Player retirement setting?

[Hrycaj]

Is there a setting that controls the rate at which players retire in a league? I'm working on a 19th century fictional game and I feel like players actually hang around too long. Right now I created a customized system using a random number generator to manually retire players early. It does exactly what I want but it made me think if there was a possible setting somewhere that I was not aware of. To be clear, I'm not interested in simply ramping up the aging speeds in the player development settings because that could cause some big issues I think. I was more looking into just having guys retire at random points in their career and not necessarily have it based on degraded ability. Hope all this makes sense. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

[Syd Thrift]

Aging would be the closest you can get. You *may* be able to set a hard cutoff on age at, say, 35, but I don't think that's what you're looking for exactly either.

Honestly I hate to say this but, having done a fictional league last season in the 19th century, you're probably best off manually editing in career ending injuries, especially for pitchers. With pitchers, I'd say basically look at the injury, and if it doesn't look like something you can just heal by telling the guy to rub some dirt in it and take a few days off, make it a career-ender. Torn labrums and rotator cuffs are pretty obvious but up until, jeez, Cy Young I guess, you really, really did not see pitchers pitching into their 30s (IIRC Pud Galvin may have? Also Tony Mullane?). Hell, you often didn't see guys pitching past the age of 25. Old Hoss Radbourn was 28 and 29 when he led the league in wins and earned his nickname.

There were hitters who did play longer - Cap Anson in particular hung around the league and was successful long enough to pick up 3000 hits, and King Kelly also lasted a pretty long time considering his somewhat insane lifestyle (his last season in the league IIRC he hired a young man, I believe referred to in the press as "his Mikado" to constantly hover about him with a cigar ready to light in case the one he was smoking ever ran out). You'd probably still want to take their injuries on a case by case basis...

[Hrycaj]

Thanks for the reply. I was pretty sure there wasn’t a setting for such a thing. I see that since you have done this yourself you see where I’m coming from. Since I’m playing in commissioner mode I just right click and manually retire guys based on a formula I created. Like I said, it works fine for what I’m doing. Your point about pitchers still going past 30 is well taken though. I should maybe look at my formula again and maybe weight it a bit heavier for pitchers.

[fredbeene]

Originally Posted by Hrycaj

Thanks for the reply. I was pretty sure there wasn’t a setting for such a thing. I see that since you have done this yourself you see where I’m coming from. Since I’m playing in commissioner mode I just right click and manually retire guys based on a formula I created. Like I said, it works fine for what I’m doing. Your point about pitchers still going past 30 is well taken though. I should maybe look at my formula again and maybe weight it a bit heavier for pitchers.

I am pretty sure you just INCREASE the aging rate.
Set injuries to HIGH

I am trying to do just the opposite...i want players to play longer, which will help me expand faster (and feel less old ; )

[Syd Thrift]

I'm playing a league set in the 40s and I am using the following settings:

Development set to 1.1, aging to 0.9
Talent change randomness to 120
Injuries to high
A few players (probably around 1 a year) are modeled after real-life Hall of Famers who debuted that season
Trades happen based on bbref's transaction log and try to be as much based on what happened in those deals as IRL. Sometimes I have to futz around with them - the spirit of the trade ("acquiring a great hitter in exchange for 2 decent but not great pitchers") is more important than the literal players sent back and forth (as it'd have to be, given that this is a fictional league)

The caveat here is that I like to play in "god mode", meaning I control all of the teams' roster moves/lineups/depth charts/etc. One thing I built this off of was a study I read about NFL QBs a couple years ago that indicated that 50% of the aging decline you see at that position comes in their final season. One way of interpreting that is "when change comes, guys fall off a cliff", but another way is "older players who have bad seasons don't get a chance to repeat themselves", and so I run things where a player who is playing well, especially if it's for a good team won't get replaced in the lineup until they stop playing well. If a guy is raking in the minors I'll try and find *a* place for him but it won't be at the expense of the guy who's still hitting in the bigs (there's even that whole myth of "AAA bat" to explain why teams do this when in fact it's really just going with the person you know instead of the one you don't).

I've done this in a couple of other situations and I think that overall, even though the universe probably doesn't advance as quickly as a lot of people would prefer it does, it seems to all work out. Older players retain enough of their value that if I really want a team to keep playing them to hit a milestone or for popularity-based reasons, they won't do it hitting like .150 or something, and even though high draft picks are often ready to play after just a season or two in the minors, that concept of being "blocked" still keeps a lot of them from moving up until later.

I'm in August of 1948, having started this particular league in 1946, and here's what the top 10 picks of '46 are doing right now:

1. C Nate Cucci (NYY) - Is on the Yankees' AAA team in Newark, where he's hitting 295/405/415, but is blocked by them having two really great players in the bigs (one of whom is a player I modeled after Yogi Berra) and who as such will probably wind up being trade bait.

2. CF Caleb Gagnon (NYG) - Is hitting 272/356/438 in AAA Jersey City, which is... fine, but the incumbent is hitting 278/341/458 with better defense, so a move to a corner OF spot is probably more in the works... except that for the Giants, their LF is their #3 hitter and a lock to hit .315 every year, and their RF is their cleanup guy. Also probably eventual trade bait...

3. SS Cameron Abbott (BRK) - Has split the year between AA Fort Worth and AAA St. Paul (the Dodgers have an additional, higher AAA team in Montreal). He's hitting really well but again, the Dodgers already have a guy there. That guy, Ken Davidson, is not hitting well this season (234/327/369), although he's still a 2-time All Star, so he's going to be tough to dislodge.

4. 2B Ethan Taylor (CLE) - Made the Opening Day roster this season but has mostly been a backup until recently. Larry Sloan (a player I modeled after Larry Doby) was starting at Taylor's position until recently, when ineffectiveness on the part of the Tribe's corner outfielders (both of whom were acquired in pretty big offseason trades) came to a head and I moved Sloan to LF. He has 95 big league at-bats.

5. CF Chris Ballinger (BOA) - Traded to the Browns over the offseason as part of a package that netted them 3 time All-Star C John Prive. Ballinger shot up 3 levels this season, starting with San Antonio (AA) then moving to Toledo (AAA), and finally getting a shot in the majors, although that's probably as much due to the Browns' lack of success as anything else. Balinger is hitting .240 in 50 major league at-bats.

6. 3B Jason McGannon (STL) - Displaced last year's starter Chad Cannon, who hit .320 and made the All-Star Game last year but was absolutely atrocious with the glove (-10 ZR last year). Perhaps I moved him up too quickly but damn, Cannon was bad, and on top of that he stopped hitting this year as well. So far, McGannon has been... meh in 60 starts, hitting .254 without much power but at least not being a black hole in the infield. The Cards are on top of the NL right now but are there in spite of a bad pitching staff that needs all the defensive help it can get.

7. 3B Rich Duran (NYY) - Was handed the 3rd base job in 1947 and hasn't looked back. He's easily been the star of that draft so far, although he's yet to make a trip to the All-Star Game.

8. 3B Kareem Bailey (BSN) - Looks like he was a casualty of the Braves and Tigers swapping minor league clubs in '47, although he has fallen down the top prospect list since he was originally graded the 12th best prospect in the league (the last one he appeared on in April of this year, he was 97th). A fantastic campaign in Hartford (A) led him to be called up to Little Rock (AA) this year, where he's been... fine. The Tigers' incumbent 3B Zach Ebeling has been a beast this season (.324, 17 HR, 54 RBI) and so he's looking slightly blocked at the moment, assuming he gets out of AA.

9. 2B Jeff Klotz (DET) - A solid campaign in Little Rock (AA) saw him recently called up to AAA Seattle, where he's hit .322 in 13 games. The Tigers' leadoff hitter Jim Koressel is also their 2nd baseman, although I wouldn't say he has a lock on the position (.251, 77 runs, and 9 SBs with virtually no power this year).

10. SS Alexis Reyes (PHN) - The fact that he's been in Utica (A) for three seasons running is more of a function of the Phillies' tiny minor league system than any indictment on him. He really only plays SS, which makes him sort of blocked at that position by Franklin Melo, but not really: Melo (.260, 5, 52) is JAG at the position, really.

[Hrycaj]

Originally Posted by fredbeene

I am pretty sure you just INCREASE the aging rate.
Set injuries to HIGH

I am trying to do just the opposite...i want players to play longer, which will help me expand faster (and feel less old ; )

Yea. That may be what I ultimately need to experiment with more. Right now the league just completed the 1887 season. The league started in 1875 with injuries set to high (realistic modern day) using the following player development settings:

[IMG][/IMG]

I started a real game in ootp set for 1888 so I could do a statistical comp. Here is what I have for wins: (real life stats on the left)

[IMG][/IMG]

Here is what I have for innings pitched:

[IMG][/IMG]

So statistically I have it pretty darn close. (credit to ootp here) Here is where I have the biggest difference. When I look at career appearances the real life range is 568 all the way down to 40 at the bottom of the leaderboard. According to the game 304 pitchers active and retired had played to this point. In my fictional league my career appearances range from 590 on the high end and 97 on the low end, with 217 pitchers having ever played. So while the stats are pretty close on the leaderboards the guys in my fictional league are sticking around for longer on the whole. Or what could be happening is that more overall games are being played in the same time frame. I haven't done that comp yet. This is why I decided to add in my own personal retirement formula to offset some of this stuff which prompted my original question. Thanks for the reply because it has my mind going.