Everyone is a flyball pitcher?

[3fbrown]

I am having another strange issue with rookie pitchers in my historical league. This league uses neutralized stats, based on peak seasons for rookies, and I just imported the rookies for 1912. I noticed that no pitchers were rated higher than 3 stars, so I tried to figure out the issue.

To make a long story short, everyone in the rookie class is a flyball pitcher. Out of the 93 rookie pitchers, I would estimate 60% are extreme flyball pitchers, 35% are flyball pitchers, and just a few (7) are neutral. That's it - no groundball pitchers at all. This is in contrast with the already existing pitchers (which were imported with OOTP 19), whose groundball tendencies are equally spread over the range.

Has anyone else had this problem? Or any ideas how to deal with this, other than editing every single pitcher?

[niu354]

I had a similar problem with stamina, so check that too. Solution was switch away from neutralized stats.

[clamel]

I got a similar problem I think.
Mid 1980s I checked who could be listed as groundball pitcher in all levels. Of the +2400 pitchers only about 40 was groundballers.

That's abit low I believe, or ?

I have not neutralized stats on.

[3fbrown]

I am pretty sure it should be roughly an even mix of flyball and groundball pitchers. I mean, I think the definition of flyball/groundball is made so that the distribution is about equal. 40 out of 2400 is very far out of alignment!

I am still playing my league in OOTP 19, hoping to have a fix for this before advancing to OOTP 21. But I haven't heard anything, nor seen an update since it happened to me.

The White Sox are doing well in 1912 in the old version though! My main (not really) problem is that my best SP is Ray Caldwell, who is super lazy. My top prospect is Tillie Walker, who is a perfectionist. Every time I call Walker up, he and Caldwell argue and fight. I need better leadership on the team!

[actionjackson]

I'm not going to minimize this because that would be an assholish thing to do, but this may be a cosmetic issue rather than a broken game issue. I'm seeing something similar in my OOTP21 game in terms of a ton of neutral/flyball/extreme fly ball pitchers, and single digit ground ball pitchers, however when I sort by Movement (better Movement = fewer HR), I have zero pitchers rated as 1s (on a 1-5 rating scale). There are a few fives, and more than half are at 3 and up (average to above average Movement), which suggests to me that there may in fact be more groundball pitchers than neutral/fly/extreme fly ball pitchers in this inaugural draft class (704 players, about 200+ are pitchers). The only way to figure it out is to try out a test season, and see if the stats line up with where they should be. Another thing you can do is tailor the stats output to an MLB year that featured the kind of stats output you want to see. I use 1984 stats output for all my games, and it hits the sweet spot for me. Sort of in the middle between deadball, and crazyball.

See this thread, and more specifically this post for information on how to do this, and come very close to what you're looking for regardless of what types of pitchers are in your game. I got very good results using this method in OOTPXX, which is one iteration beyond where you're at in OOTP19. Just quickly scanned through my pitchers, and in my entire game, there's a grand total of 4 groundball pitchers, and two extreme groundball pitchers in a 16 team league (8 teams per sub-league), so these are similar ratios to what you're seeing in your OOTP19 league. As this feature is not functioning optimally (to put it mildly), I would suggest looking for pitchers with strong Movement ratings if you want more ground ballers on your staff. Whatever the case may be, I can tell you that your league wide stats output shouldn't be affected by this feature, which appears to have been around for at least three versions now.

Just for comparison's sake:

1984 RL: 4.26 R/G, .043 2B/AB, .007 3B/AB, .023 HR/AB, 66.74 SB%, .083 BB/PA, .156 K/AB (not sure why OOTP uses BB/PA, and K/AB, but since it does, that's what I do as well), .260/.323/.385/.708, 3.81 ERA, 15.02 CG%, 1.34 WHIP, 8.9 H/9, 0.8 HR/9, 3.2 BB/9, 5.4 K/9, 1.69 K/BB, .286 BABIP, .699 DEF, .978 FLD%

1902 OOTP (based on 1984 stats output): 4.33 R/G, .045 2B/AB, .007 3B/AB, .022 HR/AB, 68.11 SB%, .084 BB/PA, .160 K/AB, .258/.321/.382/.703, 3.95 ERA, 17.09 CG%, 1.34 WHIP, 8.9 H/9, 0.8 HR/9, 3.2 BB/9, 5.5 K/9, 1.74 K/BB, .286 BABIP, .698 DEF, .981 FLD%

That's probably as good as it gets, as far as getting the kind of stats output I want to see in my game. The CG% is a bit high, but this is a historical random debut, and there are 19th century pitchers in it. Those guys didn't get the luxury of solid bullpens, so they tend to go deep. That those numbers are reasonably close together suggests the method is working.

So, why do I focus on the league wide numbers so much? Because, if you get them right, the individual players should perform close to where you want them to be. Any questions? Fire away, 'cause it's complicated.

[3fbrown]

Thanks actionjackson, I appreciate the response.

I hear what you are saying about the distribution being skewed high, and (to put your ideas into other words) if everyone is high, then nobody is really high. That much is of course correct. In fact, in the continuing OOTP 19 version, the pitchers skew toward high GB rates. Very few have high flyball rates. Not a problem.

But when I switch to OOTP 21, all the new pitchers have high flyball rates. This does affect movement, and in fact that is how I noticed the problem. All pitchers in the rookie draft had low ratings (not a single pitcher better than 3 stars), and it was because they all had low movement. This is both in a vacuum and compared to the rest of the league.

Overall the league's pitcher movement ratings average around 3.0-3.5 out of 5. Out of 93 rookie pitchers, only 2 or 3 were better than league average with movement, and their average would be way down at 2.0-2.5. If I let these pitchers join the league, while the overall league totals would be fine, the rookies would be giving up all the HRs. (Or more likely, none of them would get to pitch.)

So while I am confident you are right, that league HR totals would be in line, I am definitely not convinced that these new pitchers would fit into the rest of the league. Does that make sense? If I started new with OOTP 21 I assume none of this would be a problem, but switching the league is causing this compatibility problem.

[clamel]

My concern is still that importing players in historical settings gives a lot more to other types than GB or ExGB.

Took a look at the setup for Standard 2020 league in OOTP21.
I only checked the players in MLB
BUT
I had 837 pitchers and 106 was GB or ExGB.
that's 12-13 %,
but in my historical world mid-80s I had less than 2 % groundballers.

How do this make sense. I would have hoped for some more and looking over the names I find many that was considered true groundballers.

Perhaps it's just what one has to take playing historical. As long as other numbers stack up close enough to RL.

[3fbrown]

My concern is still that importing players in historical settings gives a lot more to other types than GB or ExGB.

I agree. I just turned over my other league, which just finished the 1998 season. The rookie draft has no SP that are GB or ExGB. There are 6 such RP. This is out of a total of 128 pitchers in the draft. So that's less than 5%. There are 38 FB/ExF pitchers.

The good news is that the pitchers are good anyway - there are plenty of pitchers that are 4 and 5 stars. So I will just roll with it for now, but is still clearly a problem.

I just took a quick look at last year's stats, since last year's rookies were the first ones with the elevated FB rates. The overall league gave up just over 1.0 HR per 9 innings. The rookie class gave up more, probably 1.1 or a bit more (I did not do the math, just looked over the list). It's a bit high, but those guys are rookies after all, and nobody has stats that look out of place. It is not obvious that HR rate was affected significantly. I glanced at the GDP rate against those pitchers, and it also looked low but not clearly out of line.

[3fbrown]

As Clamel indicated, I have figured out that the issue is related to neutralized stats. When I go with real stats, GB% are properly distributed. I also did some testing, and ground ball rates are definitely affected by this league-wide. So while home run rates will find their level, GB% does not. It does matter, though the importance of that difference is debatable.

Anyway, it's pretty late to be posting this information, but I figured I would do it just in case anyone ever is curious. I don't have version 22, so I have no idea if this problem persisted. The upside is that in my testing (with random debut leagues) having Real Stats seemed to not cause any problems for someone like me that likes neutralized stats. The game appears to be smart enough to adjust for era without the neutralized stats. I still had pitchers from 1884 getting loads of strikeouts and hitters from 1907 hitting lots of homers.

[Garlon]

There were updates to the database for the new game.

https://forums.ootpdevelopments.com/...d.php?t=326065