What I don't like about OOTP22

[Drbugboffin]

1) by far -- CONSISTENCY of player performance. How can a player hit .300 one year and .200 the next? Is this realistic? It seems the same with pitchers. Am I a victim of low sample size (I play a 46-game season)? Whatever it is, it makes building a team almost impossible, leaving it all to luck. A bit less frustrating is when a player's performance in Spring bears no resemblance to his season play. Can a GM count on anything, besides inconsistent performance?
2) PITCHER STAMINA ratings seem almost meaningless. Why do A.I. pitchers often pitch well into the red, whereas my pitchers get knocked out well before that. I hesitate to start a "Starting Pitcher" with Stamina in the 50s, though the A.I. does it regularly. Why do I have a reliever with Stamina = 100, who can barely last 2 innings?
3) GRAPHICS are messy. Yes, apparently OOTP23 seriously upgraded the game's graphics. As this is therefore a moot point, I don't have to detail all of OOTP22's graphics abnormalities.
4) WORTHLESS TEENS! Sorry but I still don't get why anyone would draft a teenage player. Their ratings are generally horrible with overall potential similar -- and I'm supposed to roll the dice on them improving vastly in the minors? Instead I can choose from a cornucopia of 26-year-olds with decent ratings that are ready to play very soon if not today. Just don't get it.
5) PITCHING COLD. What's with the apparent algorithmic bias making pitchers less effective in the first inning? Often my team goes down 2-4 runs in the first inning, I think because the game is leaning on them. I suppose it thinks they're cold at the very beginning of the game, but really? I've chosen the "no warmup" option, so maybe the game's penalizing me for that convenience.

[Syd Thrift]

Over a full length season, the standard deviation for average is IIRC 25-30 points. That means that even over an entire season, if you have a lineup full of 9 players who "should" hit .260, only 6 of them will have averages between .235 and .285. The other 3 will be lower or higher than that, and every other team, thereabouts, will have a guy (again, assuming all players are centered around .260) hitting above .320 or below .210. Variance among players is one of the first thing Tom Tango looked at in The Book, published 15 years ago now, and he could find little to no evidence that players are *more* consistent than normal distribution implies and if anything just a little bit *less* consistent / more streaky (IIRC a player coming off of a 5 game hot streak has, everything else being equal, a 4 point higher average than he'd otherwise have, whereas a player on a cold streak has their average lowered around 6 points. It's a tiny, tiny amount but it was statistically significant).

That's an entire 162 game season and roughly 550 at-bats. If you run a third of that, I don't remember what exactly the standard deviation is, but IIRC it's up around 60-70 points, which means that yes, absolutely, just using normal distribution you'll see guys who "should" hit .260 hit between .200 and .320 in what amounts to a month and a half. You see this all the time in actual baseball as well: guys who are meh hitters having a great month and then returning to normal, and stars hitting .140 for a month before getting better like nothing happened.

As for coldness, while there is rust in the game this isn't going to apply to starters in a regular rotation. I do see pitchers being kind of "cold" early on but a. I suspect it has to do with the way lineups are built, which gives you a slight increase in your chances to get runs in the first inning at the detriment of the second, and b. I've been reading those Scouting Reports that came out back in the 80s and it's a veeeery common refrain for aces that you have to get to them early if at all. If there's anything that really happens, it's that a pitcher's ratings might be a little volatile from one game to the next and you're going to notice the games where they got knocked out of the box in the 4th more than you'll notice the games where they had a meh quality start where they were most hittable in the 5th.

I *suspect* that position players get tired during games and so are less effective in the 15th than they are in the 1st, but that's pure conjecture and unrelated to this...

[The Game]

Please tell me that you are not a White Sox fan.

[Drbugboffin]

Thanks to Syd... you've confirmed some of my suspicions. Unfortunately.