2015 - A Year of the Pitcher

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commish
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2015 - A Year of the Pitcher

Post by commish » Sat Mar 19, 2016 6:44 pm

http://www.sportingcharts.com/articles/ ... -game.aspx

The average number of runs scored in an MLB game varies from year to year and era to era. Recently MLB had these two averages:

2013: 8.33
2014: 8:13
2015: 8.50

GLBL 2015: 6.50

Why such a low level of scoring?
Do we concern ourselves with this statistic?
Is it likely to self correct?

FYI..these are the averages for the ball park factors
Avg BP Batting AVG. .999
Avg BP HR .985
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milwaukee_mike
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Re: 2015 - A Year of the Pitcher

Post by milwaukee_mike » Sat Mar 19, 2016 8:36 pm

No concerns from where I sit, settings are as they should be for, it just seems that due to the short season we've ended up at the far end of the distribution curve in terms of output and player creation, nothing for us really to concern ourselves about IMO.

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Re: 2015 - A Year of the Pitcher

Post by commish » Tue Mar 29, 2016 4:33 pm

No change has been made to the settings. However, this is a topic that will remain open. I'd like to see how year 2 (2016) plays out and then take a fresh look when the stats are in.

So, no changes are imminent yet please be aware that some settings....could potentially change (they would not be dramatic) as we move forward.

Comments and analysis most welcome in this thread. Thanks to all who have weighed in on the topic.
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Al B
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Re: 2015 - A Year of the Pitcher

Post by Al B » Thu Mar 31, 2016 4:54 pm

I wish I understood better how OOTP works, because there is something seriously weird going on.

I wanted to attach the screen shot that Steve posted in the GroupMe discussion, but it's too large. To recap, the default settings for the league totals (presumably based on 2014 MLB totals) gave numbers that were similar to those 2014 MLB totals in some categories, and a bit off in others. You might think that all you'd have to do is change all the totals to the actual 2014 numbers (or something close to them) and you'd be good to go.

But...

The "default" totals for strikeouts was much lower than in MLB (default 29000 / 2014 MLB 37441) and yet the strikeout rate in our league was much higher. That was, by any estimation, an odd result. It would seem to imply that the league modifiers don't affect the totals at all.

Here's a guess, and it's really just a shot in the dark. The default league totals for AB were very close to the actual 2014 AB in MLB. But that was for a 30-team, 162-game season. Is it possible that applying those totals to our 12-team, 140-game season confuses the program?

I wonder if we need to try to set the defaults according to the smaller number of teams and games we have. It wouldn't be that hard to do: we play, as a league, 840 games; MLB plays roughly three times that (2430). If you set the league totals to a third of the default totals and run a test season, you could see if it produces results closer to what you'd expect it to produce. That strikes me as a better option than marching forward and hoping the game corrects itself.

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Al B
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Re: 2015 - A Year of the Pitcher

Post by Al B » Sat Apr 02, 2016 12:33 am

Well, I'll be darned. Check this out (it's from this page of the Online Manual):
OOTP generates a league total for each category, noted in the left column. The league total acts as the basis for the calculation engine. In historical leagues, these are the real league totals from the imported year. In fictional leagues it's the major league totals from the most recently completed season. The league totals do NOT directly equate to how many of these events you will see in your league! They are simply a basis for calculation, which ensures the ratios of these events remain accurate compared to real life. Adjusting league totals is a little counterintuitive. The results in your league are inversely related to the league totals. In other words, if you increase the triples total from 1,000 to 2,000, it would actually result in FEWER triples in your league! We do not recommend adjusting your league totals directly unless you're just messing around, or you are experienced in working with our league totals!
Could that explain why we had so many strikeouts this year?

milwaukee_mike
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Re: 2015 - A Year of the Pitcher

Post by milwaukee_mike » Sat Apr 02, 2016 2:09 pm

All,

It's unlikely what Al says is correct as I commish two leagues both with reduced (120-130 game schedules), one playing with 2014 or 2015 defaults every year, but playing in the 1950s and 1960s and another that runs in the 2000s and started with 1960-1970s defaults.

The issue I saw is that the 'defaults' in GLBL do NOT match the defaults a new league should start with, which is quite strange.

I am going to sim a test for GLBL for about 20 years to see what happens, starting shortly.

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Re: 2015 - A Year of the Pitcher

Post by milwaukee_mike » Sat Apr 02, 2016 3:24 pm

OK guys, a quick copy paste and supporting data of what I just sent Steve over groupme from a 14 season sim in GLBL.
looks like year 1 was just an anomaly... ERAs are up as are averages

I honestly think the year 1 'strangeness' is due to how teams drafted.. we had a couple teams draft to get the first draft pick and not compete, so that meant those who did want to compete got a bunch laod better players e.g. no one in the USA has beaten MILs 95 wins in the 14 year sim just run nor has any team lost more than the 109 games toledo lost in 2015, in fact no other team has lost more than 99 games...

so, nothing to worry about, just let the league play out as it should
See the attachment below, note AI was given control of all teams so trades etc played out by the AI to try and maintain a relatively equal footing.
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Al B
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Re: 2015 - A Year of the Pitcher

Post by Al B » Sun Apr 03, 2016 6:46 am

The issue I saw is that the 'defaults' in GLBL do NOT match the defaults a new league should start with, which is quite strange.
Right. And that's a VERY significant issue. That's what I was trying to point out with the quote from the manual. The defaults should have been the actual totals from 2014, but they weren't. The "default" number for strikeouts was way too low, which, as the manual explains, resulted in the strikeouts in our league being way too high.

Mike's experiments would suggest that batting averages and ERAs are going to rise to relatively normal historical levels in the GLBL, and that's good news, but I'm still very concerned about those strikeouts. As I've mentioned elsewhere, the strikeout rate in the GLBL in our inaugural season was significantly higher than the strikeout rate in any season in baseball history. In my opinion, that's something that is broken and needs to be fixed.
I honestly think the year 1 'strangeness' is due to how teams drafted
The test seasons I've run in my own league do not support that. I've run season after season, making all kinds of personnel changes (adding players, turning off trading, turning it back on, allowing the AI to change lineups and rotations, not allowing it to make changes, etc.), and season after season, all the league totals that the simulation produces remain remarkably consistent. What this shows is that the players themselves don't actually have anything to do with what the totals are going to be. Matching the totals that it's trying to match is one of the things OOTP does very, very well.

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Al B
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Re: 2015 - A Year of the Pitcher

Post by Al B » Thu Jun 30, 2016 7:04 pm

Well, it's about that time again... with the regular season looming, here is my annual plea for the Commissioner to address the issue of pitcher dominance and off-the-charts strikeouts totals.

First, the data:

BATTING AVG.
2015 USA: .228
2016 USA: .234

2015 CAN: .235
2016 CAN: .236

RUNS PER GAME (per team)
2015 USA: 3.11
2016 USA: 3.52

2015 CAN: 3.39
2016 CAN: 3.36

STRIKEOUTS
2015 USA: 7487 in 840 G (8.9 per game)
2016 USA: 7347 in 840 G (8.7 per game)

2015 CAN: 6670 in 840 G (7.9 per game)
2016 CAN: 6673 in 840 G (7.9 per game)

Next, some historical context:

Yearly batting averages in Major League Baseball typically congregate in the .250-.265 range. Only twice (1908 and 1888) has the MLB average dipped below .240, and just barely, at .239.

We've been comfortably below .240 in both leagues, both years.

As for strikeouts, our 8.9 and 8.7 rates in the USA league are much, much higher than any league strikeout rate ever posted in real life, and the Canadian league's 7.9 rate has only been equaled once in real life (2015; 2016 is also ahead of that pace as of this writing).

Runs per game in MLB have moved up and down, because the game has changed a lot in 139 years. Even still, no real-life season has ever come close to producing runs as infrequently as our USA league's 3.11 per game in 2015, and that league's "dramatic" increase to 3.52 in '16 would rank it 135th out of 139 if it were compared to all historical MLB seasons. The Canadian league's 2015 and 2016 seasons would rank 137th and 138th, respectively.

Strikeout rates in MLB have climbed slowly and surely over the years; the seven highest rates of all time are in the seven years of this decade (counting the in-progress 2016). The MLB rate may well eventually reach the 8.7 or 8.9 of our USA League at some point. One might try to argue, then, that we are merely ahead of the curve in our league, and that the game we're playing is five or ten years ahead of its time.

That argument has problems. While our league's results appear to be skewing towards the future in that one stat (strikeouts), it's mired in the distant past in runs scored and batting average. We may be striking out like they will in 2025, but we're scoring runs like they did in 1908. In spite of all the strikeouts in the contemporary game, they score about a run more per game than we do, because they hit twenty points higher.

Before last season the question "will this correct itself?" was raised. Mike ran some test seasons and reported that batting averages would rise (but would stay on the low end of historical norms). His report did not include strikeout data.

It's early, but I'm pretty unconvinced that we're moving in the right direction. Runs per game went down in the Canadian league last year. If we're heading towards historic norms, we don't appear to be in much of a hurry.

This is something that can be fixed. It does require making a copy of the league and some trial and error, fiddling around with league totals modifiers. It takes a little time. I have some experience with this, and it can be a little frustrating, because OOTP will not always do what you expect it to do. But once you figure out what it wants you to do to make it do what you want it to do, it will comply (that's where the trial and error comes in).

But if I'm the only one in the league who's tired of seeing starters hitting .180, I'll zip it for another year.

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Re: 2015 - A Year of the Pitcher

Post by Alex (Hamilton) » Thu Jun 30, 2016 7:56 pm

I guess in the end, I don't really care. I don't mean that flippantly, either, but I've seen comments above that this is something that needs to be "fixed" or moving in the "wrong direction" and I don't get that. I mean, if this were a historical league or a league that mimicked the MLB, then sure, it would be a bigger concern. However, this is a completely fictional league that can have its own character and traits.

I guess I'm enjoying the fact that I have to think about what the lower offensive output means in my own strategy. Do I focus more on players who can save runs with their glove since a slightly better hitter doesn't add much, shift my strategy to more bunting/stealing since runs are at a premium and these strategies aren't the same loss of run expectation they are in modern baseball, and what kind of contracts should I be giving out because of those differences? I'll just say that I'm very much enjoying the challenge presented by these questions that are much more simply answered in a league that mimics modern baseball because its very comparable and there's a lot of real life discussion that applies.

To me, there's also problem with changing it two seasons in right now and that's that the current league records and player stats will look pretty awful. Essentially, they'll mean nothing. And, more importantly, hat also means that those of us taking into account the league norms in their team management (the questions I eluded to above) will be penalized for doing so. In that context, if we're changing those numbers, I think we would have to start over from scratch to be fair.

I'll just wrap up by again emphasizing that I'm fine with and actually enjoy the fact that the league has its own personality.

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