Great players who cannot hit

[Long_Long_Name]

Originally Posted by zuty

Seriously?

It's a computer game, right? This means that there's no actual player who actually has any psychological reaction to being moved in the lineup...

Yeah, it's probably an astrological/rain dancing affair. You try it once, and it works. Next time you try it, well, the player goes 0 for 5, but belts two doubles the next day; close enough. The thing is, slumping players will get back to their regular level at some point, and if you make a change every game, one of these changes will be made on the day where the slump ends - it hardly implicates causality. Basically, it's quite possible that your player starts hitting better once he's moved in the lineup, but that doesn't mean that moving around helped in any way.

[Syd Thrift]

OOTP does have slump management. If a player goes cold, he can stay cold for quite a while. Mitigating factors in this are Work Ethic and Intelligence and IIRC the Teach Hitting skills of the hitting coach and the manager. It's all in the manual if you don't believe me.

As for lineup spot, well... a couple things on that. One, I know that if a guy expects to hit cleanup and you bat him 8th, he'll not be happy about that and his stats may suffer as a result (in beta testing last year Markus insisted that this was a very, very small effect, worth like 3 points of batting average, but it would not surprise me if, on rare occasions, it had a much greater effect - I know I've seen unhappy guys hit .240 with one team and then move to a better situation and suddenly hit .300).

The spot in the lineup may have an effect on how many runners-on situation a guy might get into as well. I'm not sure that the game has pitchers get worse with runners on per se (real baseball stats demonstrate that effect due in large part to the fact that bad pitchers allow more hitters to reach and therefore get more runners-on opportunities than good ones do), but it does have that "Hold Runner" rating, which for sure drops them down.

Also, dropping a guy who's doing nothing but making outs down and away from a group of guys who aren't will likely create more rallies, which the guy would then come in at the end of. Markus has always been rather coy about whether there is a hidden clutch rating or not, which makes me think that one exists. It probably doesn't turn on too often and doesn't have much effect when it does, but I would be dollars to donuts that one of those points is with runners on base with two outs. That's how Strat-o-Matic does it.

All that said, I think that doing things like sitting left-handed batters against tough lefties has a much more profound effect on ending slumps. Basically, if a hitter has a good game or two, that usually seems to be enough to break him out. Put him into positions to break out.

[tysok]

Originally Posted by zuty

Seriously?

It's a computer game, right? This means that there's no actual player who actually has any psychological reaction to being moved in the lineup...

This discussion is just like reality, there are a myriad of things to try to get a hitter out of a slump and there's at least one supporter somewhere for each and every one of them...

You can just leave them where they are and they'll eventually come out of it. That's true in the game, and could be true in real life. It just usally doesn't happen in reality.

There is definitely no psychological effect in the game (as far as I know) when they're moved up or down in hte lineup, except for morale if their demands aren't met. There are certainly people on the boards here that think there is no psychological effect on players EVEN IN REALITY. So if it came out that there WAS a psychological effect in the game we'd hear a lot of people screaming to the heavens about that one.

There are certain things that do occur, in reality, when a player moves in hte lineup. Taking away a "pressure" aspect of hitting 4th even. A guy hitting in front of a superpower hitter will see more strikes, they don't want to put a guy on in front of him. A guy hitting after a speedster is likely to see more fastballs, to allow the catcher a chance to easier throw out a steal attempt. If you're hitting with guys on base more often it can also open up holes in the infield (as in holding a runner on first). Whether those sort of things are modeled in OOTP I don't know.

In OOTP it could have some effect as well. You might be able to dig around and find it, or you may just think it does... either way. We like to think of an at bat as just being a roll of the dice, but is it really just a roll of the dice? If it comes up number 1 or 2 he gets a hit, 3 or 4 he makes an out etc. Simplistic example but works as an example. If that's the case then it doesn't do a very good job of modeling baseball. If there are no runners on it's going to go through some calculations, if there's a runner on first it's going to go through a different set, etc. To model the game it has to take into account what's happening around it... since there aren't "too many" two run home runs, there aren't "too few" one run home runs, etc it must be doing something correct.

Beyond that, it changes things anyhow. If you have a guy hitting fourth with very little behind him OOTP uses whatever logic it uses and may pitch around him. If you move him up to third and get power behind him OOTP will use whatever logic it uses and may not pitch around him. In that way it is exactly like reality, the hitters around you will make a difference in the strategy used.

Getting away from that and going just on my own experience now. I've had players, several different times with different players, who seemed simply incapable of hitting at the top of the lineup. He was picture perfect, ratings wise, to be the first or second hitter. He never, NEVER, hit over .240 hitting up there. But when moved down to #7 or #8 he would hit well over .300. I started the season with him at #1, he hit .240 at the end of the month. I moved him down to 7 and he went on a tear. Okay, he's out of the slump now, I moved him to 2 (I'd gotten another leadoff guy that was better) and he went on an ugly slump. I moved him to 7 and he took off again. I moved him back to #1 (other guy was injured), slump time again. I moved him to #8 and he took off once more. Each was a month long stint... I repeated the process the next season with the same results. I've seen it several times in 30 seasons. Is it real? Maybe, maybe not. If it is real is it because Markus has coded some psychological problem into him? Definitely not. It would just mean that he's got some set of ratings that end up making him some kind of enigma in the game. That's not uncommon in computer games, I remember Sammy Sosa in one of the old graphic games (one of the Hardballs) where he would rip the ball for 2 seasons EVERY TIME, but totally suck in the third season, and begin ripping again for the next 3. He hit some spot in his ratings that the game was using that made him suck at just that time, and there were several players that followed different but just as easily seen patterns.

Anyhow, I've also moved guys down and they slumped still, when they took off I moved them back up and they kept going. One never knows... but one thing is for sure, don't ever just leave a slumping guy hitting toward the top of the lineup and do nothing until they pull out. That costs you games, even if moving them around doesn't "help" them, it helps you.