#1

Just like in my abbreviated - and already retired - golf game, where I hit the ball long and straight only to suffer in the short game, here too I am aware that "advanced settings" may make a difference as the portion of WIS baseball that needs to be fine tuned. True?

I am mostly concerned with the pitching at this point, as that is what seems to be letting me down (see #2 below for possible other problem). How much of a hair trigger do you switch too in the dog days of the season as far as pulling the pitchers? All but three of my 10 pitchers are set at 1.

If the advanced settings are critical, they may be coming into play, as late in the campaign my season long 9-game lead has evaporated. With 6 games to go, I am hanging onto a 1-game lead.

In the advanced settings I am still running on "recommendations" which have done fine all season – until now.

What are your theories on how to play this angle of the game?


#2

In this same $255 mil league, my 80 Brett and 27 Gehrig weren't producing, so they have been riding pine most of the season. I have been winning without them.

I check my box score and lineup daily as I imagine most players here do. Down the home stretch I have been repeatedly finding the attenuated Gehrig in the lineup, stranding runners and generally not helping out - even though I had not penciled him in. I would take him out only to find him back in after the next game was played. What's up? . . . and why now? My manager’s settings are hands off as far as any kind of replacements; and those settings have been respected by the simulator all season without incident . Now, I'm losing games and my lead. Where does this interference come from? Any chance that the game has been hacked and someone is tinkering? Or, aside from the pushy Gehrig, maybe it is simply a matter of more seasoned players knowing better how to play the short game?

Before the last game I put Gehrig and Brett on rest - as opposed to on the bench - and that has seemed to work . . . for one game. That had not been necessary all season long though. We’ll see.

Is the simulator trying to help me manage?

Do you have any theories . . . or knowledge about this mystery?

thanks

1. Don't rely on the recommendations for anything. They're horrible in many, many different ways. First off, the pitch counts are based on total innings pitched, not pitches per game (in-game stamina) which is what you should be looking at to set pitch counts. Look up your pitchers' real life IP/G, then multiple by about 15 or 16 to get your PC max.

Another example: I recently entered the 1967 White Sox into a theme league (the entire team, basically, with 4 twists). Cisco Carlos had by far the best numbers of any pitcher on the team. Guess which role he was placed in by default? Mop up!

2. With respect to Gehrig and Brett playing when you don't want them to, I think you're probably overlooking something with your settings. I've never had players start for me who I didn't want to start, unless I made an error of some kind. Are you making the changes and not saving them? Are you making the changes only for y pitchers and not righties (or vice versa)? Are their replacements tired and below their autorest numbers? If you're absolutely positive it's not your doing, then send a ticket to Admin.

thanks crazystengel, for taking the time to reply.

Because this cap is so high I have enough ip/ab and there have been no apparent fatigue issues at the dish or on the mound. Are you suggesting that my pitchers could be having ip.g fatigue within individual games that does not register on the fatigue scale - which is almost always at 100% and and not yet ever below 94%?

I will apply the formula you gave and look at the history of some of their games to see if there is a drop after the ip/g redline is reached . . . but I won't be able to see a history of pitch count by inning - will I? I can maybe ballpark it by looking at the final pitch count and when they started to go bad.

Your response re Gehrig is entirely possible. I thought I was being careful. I have been attentive to the rhp and lhp lineups after seeing how my batters do against rhp and lhp in the team stats window. That is kind of fun. I sort of feel like I am mining for crumbs of advantage. I guess things like this are exactly what I am trying to learn more about and the root of my initial question.

this is helpful

"Are you suggesting that my pitchers could be having ip.g fatigue within individual games that does not register on the fatigue scale"

That's right. And sometimes you'll have a pitcher who looks like he should be able to throw 120 pitches a game, but when you see his IP/G you realize that's not going to work. 1930 y Grove with his 307 IP looks like he'd be a horse, but because of relief appearances in real life his IP/G is only 5.82 -- which in my opinion is only good for about 90 pitches a start.

Low IP/G is also one of the reasons I tend to stay away from modern relievers. If you find you've been underusing Gagne or Eck, there's no way to "catch up on" those innings with a spot start or two, because those guys are toast in a game after about 20 pitches.

In-game fatigue is one of the aspects of WIS that is most poorly understood by new owners in my opinion.

The reason is that the boxscores don't show you in-game fatigue at all. A pitcher could enter a game at 100% - and be at 100% at the end of the game - and so you think he has been pitching at 100% throughout. Not true.

Do a search for elbirdo's pitch count thread, which explains in great detail how to calculate the optimal pitch count for your pitchers. I completely agree with crazystengel - don't use WIS's recommendations for pitch counts.

Nice eye-opener. Just the education I was hoping for. thanks guys

when in doubt, call time out

--Mr Heitkemper, 4th grade basketball



he benched me once for calling time out twice in three minutes. hey i was confuzzled!

Gagne, Wagner, Eckersley and Rivera were set at 20 mpc. I lowered them all to 15 according to your formula which now has them all between 16-17. Do you think that small change will make a difference? I know sometimes in RL it is easy to say (in hindsight) that someone, "should have been taken out 3 pitches ago."

All of my starter's calculations came out 3-5 pitches lower than how they automatically were set. I could have raised their mpc but have not yet done that. I'm considering it, but it looks like a conservative move after they have gone beyond 110 to stop them a little short of their mpc.

Do you think it is common for the successful owners to micro manage to that degree? 3-5 pitches?

On further rumination of the suggestion to multiply the RL ip/g by 15 or 16, I did both numbers. The recommendations say 20. I wonder about the small differences and how important they are. It could be considerable. What do you think? Is an mpc of 15 pulling them a few pitches too soon or is 20 waiting a few pitches too long? Is the difference too small to manage? If so then the simulator is doing a pretty good job - in this instance

xxxxxxxxx sim set ip/gx 15 x 16

99 wagner 20 16 18
90 eckersl 20 17 19
08 rivera 20 16 18
03 gagne 20 16 17

The next question I have is, how do you determine where to set the "when to pull them out of the game" on the 1-5 scale?

Setting the right pitch count isn't micromanaging. You just get your calculator out and do it once at the beginning of the season. Shouldn't take 3 minutes to set pitch counts once you get the hang of it. Occasionally, during the season, I will have to lower or raise a starter's PC by 5 as his fatigue slowly drifts one way or the other, but it isn't a big deal.

"The next question I have is, how do you determine where to set the "when to pull them out of the game" on the 1-5 scale?"

If a pitcher's good -- one of your top starters or relievers -- I think he should always be set at 1 (in fact, I wish there was a 0 setting: "never come out until PC max reached").

If you have 1995 Maddux and he gives up 4 straight hits in the first inning, that doesn't mean he's going to keep getting rocked all game -- previous at-bats have no effect on what a pitcher is going to do next. I'd rather a good pitcher ride out a rough patch than have him come out early and wear out my pen.

For regular season games I usually use a 1 pull for all my pitchers. In a must-win game or in the playoffs, I'll put the lower quality pitchers on a 3-5 pull -- unless I put them on rest because I don't want them coming in at all. It always surprises me when, in the deciding game of a playoff series, my opponent's mop up comes into the game in the 1st or 2nd inning. IMO your worst pitchers should be on rest for important games, and your average pitchers should be prevented from coming into the game until the 9th, if at all.

Part of my now "adjusted" perspective, is that it looks like the SIM is pretty close on calculating an accurate pc. I just need to decide if I want to go, "a few pitches more" or, "a few pitches less.”

The SIM doesn't allow adjustment in increments any smaller than 5 so it is a little like the RL manager standing on the top step of the dugout, fervently eyeing his pitcher and calculating when to pull the plug. Is he a tad conservative or a bit of a risk-taker? The perfect decision is forever unattainable so instinct or faith kick in when numbers stall.

One could argue to leave the PCs as the sim sets them. But the sim sometimes can mislead - as in crazystengel's earlier example.

So

Boogerlip’s pre season calculating then is insurance against the limits of computers . . . and the desire to feel like the architect of one’s success and failures?

Maybe micro-managing wasn't exactly how I wanted to say that . . . it just feels like the decision making is approaching a minutiae of real life. Perhaps that is a good “what if” approximation.

Good stuff on the 1-5 pull theories crazystengel. I like the idea of layers for the playoffs and important games: pine for the exhausted or non-performing; 3-5 for the average Joes; and 1 for the frontline horses you rode in on. If I got that right.

OK, an image, a strategy is forming. Hope I can remember it all.

attenuated Gehrig



I did a search and could not find this guy

look under his nickname "bisquit pants"

There might not have been enough games (2) to credit crazy's theory but I did plug in the lower pitch counts and the team's skid appears to have ended. They have played two solid games and are feeling confident. The magic number is down to 1 with 3 games to go. Both starting pitchers have gone longer each game - only needing the closer. Maybe the sim, seeing the lesser numbers in the formula for the relievers, shyed away from them? They had been losing a lot of late inning games with the 4th or 5th pitcher of the game.
Grazie' crazystengel