...if they can't fix the fielding system, then the price of pitching and fielding relative to hitting must come down...

Quote: Originally posted by grizzly_one on 9/27/2009The old baseball adage "Good pitching beats good hitting" is silly.

ftfy.

Sometimes good pitching beats good hitting. Sometimes it's the other way around. This is one of the dumbest lines in "the book" that still survives as some kind of axiom. You want to say something that makes some kind of sense? Try: "Good pitching usually beats bad hitting." Maybe: "Good hitting will often knock the bejeezus out of bad pitching."

Just read the box scores a couple of days. You'll see good pitching losing to good hitting all the time. You'll see good lineups shut down by journeymen. All. The. Time.

lol

I agree the pitching-hitting mix seems a bit out of whack. However, if pitching becomes more dominant, games will become lower-scoring and I foresee won-loss records becoming more eratic. Its just a theorey tho.

Statistically you should be right - lower scoring games increase the randomness associated with the result of each game. Beyond this, we should really realize by now that good pitching does NOT beat good hitting. It's not universally true, but in most years the All-Star game has been higher scoring than an average season game. All the pitchers in these games are rested, nobody gets stretched out anymore - still holds true.

...yeah, i don't buy the good pitching beats good hitting idea, but the hitting/pitching balance is out of whack, and it's not hard to demonstrate that...

Any news on what the next update will be besides an update for '09 players?

...the site should have some kind of announcement soon...

In the past, team selection was biased towards pitching teams. I assumed the h/p balance was skewed to correct this imbalance and had nothing to do with real life. The best level is one where hitting teams and pitching teams are equaly playable. Today's game is more balanced than the 50/50 split.

...in the past (prior to the last big update in 2007) there were 2 reasons for a bias toward pitching...one was that you could load up your OF with 3 super range guys and get 300 plus plays...that's a lot of hits taken away...the second was that excellent ERA+ pitchers crushed non-HR XBH...along with the removal of both of those "things" the site also boosted the cost of range by a lot under the mistaken impression that its effect was spread evenly throughout the range spectrum when it's not...super range OFers may have a range salary cost that is worth it, but no one else on the above average side does...and while it's a good thing that excellent ERA+ pitchers are no longer able to shut down XBH, their price also went up in such a way that it reflects their effectiveness under the old system rather than the new...

...one's hitting salary dollar just buys more than one's pitching and defence dollar...

Quote: Originally Posted By grizzly_one on 9/29/2009
As to the Pitching/Hitting thing. In real baseball give me a stud staff with mediocre hitting over the stud hitting with mediocre pitching any day. Of course, that's just my opinion.

...the dodgers of the 60s were my favorite team growing up, so that's certainly my prejudice as well...however i don't think any study of MLB history would show that great pitching teams will make the WS more that great hitting teams do...

I seem to remember a sabermetric study that showed pitching teams do better than hitting teams in the playoffs but had no advantage in the regular season. the quality of competition and the extra days off were two of the factors.

Quote: Originally posted by grizzly_one on 9/29/2009When you have a line-up of Hall of Fame hitters going against Hall of Fame pitchers. I believe the stats would end up mediocre for all. Here, the hitters lose very little while the pitchers look like they shouldn't even be in rookie ball.

I agree with this...