Predictable game outcomes

[mrkdog]

This is my first year playing OOTP and I've recognized some events which, way more often than not, seem to lead to predictable outcomes. The main one I've seen is a single followed by a wild pitch. My experience is this almost always turns into a big inning.


Yes, in real life a wild pitch turns into a big inning, but I think much less than OOTP.


Has anyone else seen this? If so, what other situations have you seen where the RNG seems predictable?

[fredbeene]

<Snipped false information that may mislead users. Poster has been warned.>

[LansdowneSt]

To the OP, I just think scenarios like that get remembered more. But I’m a Red Sox fan so Bob Stanley scarred me in ‘86. So a single followed by an WP has me braced for a big inning irl and if it happens it sticks with you. Each at AB is a stand-alone die roll so. Asked on my game experience, I wouldn’t read too much into it. But I’d also start warming up the bullpen (that’s the scarred me talking there).

Fred, are you even capable of posting sincere responses or must every post be a troll to amuse yourself?

[Reed]

Originally Posted by fredbeene

please run a report on single followed by WP.
and or run in innings with WP vs run in innings vs no WP
You can group by year, team.

and then manually put them together for different simulations

Fred, this is in no way helpful to a new poster and someone who apparently recently started playing the game. I imagine he sincerely thought you were trying to be helpful instead of being sarcastic.

[OutS|der]

Baseball is a funny sport for statistics. You can go 5 games with a leadoff HR and then never hit another all year, or have a player have a terrible month where they can't hit the broad side of a barn and next month have the greatest month ever.

The issue with this is there could easily be an issue with the game producing too many wild pitches and big innings or it could just be a string of bad luck and will even itself out over the season or years.
There is also the issue of where if something happens to you, then you're more likely to notice it when it happens again, and those events will stand out to you more then all the times things were normal.

We get posts like these all the time. All we can suggest is keep playing the game and try to document how much something like this happens, then present your data showing that there is a problem compared to RL baseball.

A perfect stat that shows how funny baseball is "Don Mattingly set a single season record for grand slams in 1987 with six. Those were the only grand slams he hit in his career."

[Brad K]

Originally Posted by Reed

Fred, this is in no way helpful to a new poster and someone who apparently recently started playing the game. I imagine he sincerely thought you were trying to be helpful instead of being sarcastic.

I doubt anyone would be mislead for long by fred's sarcasm. I thought it was a clever way of explaining that while it's 2024 and OOTP is a huge spreadsheet program, it doesn't have the search and sort capability of a 1994 version of Microsoft Works for Windows 3.1.

[joefromchicago]

Originally Posted by mrkdog

This is my first year playing OOTP and I've recognized some events which, way more often than not, seem to lead to predictable outcomes. The main one I've seen is a single followed by a wild pitch. My experience is this almost always turns into a big inning.

Yes, in real life a wild pitch turns into a big inning, but I think much less than OOTP.

Has anyone else seen this? If so, what other situations have you seen where the RNG seems predictable?

What's the problem here? That there are too many WPs? Or that too many singles+WPs end up leading to "big innings?"

As to the first question, I guess I haven't noticed that, but then I usually sim games so maybe I just missed it.

As for the second question, well, yeah, putting a man in scoring position will, all other things being equal, lead to more runs being scored than putting a man on first. I'm not sure what constitutes a "big inning," but again, if a team is hitting singles against a pitcher who is also a little wild there's a chance it will get more hits off that pitcher. I'm not sure that's a statistical aberration as opposed to working as designed.

[pgjocki]

For me it's getting a 3 run lead, when that happens I might as well just turn my laptop off because that's the kiss of death. All of a sudden my Gold Glove Catcher has never caught a curve ball before and my 1B who has 5 straight Gold Gloves and Platinum Sluggers will drop a throw or hit into two consecutive double plays while the AI strings together 7 or 8 hits in a row and now they're up by 3 and it's game over.

Statistically the game generates the same number of Wild Pitches as real life but since you only play out your games it can appear that they happen more often.

[Sweed]

Originally Posted by LansdowneSt

So a single followed by an WP has me braced for a big inning irl and if it happens it sticks with you.

This, applied to many more situations than just wild pitches.

The last game I played I was up one going into the 8th. My P hits the first batter and the next follows with the dreaded infield hit. In my head I'm thinking
"oh no, here we go,". What happened next? I turned a DP, so 2 outs and tying run on third. Next batter pops out and I go on to win 1-0.

I only remember the game because it was the last one I played. If I had lost I would remember it for weeks.

[Jasper70]

We all see differences in the game. I play my games out and started noticing whenever my hitters had 2 strikes, no matter the count, they were striking out at an alarming rate. But when I went back and sorted each players weeks at bats on Monday (review day), I was wrong, that wasn't the case. What we actually think we see isn't usually borne out by the stats though some pretty weird stuff does occur.

[dannibalcorpse]

Originally Posted by mrkdog

This is my first year playing OOTP and I've recognized some events which, way more often than not, seem to lead to predictable outcomes. The main one I've seen is a single followed by a wild pitch. My experience is this almost always turns into a big inning.


Yes, in real life a wild pitch turns into a big inning, but I think much less than OOTP.


Has anyone else seen this? If so, what other situations have you seen where the RNG seems predictable?

I do think there's sometimes a bit of confirmation bias with stuff like this - ie, you see it happen once or twice and then you notice every.single.time. it happens.

There's also something to be said for run probability in that kinda situation - runner on 1st with nobody out has about a 57% chance of staying a scoreless inning. But get that runner onto 2nd with nobody out and now you're looking at a 37% chance of a scoreless inning and a nearly 50% chance that you're giving up 1-2 runs (all probabilities from Greg Stoll's Expected Runs calculator) so it would make sense that the single and a wild pitch would open the floodgates.

The one thing I would look into, if you really want to dig into the backend, is if your game is seeing too many wild pitches?