Durability rating

[the_mad_monk]

Players need a durability rating as they don't tire the same in real life. This is even more important for pitchers. Two relievers with the same Stamina rating shouldn't necessarily recover at the same rate. But both should have a much higher Durability rating than a starting pitcher.


Position player example: 2018 Molina would have a higher Durability rating than 2018 Cervelli.

[jeffw3000]

Agreed. OOTP needs to have a fatigue rating for both pitchers and position players. As it is right now it is difficult to send some one like Kent Tekulve to the mound 94 times and 134 innings in a season because every pitcher tires the same. It is even more difficult to send Mike Marshall to the mound for 106 games, and 208 innings.

There needs to be a system that recognizes all players are not the same.

[Syd Thrift]

I think that a better or at least more realistic method would be to make very minor injuries a thing and to them happen a *lot*. Minor injuries might have small effect on some aspect of a player's game but mostly the bad thing about them might be to increase the risk that your guy gets more badly hurt. So no longer are you sitting your on a Sunday because it's the 7th game your team's played and you have things set to rest your catcher that day, it's because he has a bad bruise on his hand from handling a pitch a couple days before that you're resting now because you just finished a game 12 hours ago and it was aggravated a little bit.

The game would be able to use the existing injury proneness system for this. As players become more and more prone, the chances that they're more or less constantly playing through some injury or another is increased as well. I think this is closer to the paradigm that baseball plays under. The game itself is frankly not all that strenuous. I can *totally* understand a player being completely beat after a soccer game and unable to play a couple days later, as you see in FM sometimes (not to mention the bits where you overplay a guy and then have to send him on holiday for a week to recover). Baseball just isn't that kind of game. The action occurs in spurts and at the end of the day even a rangey center fielder won't run anywhere close to the ~5.5 miles a game that a midfielder in soccer will commonly run. The one position where guys clearly do get fatigued are pitchers but even that could be handled differently: after a game, instead of straight-up fatigue, give the guy a minor injury he has to rest through, and the earlier he comes back, the bigger the risk of injury he has.

For the specific guys mentioned, I'd add...

- Some pitches and pitching styles just don't cause short-term fatigue to the arm as others do. For a Kent Tekulve or a Dan Quisenberry type, just having that "side arm" modifier means they should have a lower chance of injury (and in turn a better ability to pitch more often). Those pitchers should also have pretty severe penalties for going through the lineup more than once (which I think they already do, as most sidearm types are going to also be 2-pitch sinker/slider pitchers) and even the first time through are bound to have extreme splits (which is definitely already reflected in the game) so you're not going to be tempted to push them out there for 200 innings.

- For Mike Marshall types... FM has a thing where you can choose to give a player a "shot" that lets them play the next game but then makes them unavailable for longer. Perhaps you can do this with pitchers, only what you wind up doing instead is that each shot reduces the in-game effect of the injury a pitcher is suffering from but has no effect or even a detrimental effect on their chance to aggravate the injury in-game. In Marshall's case, he still got used rather heavily by the Dodgers after 1974 but I also see that, even given that they were *very* lucky not to see him suffer a bad injury, he still very clearly missed a bunch of time the next couple seasons. In 1975, for example, he pitched in 58 games the whole year, which is still pretty good... but he also missed most of May and the second half of April so that as late as June 5, he'd thrown in just 9 games and 20 innings for LA and walked more men than he'd struck out. *Clearly* he was working through something at that point and Walter Alston was probably keeping him out not just to prevent further injury but because his stuff had broken down so much that he just wasn't that effective.

On top of that I have no way to back this up statistically but I get a sense that pitchers' arms mature at a certain point and the overall risk of really harmful injury is lessened if they've avoided by the time they hit 30 or so. Marshall is probably a good example of this phenomenon; after failing to stick as a starter, Montreal started using him a lot in relief in his age 28 season and it wasn't until his age 30 season that he really started to have those gaudy relief numbers people talk about.

Randy Johnson is another guy I'd cite; he had a bad back (not arm!) injury in 1996 that probably helped preserve his arm a bit but even at the end of his tenure with the Mariners and especially with the Astros and Diamondbacks he was often able to throw 130 pitches in a game without having to miss a spot in the rotation or something, and he did that into his 40s. Even Nolan Ryan, who was pretty famously put on pitch counts starting in his mid-30s, managed to thrive with those pitch counts for a decade plus until he finally suffered his career ending arm injury at the age of 46. See also: Roger Clemens (granted that he had help but I mean the game is meant to simulate baseball and that should include, I think, simulating the role of "help" in the late 90s and early 2000s. I'm not saying this should be the statistical norm but I think the game ought to have room for outliers like this.