ready to pitch whenever the manager called on him. The 1920 Indians, for instance, had nine pitchers who threw over 40 innings, and each of them started at least twice and all of them appeared at least once in relief.

Furthermore, the club probably carried only seven or eight pitchers at any one time, which means that it had, in effect, an eight-man rotation. You can't do that in OOTP. At most, you can have a six-man rotation. So if you want to get close to recreating the conditions of 1920s baseball, you should have the following settings:

• six-man rotation
• start highest rested
• starters allowed in relief
• no closers or other relief specialists

I get where you're coming from in terms of modeling the attitude that teams had back then. The problem is that, in OOTP, if you start highest rested, your top two starters will come up with 350-375 innings. Maybe that says that starters get rested too fast.

[joefromchicago]

Originally Posted by risp2out

I get where you're coming from in terms of modeling the attitude that teams had back then. The problem is that, in OOTP, if you start highest rested, your top two starters will come up with 350-375 innings. Maybe that says that starters get rested too fast.

Four responses to that:

1. You may want to set pitcher stamina to "normal," although that might have an unwanted impact on the number of complete games;
2. The top two starters on a club in the 1920s typically did pitch a bunch of innings, often over 300;
3. I'm not so sure that the top pitchers would pitch as much as you think they will. If you allow your starters to relieve, then the top starters should also be the "high leverage" relievers out of the bullpen. That would probably affect their ability to start more often (as was true in real life). And if you're using schedules from that era, you should see more double-headers, which will spread out the starts among the lower end of the staff; and
4. As I hinted at earlier, any solution is going to be more-or-less unrealistic because OOTP's pitching model is based on how pitchers are used today, not how they were used 90 years ago. This is always going to be a round-peg-in-a-square-hole situation, so you're bound to be disappointed if you're looking for complete fidelity to the real-life stats. The question isn't "how can I make this accurate?" but rather "how far am I willing to tolerate some inaccurate results?"

[Déjà Bru]

joe, these assessments of yours are impressive and appreciated. They stand to reason but are a bit tough to take in a game that prides itself on historical accuracy. I mean, for goodness sake, I am playing fictional MLB in 1905 and the game is telling me that it's been highly accurate (except for HR/AB & SB/1B some years).

My point is, they put this feature in there to track such stuff. It's obviously a priority.

Hmmm. I bet that six-man rotation is the thing, but the question is, why didn't they make that standard for these years?

[Spritze]

Originally Posted by Déjà Bru

Hmmm. I bet that six-man rotation is the thing, but the question is, why didn't they make that standard for these years?

It used to be five but some people complained that pitchers did not pitch enough innings.

I use this and it seems to work well.......
six-man rotation, two relievers
strict rotation occasionally highest rested
starters allowed in relief
default bullpen usage

[joefromchicago]

Originally Posted by Déjà Bru

Hmmm. I bet that six-man rotation is the thing, but the question is, why didn't they make that standard for these years?

How much time do you have?

I think OOTP does a better job of getting pre-1940s batters right. That's because there hasn't been a big shift in the way batters have been used since about the 1890s, when free substitution was introduced. After all, it's not like shortstops were ever routinely replaced in the late innings of a game by one of the six or seven reserve shortstops on the bench. In contrast, pitchers today simply aren't used the same way they were used even 40 years ago, let alone 100 years ago.

OOTP started out by modelling modern baseball, and "pre-modern" baseball in OOTP is just a series of fixes to that modern model. That works for batters, where the biggest changes are to things that can be modified through strategy settings (like bunting frequency, hit-and-run frequency, etc.). But pitching is more complicated and has led to some rather clunky fixes. For instance, any pitcher who isn't in the rotation is automatically converted into a reliever. That makes sense in the modern era, where there's a pretty clear distinction between starters and relievers, but doesn't make sense in earlier eras when practically every pitcher was expected to start and relieve.

OOTP made a big step forward when it finally allowed starters to relieve, but what it also needs to do, in order to more closely replicate pre-modern baseball, is to allow relievers to start. Better yet, everyone on a pre-modern pitching staff should be included in the pitching rotation, so that, for example, if the staff has eight pitchers, it should have an eight -man rotation.

But I suppose any fix is just one more layer of kludges on top of the existing modern model. If the developers had it to do over again, it's possible they'd scrap the entire pitching system and come up with something more flexible. As it is, though, we have to come up with work-arounds that, we hope, get us closer to replicating historical results while acknowledging that we'll probably never quite get there.

[joefromchicago]

I got to thinking about this thread recently when I ran a replay of the 1922 season playing the St. Louis Browns (won the pennant lost the world series ). In the League Settings, I set the starting rotation size to 6 and number of relievers to 1. I set Starting Rotation Mode to "Start Highest Rested" and allowed starters in relief. My reasons for doing so are outlined in the posts above. Here are the results for the top five Brown starters, listed in their order in the rotation, comparing the sim totals to real life:

Urban Shocker (sim): 50 G, 26 GS, 274 IP
Urban Shocker (RL): 48 G, 38 GS, 348 IP

Elam Vangilder (sim): 38 G, 31 GS, 285 IP
Elam Vangilder (RL): 43 G, 30 GS, 245 IP

Ray Kolp (sim): 35 G, 24 GS, 222.1 IP
Ray Kolp (RL): 32 G, 18 GS, 169.2 IP

Dave Danforth (sim): 30 G, 20 GS, 166 IP
Dave Danforth (RL): 20 G, 10 GS, 79.2 IP

Dixie Davis (sim): 29 G, 28 GS, 227 IP
Dixie Davis (RL): 25 G, 25 GS, 174.1 IP

The fear, then, that this set-up would result in too many pitchers logging 300+ innings wasn't borne out. In fact, while three pitchers totaled over 300 innings in real life (Red Faber - 352; Urban Shocker - 348; Eppa Rixey - 313.1), no player in my replay reached that level (Jesse Haines led the majors with 292.2). Indeed, it could be argued that my set-up led to pitchers - at least the top starters - pitching too few innings.

The main reason, as I noted earlier, is that the game uses the top starter as the top reliever as well. So Shocker, my top starter, came out of the bullpen 24 times during the season. That meant that he missed starts because he was frequently tired, so starts that would have gone to him went instead to starters farther down the list. The biggest beneficiary of that was probably Ray Kolp, the third starter, who got six more starts in the sim than he did in real life (Danforth started the year in the bullpen but moved to the rotation because of injuries and stayed there because he proved to be better than the guy he replaced - in real life he was demoted to the minors mid-season because he was suspected of doctoring the baseball).

That was the case as well with the AI teams. Haines, the top starter for the Cardinals, started 30 games and relieved in 21. In real life, he started 26 games and relieved only 3 times. The second pitcher in the Cards' rotation, Bill Doak, started more games (32) than Haines (30). That pattern repeated itself on a number of teams, where the second or third starter in the rotation logged the most starts on the staff but the top starter logged the most innings pitched because of all of his relief appearances.

As I argued above, the best solution for the pre-reliever era (roughly pre-1940) would be scrap the existing rotation-based pitching system and replace it with something that would recognize that pitchers in this era were expected to start and relieve. Barring that (and I have no realistic hopes of that ever happening), the next-best solution would be to make the starting rotation equal the number of pitchers on a staff, so that a team with a seven-man staff would have a seven-man rotation. That's not possible right now because the rotation size is limited to 6, but it would presumably be easier to change the rotation limit than scrapping the whole pitching system and starting over from scratch.

[Drstrangelove]

I compared the top starters in the NL in both 1921 and in 2017, taking an average of 3 and 5 per team, respectively. (In other words, I chose the top pitchers by games started, counting 24 and 40 in 1921, and 45 and 75 in 2017.) That works out to an average of 3 and 5 per team.

If starter rotation usage was different, it should be reflected in different results.

In 1921, the top 24 pitchers average 31 starts and the next 16 averaged 19 starts. That worked out to 62% and 24% of all starts, or 86% among the top 5 per team. The highest total by any pitcher outside the top 40 pitchers was 10-11 starts, done by 4 people, with 6 more starting 8-9 games: that's a total of 10 pitchers with an average of 9 starts, with an average of 1 pitcher per team,

That is pretty clearly not a 6 man rotation, but a 5 man rotation. And that's what one finds from the literature. People starting 8-11 games, less, were spot starters, used when needed, and in no way considered regular rotation starters.

In 2017, the top 40 pitchers average 29 starts and the next 30 averaged 20 starts. That worked out to 54% and 24% of all starts, or 78% among the top 5 per team. The highest total outside of the top 75 starters was 15: there were 4 with 15, 6 with 14, 5 with 13, and another 15 with 9-12 starts, or a total of 30 (2 per team) averaging 12 starts each.


Imo, that indicates that if there's a 6-man rotation in effect, it's now, and not in 1921.


The problem in replicating 1921 in a game engine that also is designed for 2017 is that the game physics are completely different. In 1921 the parks were huge, teams played more double headers, the schedule had more travel days, and pitchers were expected to save their energy throughout the game so they could hopefully complete it. There are numerous examples of pitchers starting of 1 or 2 days rest.

That is completely different now.

Cooper completed 4 games in a span of 11 days; Faber faced 36 batters (10 innings, May 27) and another 42 (9 innings, May 30), pitched completed games on July 3th and 6th, 14th and 17th, and a total of 330 innings despite missing almost 3 weeks of the season (in a 154-game schedule.)

So stamina would definitely need to work differently in 1921 than it does in 2017 so pitchers could do that, but that would then enable pitchers to throw a lot of innings.

[joefromchicago]

Originally Posted by Drstrangelove

I compared the top starters in the NL in both 1921 and in 2017, taking an average of 3 and 5 per team, respectively. (In other words, I chose the top pitchers by games started, counting 24 and 40 in 1921, and 45 and 75 in 2017.) That works out to an average of 3 and 5 per team.

So let me get this straight: in order to determine if teams had six-man rotations in 1921 and 2017, you're looking at each team's top five pitchers? Why wouldn't you look at the top six?

Originally Posted by Drstrangelove

That is pretty clearly not a 6 man rotation, but a 5 man rotation. And that's what one finds from the literature. People starting 8-11 games, less, were spot starters, used when needed, and in no way considered regular rotation starters.

Well, no, that wasn't a five-man rotation, or even a six-man rotation. That was a non-rotation, since baseball didn't have set pitching rotations until the late '30s at the earliest. Those pitchers who started 8-11 games could have done so for any number of reasons: they might have been primarily relievers or mid-season call-ups or send-downs or guys who sat on the bench because they were on the way up or on the way out or else they missed time due to injuries. Ray Caldwell, for instance, had 12 starts for Cleveland in 1921 because: (1) there were five guys on the staff who were better than him; (2) he was used primarily as a reliever; and (3) he was something of a head case. It's not, however, because he was the sixth man in the Cleveland rotation.

There's no question that, in the 1920s, a team's top starters got the majority of starts and the bottom of the staff picked up starts here and there when needed. The question is how best to simulate that in OOTP. As I mentioned, it's not ideal or even realistic to configure the staffs so that they have six-man rotations. Instead, that's a work-around made necessary because of the game's limitations. It would be better to get rid of rotations altogether for that era, but unfortunately we're stuck with what we have.

Originally Posted by Drstrangelove

So stamina would definitely need to work differently in 1921 than it does in 2017 so pitchers could do that, but that would then enable pitchers to throw a lot of innings.

There's a pitcher stamina setting under Stats & AI/General Strategic Tendencies. In my 1922 replay, I kept it at the historical setting (high, I think). That wasn't a problem at all. As I noted, if anything, my pitchers pitched too few innings.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Interesting, has anything been improved in this regard in OOTP19?

[joefromchicago]

Originally Posted by Dr. Strangelove

Interesting, has anything been improved in this regard in OOTP19?

Not that I'm aware of.

[warneke]

Originally Posted by joefromchicago

Not that I'm aware of.

There are now settings for Hook Starter/Hook Reliever (see my next post). But anyway, Joe, I appreciate all your input on this matter. Frankly when I play pre-40s or pre-50s I just pick a "pitching model" that returns results that are "good enough" for me and jettison reality. But the replay stats from 1922 thay you posted don't seem too bad. I don't mind if pitchers throw less than in real life, because "nowadays" pitchers don't even approach those IP numbers.

For me, I would probably go with a 6 man staff, start highest rested, use starters in relief, but then have 2 or 3 relievers not just one. Maybe even rotate out the bottom 2 or 3 of the starters with the "relievers" half way through the season and not allow AI to change the rosters.

[warneke]

Originally Posted by Dr. Strangelove

Interesting, has anything been improved in this regard in OOTP19?

Actually, now I recall that

Version 19 has added two Settings under General Strategic Tendancies for
Hook for Starting Pitcher and
Hook for Reliever

and has 11 settings for both, ranging from -5 Very Quick to +5 Very Slow. Theoretically I guess, one could play around with these and see what the result is on starters' IP and CG and stuff. At least setting it to +5 for relievers would seem to mean that relievers would pitch much longer in games than they do now, and less relievers would be used per game, which would model older eras.