Pitcher Fatigue
 

I am playing with the actual rosters and schedules starting in 1871. What I have seen in simming the 1871 season 5 or 6 times is that a pitcher can get 2+ starts on consecutive days, 3-4 starts if separated by 1 day with the stamina ratings given the pitchers at import and setting the starting pitcher stamina to 5. This is a start, but what i have also found is that pitcher stamina doesn't change much when trying to set it any higher. I have tried 50, 100 even 1000 and the pitcher's still tire out at the same rate.

As I said, I am using actual rosters, actual schedules and the actual starting pitchers. I also looked at the team stats to determine how often the pitcher was relieved. I use this to try to cut down on some of the fatigue. This doesn't always work, case in point is Asa Brainard of the Washington Olympics. He started 30 of the 32 games Washington played and is not relieved in any of them, 10 of those starts are in May. Needless to say he was toast by the 17th. I played out the games just to see what happens and I can get 2-3 good innings then his walk totals sky rocket as well as his era.

What Iam getting to is how does the strategy settings work with the player stamina ratings? Is there an upper limit to the settings? I know that a pitcher's stamina cannot be higher than 250. Is this also true for the Starting Pitcher Stamina setting in the league setup?

I'm far from expert at this and just my opinion, but maybe the problem is the league schedule. In looking at your screen shot, he started 9 games in a 14 day period. That is not realistic I don't believe in the way they played games back then and certainly not against different teams. Remember that travel was limited to train pretty much, so they might play a game or 2 in one city, then need several days to a week to make it to their next destination. Even superman couldn't start that many games in that short a period. Maybe spacing out your schedule to be more realisitic to the era would help your pitchers get the rest they need to be able to start every game. CPB

They also didn't play on Sunday's back then and if I'm not mistaken, and in a lot of cases played the majority of their games on Saturday when people weren't working. Again, that type of scenario would space games out more as well as the travel aspect of that era.

I don't quite understand this part of your post. Don't you have any other SPs? Is your pitching rotation set to "Highest Rested" or "Strict Order?" Is the League Strategy set for 3-man or 4-man rotations? Maybe I'm just not understanding, but it would be useful to understand how you got essentially a 1-person rotation.

League Strategy in 1871 is set to 1 or 2 rotations.

In the early years of baseball, there were only 1 sometimes 2 pitchers per team and that was that. But they didn't pitch they way they do today first off all, nor nearly as often. There was only 1 sometimes 2 games a week at most. In 1871, there was no official schedule, so not sure where that could have come from. Think about it...the teams played on average about 30 games in 6 months from May thru October...that is only on average about a game a week. Set up a schedule with that in mind and you'll have no problem getting Asa Brainard or Rynie Wolters or any of those other 1871 pitchers to do what they did and start virtually all of their teams games, and also perform well enough on top of it.

1871 should be a 30 game schedule with one or two games per week. That schedule was the default in the first release of OOTP10, it appears it may have been changed via a patch?

What you are seeing looks like the OOTP9 1871 schedule and the weirdness you are remarking on was the reason for the change.

OP says he's playing the actual schedules. The game log seems to correspond to Retrosheet:


Date # Opponent Result Record Starter Opposing Starter Winner Attendance Time
5- 5-1871 Vs BOS n L 18-20 0-1 Brainard Spalding 5000 2:25
5-13-1871 At CLE n W 12- 8 1-1 Brainard Pratt 1200 2:30
5-15-1871 At KEK n L 6-12 1-2 Brainard Mathews 2:20
5-16-1871 At CHI n L 4-14 1-3 Brainard Zettlein 5000 1:57
5-17-1871 At ROK n W 12-15 *1 2-3 Brainard Fisher 2:15
5-19-1871 At CHI n L 7- 9 2-4 Brainard Zettlein 5000 1:50
5-20-1871 At CLE n W 13- 9 3-4 Brainard Pratt 2:30
5-22-1871 At TRO n W 14- 5 4-4 Brainard McMullin 1000 3:20
5-24-1871 At BOS n T 4- 4 4-4 Brainard Spalding 3000 2:10
5-27-1871 At BOS n W 6- 5 5-4 Brainard Spalding 3000 2:00

I guess the question is whether the historical 1-man rotation was subject to fatigue. We know that most of those pitchers did not throw stuff comparable to modern era pitches. We could either see lower fatigue and lower stuff/movement ratings or assume that teams were willing to go with pitchers who were fairly tired on their third or fourth starts within a week. My guess is that it's somewhere in the middle.

Very cool...you know, in looking at his stats above, he's really not that far off of them. He did pitch 264 innings and allow 361 hits for real, with the fact that he allowed 292 runs but only 132 earned runs keeping his ERA at 4.50 for the season. I think if you go on in the season, as he gets his rest more since they only play 22 games over the next 4 months he will perform better...maybe... :-)

Ahh but theres the rub, Real schedules don't work correctly with OOTP as fatigue and things like that assume modern day pitcher usage. Too big a difference. So you must use altered schedules to keep pitchers from fatiguing. No matter how high their endurance it is way too low.

Back in those days 1 man pitching staffs were the norm. Pitchers just lobbed the ball, plus back then the game was played by Real Men, the kind with hair on their chest and face, they didn't need no stinkin help. Pitching wasn't as tiring then as now. Fielding wasn't of the ESPN highlight variety. All in all it was a different game.

I have the leagues settings to very low for pitcher fatigue and 5.000 for the starting pitcher stamina. All teams are set to strict rotation and 1 man rotations. I have adjusted the fatigue settings for all players that pitched to 225. I found that setting them to the max can cause issues. I have the seen the ratings go above 250 during the season. When this happens the pitcher tires after the first inning no matter how much rest he has had.

Retrosheet has box scores for all but a few games for the 1872 season. I used these to setup my starting lineups. I had trouble with maybe a dozen games of the 175 game schedule where the pitcher was exhausted. I would check the pitchers' fatigue before the start of each game. I found that a pitcher would be 40% tired to 50% rested if he had pitched 2 days in a row and and had no pitch count for the previous days. I would get at times 0% exhausted when the pitcher had been off for 2 days but pitched the 3 previous days.

I don't mind the pitcher becoming tired. It adds to the game. What I would like to see is that the pitch count isn't retained after 3 days instead of 7 when playing playing using the pre-1900 settings. I confirmed this by doing some back door adjustments. I opened the players.dat file with a hex editor and found where the pitch counts are stored. I reset the pitch counts to 0 for days 4-7 when a pitcher became too fatigued. This would leave the pitcher with some fatigue if he had pitched in the last 3 days.

BTW here are the league totals for 1872 actual/mine:

AB R H D T HR RBI BA
15679 3390 4487 567 139 35 2103 0.286
14989 2575 4362 531 131 30 1990 0.291

IP ER ERA
3285.1 1357 3.72
3241 922 2.56

TC PO A E LFA
16813 9858 4201 2754 0.836
17266 9720 5015 2531 0.853


My final standings:
BS1 36 12 0.750 0.0
NY2 38 18 0.679 2.0
BL1 34 24 0.586 7.0
PH1 24 23 0.511 11.5
WS4 5 6 0.455 12.5
CL1 10 12 0.455 13.0
WS3 3 6 0.333 13.5
TRO 11 14 0.440 13.5
BR1 8 21 0.276 18.5
BR2 12 25 0.324 18.5
MID 2 22 0.083 22.0

Team rosters had at the most 15 or 16 players at the time, usually 1 pitcher and another player who could pitch just in case. There were no fastballs, as they didn't pitch overhand, so there was no need for a bullpen or a pitchers arm being tired.

In 1877 teams played usually on Tues, Thur and Sat, so I would assume something close for 1871.

Just to make someones head come off........Pitchers in the 1870's often threw well over 200 pitches per game three times a week (that is 600-700 pitches per week folks) due to all the errors and the scoring and the rules of the day.

It really was a different game and that needs to be kept in mind. OOTP is based on 1990's baseball and allowances have been made for early era play. All the allowances in the world won't make it totally realistic though, just a very good approximation.

And that's just the league games. The teams generally played as many exhibition games as they did league games, and many times used the same pitcher.

The only solution to this is the ability to manually reset fatigue in Commissioner mode. OOTP really can't adjust to these practices. Until that's enabled, go through the schedule and edit anytime a pitcher is scheduled to pitch three days in a four day stretch, which is the dividing line for fatigue.

It could adjust if the way stamina is measured was changed to make it more relative to the era. Say a modern guy with 250 Stamina can throw about about 150 pitches on 3-4 days rest, but an 1871 guy with 250 stamina can throw 200+ pitches every other day and pitch on no rest if needed.

This is how you make allowance for the era.

The game saves the last 5 days and the current days pitch counts. With the settings of pitcher stamina of very high and a fatigue rating of 225 a pitcher will become exhausted between pitch 500-600 or 3 days. The unknown factor is what the starting pitcher stamina does in the league totals. I still haven't figured out what it actually does. I haven't seen any benefit with changing this value from 1.

What I would like to see is the stamina rating determines how the pitch count is retained over the 5 days.

very high - keeps the last 2 days within the regular 5 day retention
high - keeps the last 3 days within the regular 5 day retention
normal, low, very low - pitch count functions normally

Right now I am doing this manually through a hex editor. This still tires the pitcher out especially going that 3rd consecutive day. I can get fatigue ratings all the way down to 7%, but it is usually around 40% after 2 consecutive starts.

The 1873 season I had to do a lot of editing as each team would go through a stretch where the pitcher starting 4-5 games in a row. The worst was Asa Brainard this time with Baltimore, starting 10 times in a 13 day span, 10/9 - 10/21, including 6 in a row.

The Pitcher Stamina rating LTM will raise the stamina for league pitchers accross the board. But there is maximum rating that stamina can ever be and since you are setting all your pitchers to this manually, then raising the LTM will have no effect. I think if you DON'T manually edit stamina and set the LTM to 10 or so, you should accomplish the same effect of maxing out everyone's stamina.

I know that the LTM functions, because I use it to regulate CG's in my league and have seen it's effects.....