Too many Five Hit games

[ChuckB]

I'm not sure if this has been addressed previously (I did a search for the variations on 'five hit games' and found nothing) but my MLB-style fictional league has an exorbinant amount of five (and even a few six hit) games each season. I have not added them up (will do so if this is a problem that has not been reported or has been reported fixed) but I have to guess at 30 per season at least (in the majors alone - if I add the minors then - phew!).

Has anyone noticed this? It's most distressing and the only gripe I have with the game's engine. The yearly totals are in line with today's major leagues, and there are no completely bizarre individual numbers to be concerned about (like 100 homerun seasons or batters hitting .450).

Thanks,
Chuck

[Nutlaw]

Well, if you have some in-game data to compare to MLB data, we can certainly report it. I know that there has been some discussion of this in the past, but I'm not sure if there was ever a resolution to it.

[ChuckB]

...to compile that information without going through every news report (an Anderson utility or something)?

I just started 2011, and already in the first three weeks there have been 33 five hit games between the minors (four levels - AAA, AA, A and R) and the majors (2 to this point) and four six hit games in the minors. Even in the minors I'd have to imagine this to be a remarkable number. Again, my league totals (at least at the ML level) fall in line with today's majors.

[Nutlaw]

Do you have ghost players on? If so, they can really skew things, as they are terrible. Going up against a ghost pitcher could cause regular offensive explosions.

[ChuckB]

Yes, I do (though not often do I read the results and see "So-and-so singled in his first at-bat against Joe Unknown, his second at-bat against Joe Unknown...etc"). I'm assuming that this is what you mean.

Ok, so we'll exclude the minor league contests. I'll run this season and look at only major league results. I do find it interesting, however, that the 'History' only shows 6+ hit games as 'Accomplishments', which leads me to believe that 5 hit games weren't believed to be rare enough as to deserve inclusion. That alone might indicate that it's a code flaw, or a logic one.

Again, it doesn't appear to be affecting league-season totals. However, it might be a problem because some guys are monopolizing way more hits than they should. Even in short spurts, this could be a problem, as it will drive more players into batting averages while others get higher batting averages, leaving the middle ground guys (.240-.270) few-and-far between. In fact, I have noticed that - a few guys whom had good ratings were hitting <.250 so I signed them on the cheap and they went on to have decent seasons with me (>.280). That's a small sampling though so it proves nothing, but is interesting.

[injury log]

Originally Posted by ChuckB

Yes, I do (though not often do I read the results and see "So-and-so singled in his first at-bat against Joe Unknown, his second at-bat against Joe Unknown...etc").

I think the pitcher's name is reported only when the batter hits a home run, so you wouldn't notice ghost pitchers very often.

Originally Posted by ChuckB

I do find it interesting, however, that the 'History' only shows 6+ hit games as 'Accomplishments', which leads me to believe that 5 hit games weren't believed to be rare enough as to deserve inclusion. That alone might indicate that it's a code flaw, or a logic one.

I think that's the point; 5-hit games aren't that rare. Ty Cobb did it 14 times, Roberto Clemente did it two days in a row, Dave Winfield had three 5-hit games in one month, even Simon Pond has done it 5 times in his minor league career. I wasn't able to find league-wide numbers in a quick web search, but I did find that 10 Marlins have had 5-hit games in franchise history, for one every 1.4 seasons. If that's a representative modern day pace, then in a universe with complete minors (roughly 210 teams, 60 of which play half-seasons) you'd expect it to happen about 130 times in a year. I'm sure that number is off (I'm using the Marlins as a baseline after all), but it's not a rare event.

My main issue with 5-hit games in OOTP is all the news reports; I'd like to be able to turn them off, and only get a message when there's been something truly rare, like a 6-hit game. I'd find this level of customisation very useful.

[Nutlaw]

Certainly, the constant news reports do lead to the impression that there are too many five-hit games. However, I'm fairly certain that core changes to the game model won't be made upon impressions. Without some hard data to prove that this area is flawed, I don't believe that we can go any further.

[Zeyes]

It doesn't exactly qualify as hard data, but I just simmed 15 years of a fairly large universe (8 leagues with 66 teams total, plus a corresponding set each of minor league teams and college feeder teams, for 198 teams total) the other day, so I went and searched through the player history files to get a count of 5+ hit games.

The annual number of regular season games in the universe was 7350, or just about three times as many as in a modern MLB season (2430); the weighted universe batting average was .2772, so somewhat higher than MLB, which obviously influences multi-hit frequency. I should probably also mention that all leagues used the DH.

Anyway, there were 2719 five+ hit performances (2588x5, 127x6, 4x7) in those 15 years, or 181 per year, or almost exactly 60 per equivalent MLB-size season. I'll leave it to someone with Retrosheet mojo to figure out how that compares to real MLB stats, as I'm a bit out of my league with that.

[Nutlaw]

Absent actual MLB data, I am going to close up this thread for now. If someone comes across something to compare our OOTP data to, post it in tech support along with a link to this thread and if there is a discrepancy, we'll be sure to log it for you. Thanks.