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Old 09-06-2015, 09:16 AM   #1
Paulie123
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Dealing with an sudden slump

Hi all, first time poster here. I live in England and have only got into baseball the last year or two and discovered this wonderful game a few months ago. It's now the only game I play!

I'm currently playing as the Oakland A's. Following advice in some other threads in the forum I've built a roster of good groundball pitching (Jose Fernandez leads the rotation) and strong defense in the infield and up the middle. With my limited budget and pitcher-friendly park the offense is only average and we don't score a lot of runs, but we have the best defense and team ERA in the league.

In the 2020 season we finished 94-68 but lost the AL wildcard game. With pretty much the same core squad we opened the 2021 season 56-44 and looked well set. But this previously decent team has now suddenly hit a wall, going 4-20 since then. We aren't getting battered but several guys in the lineup and bullpen have hit cold spells at the same time, and we've basically lost every close game during the run.

I would really appreciate any advice on how to deal with a team's sudden slump like that. When the losses started to stack up I made some roster moves to put some of the strugglers into the minors (it's past the trade deadline) but that hasn't helped and I'm wondering if shaking up the squad a bit was, if anything counterproductive. Is this just one of those things that happens to any team sometimes and I should have ridden the slump out with the guys that had previously done well for me? Should I have been more proactive at making roster moves or changing round the lineup?

Any advice or tips would be much appreciated! Cheers. I sim every game.
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Old 09-06-2015, 09:32 AM   #2
battists
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Honestly, it's hard to say. Slumps are certainly part of baseball, it sounds like what you trying to do is exactly what most managers would do to shake things up.

One thing you could consider looking at is your Pythagorean record (pyt). I believe it's on the standings screen, perhaps under expanded standings or something like that. If you're not familiar with it, it essentially shows what the game thinks your record should be. So, if your actual record is worse than your Pythagorean record, then it's just kind of an indicator that you are a bit snakebit, and you can ultimately expect your performance to turn around. If, on the other hand, your Pythagorean record is worse or equal, it's an indicator that your team really wasn't as good as you thought it was, and perhaps you over performed last year.
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Old 09-06-2015, 05:44 PM   #3
Paulie123
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I seem to consistently lag behind my Pythagorean record. At the start of this dire run when I was 56-44, my PR was 59-41. Now I'm 60-64 but my PR is 66-58. Last season when I got the 94 wins, my PR was 97 wins. If I'm just being unlucky and I'm generally doing sensible things, I guess that's reassuring in a way, but at the same time a bit frustrating that this season has gone down the pan...! I should add that I've not had any major injuries or suspensions affecting my roster.
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Old 09-06-2015, 07:17 PM   #4
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How are your left and right splits? Are you optimizing your line up? Are you using your bull pen to much or to little?
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Old 09-07-2015, 01:44 PM   #5
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Paulie123 View Post
Hi all, first time poster here. I live in England and have only got into baseball the last year or two and discovered this wonderful game a few months ago. It's now the only game I play!
Welcome to the end of your social life. Good to see someone else from the UK!

Quote:
I'm currently playing as the Oakland A's.
Well, there's your problem. ¬_¬ ¬_¬

Quote:
In the 2020 season we finished 94-68 but lost the AL wildcard game. With pretty much the same core squad we opened the 2021 season 56-44 and looked well set. But this previously decent team has now suddenly hit a wall, going 4-20 since then. We aren't getting battered but several guys in the lineup and bullpen have hit cold spells at the same time, and we've basically lost every close game during the run.

I would really appreciate any advice on how to deal with a team's sudden slump like that. When the losses started to stack up I made some roster moves to put some of the strugglers into the minors (it's past the trade deadline) but that hasn't helped and I'm wondering if shaking up the squad a bit was, if anything counterproductive. Is this just one of those things that happens to any team sometimes and I should have ridden the slump out with the guys that had previously done well for me? Should I have been more proactive at making roster moves or changing round the lineup?
It's definitely one of those things that happens sometimes in baseball. Sometimes you'll be doing better than your team's talent level suggests via luck and poor opposition performances, but the very purpose of a long 162 game season is to make sure it catches up with you eventually. It might just be the opposite however - an unlucky spell where things haven't been going right. Bloopers get caught instead of falling, home runs slip to the other side of the foul pole, well located pitches get dug out and hit for miles.

While replacing your 'cold' batters seems a good option, make sure your replacements are at least decent enough to make a fist of it in the majors. Replacing a good batter in a slump with a crap batter doesn't really fix much.

Also, as pgjocki said, check your Left/Right splits. If a guy is doing ok against lefties but sucking against righties (or vice versa), consider 'platooning' him with someone who plays the same position (putting him in the lineup against the pitchers he's good against, and someone else in the lineup for the other handed pitchers). Clearly you don't have room on the roster to do this for everyone (until September!) but you can do it for a few if there are some whose splits are very different.

Last edited by monkeystyxx; 09-07-2015 at 01:50 PM.
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Old 09-07-2015, 07:16 PM   #6
Paulie123
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Thanks guys, really grateful for the advice. I'm doing platooning (currently have 5 lefties in the lineup vs RHP but only 2 vs LHP) but essentially doing it where my roster makeup allows me to, rather than looking at the players' split stats, so I'll have a look at them and see if I should move things around.

What I struggle a bit with in the game on that is how much individual players' splits seem to vary year on year. For example, I traded for lefty 3B Jake Lamb, and in the first year he had an OBP vs lefties of about .140, so I started platooning him the second half of the season. The last year and a half his OBP is about .380 so I stopped his platoon. He has about 80 PA against lefties this year, is that enough of a sample size for me to reasonably make a decision that this year at least he's ok against lefties after all and I shouldn't platoon him?

On the lineup, I don't change the order around during the season unless forced to by trades, injuries, etc. Is it beneficial to move things around fairly frequently depending on whether guys are hot or cold etc, to get out of a slump like this? I have 5 of my lineup vs RHP with the dreaded snowflake right now...
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Old 09-07-2015, 07:47 PM   #7
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In regards to moving guys in the line up, what could it hurt?

I like to see at least 100 AB and prefer 200 AB before I make judgment.
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Old 09-07-2015, 09:27 PM   #8
monkeystyxx
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Originally Posted by Paulie123 View Post
Thanks guys, really grateful for the advice. I'm doing platooning (currently have 5 lefties in the lineup vs RHP but only 2 vs LHP) but essentially doing it where my roster makeup allows me to, rather than looking at the players' split stats, so I'll have a look at them and see if I should move things around.

What I struggle a bit with in the game on that is how much individual players' splits seem to vary year on year. For example, I traded for lefty 3B Jake Lamb, and in the first year he had an OBP vs lefties of about .140, so I started platooning him the second half of the season. The last year and a half his OBP is about .380 so I stopped his platoon. He has about 80 PA against lefties this year, is that enough of a sample size for me to reasonably make a decision that this year at least he's ok against lefties after all and I shouldn't platoon him?

On the lineup, I don't change the order around during the season unless forced to by trades, injuries, etc. Is it beneficial to move things around fairly frequently depending on whether guys are hot or cold etc, to get out of a slump like this? I have 5 of my lineup vs RHP with the dreaded snowflake right now...
80 PA is a little on the low side to make any kind of claims as to a guy's numbers, IMO. Maybe he's just having a good month, or the lefties he's faced so far were pretty poor. What's his BABIP against lefties? If that's considerably higher than his batting average, it could be an indicator that he's going to come back down to earth sooner or later. That being said though, it's clearly working for him right now, so let him keep at it! That's part of what you need to be doing right now; looking for guys who're doing well at this point in time and using them over the guys that might generally be better, but aren't having such a good time of it at this particular moment.


As for the batting order, I usually look at this on a weekly/fortnightly basis using the stats from the last month, move fast guys with the highest OBP to the top of the lineup, make sure the highest AVG guy is third, and the guy with the most home runs/highest SLG is 4th. Fill out the rest in order of OBP. The jury is out on whether it makes much of a difference (in real life as well as OOTP) beyond making sure your best hitters are at the top , but it can't hurt. At the very least I like to make sure that there aren't any glaring 'errors' in my lineup (the 3-hole batting sub .250, or the leadoff guy leading the team in strikeouts, for instance...). I don't always go through the whole lineup every week, just keep an eye out for obvious issues.
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Old 09-10-2015, 06:42 PM   #9
Paulie123
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Thank you all for the tips. Since these posts I completed that season. I did promptly run into an 11 game losing streak (although that included 6 games against the Twins who ended with 110 wins and went 11-1 in the postseason) but then stabilised, finishing 76-86, but with a Pythagorean record of 83-79.

Checking the splits worked well so cheers for that. I have a young lefty RF who I'd called up when trying to bust the slump, and after your advice I realised he was rated 7/6/5 (on 1-10 scale) against RHP but 5/4/4 against lefties. He def got more productive when I took him out of the lineup against LHP. Less obvious to me how lineup shuffling impacted but I'm just going to keep trying that over the next few seasons and see how it goes.

Incidentally I got that young RF simply as a 1*-potential throw-in chip in a trade I made before the season which was primarily to acquire a backup CF. He is now a 3* player and has hit 5 HR with 1.044 OPS in the first dozen games of the new season. This game is awesome!
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