ISTR seeing that where this was studied, the issue wasn't so much that constantly giving a guy 120 pitches a game was destructive so much as occasionally giving him 180 pitches was a death blow. I'm also not sure *quite* how much Bill James in particular has been on that bandwagon; in fact, back in the early 2000s when Baseball Prospectus was leading this charge, I'm pretty sure he one of its most outspoken critics. He's said time and again that as recently as the 70s and 80s pitchers threw a *lot* more than they do now, and while they got injured, it's not at all clear that they got injured more than they currently do.
I do think that there's an aspect of CW-breaking behavior that OOTP or for that matter pretty much any sports sim out there doesn't encapsulate: right now, if Eric Wedge went out and had Felix Hernandez throw 300 innings, people would scratch their heads. If he tried to do that and King Felix went down with an arm injury, they would blame the overuse whether or not the overuse actually cause it or not. In fact, there's a very good chance that Eric Wedge's days as a manager would be over for good soon after that injury. In a nutshell, you see this set of behaviors:
- If a manager follows CW and wins games, he's a winner and keeps his job.
- If a manager follows CW but loses, he hasn't ruffled any feathers and will probably find work somewhere.
- If a manager does not follow CW and wins, he'll keep his job as long as he's winning, at least, and maybe some time down the line his ideas will drop into the conventional wisdom. Tony LaRussa's bullpen use in Oakland in the late 80s is the best example of that, I think.
- If a manager does not follow CW and loses... well, good luck with that. He gets canned and everyone knows him as the guy who tries to do weird and crazy things with his players.
As a result, and because of the fact that there is essentially only one company in the USA that hires people to manage baseball games, there are a lot more people out there willing to follow CW than not.
I'd love to see a system in which GMs accrue "anti CW" points in the same way that countries in Europa Universalis accrue "bad boy" points. Get enough of them and owners put you on a shorter leash when you're hired and, eventually, don't even want to hire you at all. Get a really large number of them at any one job and other GMs will start to distrust you - they don't want you to make them look stupid - and stop offering you equal value in trades and the like. Also expect players to react poorly when they aren't being used in traditional roles.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Markus Heinsohn
You bastard....
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The Great American Baseball Thrift Book - Like reading the Sporting News from back in the day, only with fake players. REAL LIFE DRAMA THOUGH maybe not
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