DHing for other than pitcher, secondary positions, pitchers following "strategy" as hitters

[hockeyman001]

Just some suggestions I have for future OOTP versions from playing the game. Just for fun I put my high school team in MLB 2002 (smack in the middle of my HS days) and gave our younger selves MLB level skills. The real fun, I thought, and something different, would be substituting the players the way we were in high school, rather than the very straightforward MLB play, and creating our younger selves to have the versatility to play a lot of different positions well (because, of course, at the HS level it was easy to play a lot of different positions for most). It is a lot of fun, I must say, to have someone pitch 6 innings, then go to right field, move your SS to the mound, and bring in an infielder off your bench to sub for the old RF and play SS. It's also fun to have legitimate threats in the niddle of your order as pitchers, to figure out how to keep the great bat in the game when they're done on the mound. Very fun without using the DH.

A couple of interesting issues were raised, however.

When a player is in the game as a pitcher and hitting, team strategy settings seemed to be affected by the fact they are a pitcher. The best way I can say this in MLB terms is to say that if you bring 1998 Albert Belle into a non DH game to pitch and leave him in to hit, if there is a runner on first and nobody out when he comes up, despite his superior batting skills the CPU manager will attempt to make him bunt...even with 2 strikes! There doesn't seem to be any way to override this other than to change his position. The CPU manager will not do this except when the player is playing as a pitcher.

Secondly, I think back to how we played in high school...during training games we had an "EH" (extra hitter) who was like a DH except all 9 positions players batted also. So this could tie into things like batting order size, or potentially giving the option of Little League style roster rules where you have "mandatory play" or summer camps where the batting order is just the team roster size, and the batting order is rolling from game to game. This is going a bit farther, but perhaps these could be fun customizing type options to add.

Thirdly - secondary positions. This could provide the game engine for a star pitcher who plays in the field the other days of the week. An SS/SP for example. But it would also tend to utilize MLB players who actually have secondary positions properly...such as utility IFs that tend to be more 2B/SS in real life, but if "use real stats" is not checked, will tend to see a lot of time at 1B since it's an "easy" position to learn and their 2B/SS skills transition nicely to 1B already anyway as they build experience.

And lastly, it would be cool to give the option to DH for other than the pitcher in non MLB leagues. On my old HS team, we used to DH for the catcher.

Just some suggestions IMO. The game is already great. I just envision these rule changes because they could someday provide the level of detail necessary to incorporate a bunch of leagues worldwide. The FHM fans among us probably remember NHL EHM 05-07 and how detailed all of the leagues were in it. Someday that would be incredible for OOTP to accomplish, although I do realize it's a ton of work to get that level of detail from databases, but at least the rules etc. would be implemented that way. It would also make for much more interesting draft day decisions if position players had pitching attributes (legitimate ones with good potential ratings) and pitchers had legitimiate hitting attributes (same), as it would more closely mimic real life where teams often have to make tough decisions on a kid's future by deciding whether to track him for the mound or a position.

Keep up the great work!

[Anyone]

Originally Posted by hockeyman001

Just some suggestions I have for future OOTP versions from playing the game. Just for fun I put my high school team in MLB 2002 (smack in the middle of my HS days) and gave our younger selves MLB level skills. The real fun, I thought, and something different, would be substituting the players the way we were in high school, rather than the very straightforward MLB play, and creating our younger selves to have the versatility to play a lot of different positions well (because, of course, at the HS level it was easy to play a lot of different positions for most). It is a lot of fun, I must say, to have someone pitch 6 innings, then go to right field, move your SS to the mound, and bring in an infielder off your bench to sub for the old RF and play SS. It's also fun to have legitimate threats in the niddle of your order as pitchers, to figure out how to keep the great bat in the game when they're done on the mound. Very fun without using the DH.

A couple of interesting issues were raised, however.

When a player is in the game as a pitcher and hitting, team strategy settings seemed to be affected by the fact they are a pitcher. The best way I can say this in MLB terms is to say that if you bring 1998 Albert Belle into a non DH game to pitch and leave him in to hit, if there is a runner on first and nobody out when he comes up, despite his superior batting skills the CPU manager will attempt to make him bunt...even with 2 strikes! There doesn't seem to be any way to override this other than to change his position. The CPU manager will not do this except when the player is playing as a pitcher.

Secondly, I think back to how we played in high school...during training games we had an "EH" (extra hitter) who was like a DH except all 9 positions players batted also. So this could tie into things like batting order size, or potentially giving the option of Little League style roster rules where you have "mandatory play" or summer camps where the batting order is just the team roster size, and the batting order is rolling from game to game. This is going a bit farther, but perhaps these could be fun customizing type options to add.

Thirdly - secondary positions. This could provide the game engine for a star pitcher who plays in the field the other days of the week. An SS/SP for example. But it would also tend to utilize MLB players who actually have secondary positions properly...such as utility IFs that tend to be more 2B/SS in real life, but if "use real stats" is not checked, will tend to see a lot of time at 1B since it's an "easy" position to learn and their 2B/SS skills transition nicely to 1B already anyway as they build experience.

And lastly, it would be cool to give the option to DH for other than the pitcher in non MLB leagues. On my old HS team, we used to DH for the catcher.

Just some suggestions IMO. The game is already great. I just envision these rule changes because they could someday provide the level of detail necessary to incorporate a bunch of leagues worldwide. The FHM fans among us probably remember NHL EHM 05-07 and how detailed all of the leagues were in it. Someday that would be incredible for OOTP to accomplish, although I do realize it's a ton of work to get that level of detail from databases, but at least the rules etc. would be implemented that way. It would also make for much more interesting draft day decisions if position players had pitching attributes (legitimate ones with good potential ratings) and pitchers had legitimiate hitting attributes (same), as it would more closely mimic real life where teams often have to make tough decisions on a kid's future by deciding whether to track him for the mound or a position.

Keep up the great work!

I like this. I love options. It could go well with my suggestion to have a setting that would cause the game to generate much better hitting pitchers if you wanted.

I particularly like secondary positions for pitchers (and pitching positions possible for non-pitchers). I know that happened some in the Negro Leagues, and I think that in the very early days of MLB that also happened at times...so it is compatible with high level baseball, even if you don't see it in the modern game.

I'd love to see many of the DH compromises that some propose possible as well, even if they're unlikely to ever be used in real life. I know there's someone on the board (forgot who) whose sig suggests a starting-pitcher-only DH (The DH is tied to the starting pitcher; when the starter comes out, the team loses the DH), or the similar idea of having the DH for the first 6 innings, after which he's lost.

There's a conceptual basis for those, which is that the strategy lost when the DH is used is largely in the late innings, so those who like the DH get to see a lot less pitchers batting, but those who prefer the strategy gained when there is no DH get to see it in the innings when the vast majority of non-DH related strategy is used.

So...let people play around with those if they want, and any other halfway-reasonable compromises that people have suggested (though whatever happens I doubt we'll ever see a compromise proposal happen in real life).

In my baseball universe, there are no DH's. I think I may have created one indy league that uses it. But if available, I'd probably let the subleague I wasn't in, in my fictional MLB, use a 6-inning DH or something and check box scores/game logs to get a feel for how it worked-- I might even make a manager-only second human manager and manage some 6-inning DH games just for the heck of it.

I have to admit that the compromises might take way too much programming time, and I have no idea how many people would use them.

But it probably would take less time to allow secondary positions, as well as position players who can also pitch pretty well and could be used as such. Those actually did exist, at the very least in the Negro Leagues. So...I support some of these ideas.

[hockeyman001]

Plus this would be fun to play out lifelike MLB scenarios like, say, the Royals trading for Bumgarner and allowing him to hit, while DHing for someone like Butera (assuming Perez is getting a day off, let's say).