Shorten the number of innings in a game
 

Seems like we should be able to control how many innings a league plays. Most video games allow shorter games this way, I'd like us to be able to set a junior league to 6 innings or a major league.

Is this doable?

1) Doing it simply and badly would be a relatively easy add-on, I'd think.

2) Doing it well would be an immense undertaking. In order to accurately sim what a 6-inning league would look like, you'd have to program that into the AI, which would change strategy, the way it uses pitchers, possibly fatigue, even the way teams value players. And I don't think most people would want the devs spending time on it.


OOTP is a pro baseball sim. It's simply not designed to simulate youth league baseball, any more than it could sim church-league softball or backyard wiffleball.

Yeah, it would be a completely different game with respect to pitcher roles and strategy.

Yeah, I can see that. In my head, what i wanted to model was precisely that. But only in the form of a human thinking that way, not really having the game respond differently. I thought of it for OOTP precisely because I wanted to see the modeling work for real life. But you're right. Not in OOTP's wheelhouse. Probably a game I need to build myself.

I would point out from a realism perspective in professional baseball games are sometimes less than 9 innings long: the minor leagues have long used a rule which states that both games of a regular, single-admission doubleheader are only 7 innings long. (In earlier years the rule was often the first game was 9 innings and only the second game reduced to 7 innings.)

A regularly scheduled single game in the minors leagues can also be reduced to 7 innings if prior to that game a suspended game is completed if that suspended game had been suspended before 5 innings had been played.

I think most are aware of shorter games as a small percentage of games played in various leagues. Not sure how that applies.

The question was asked in terms of all or nearly all games being shorter in a given league That would change strategy, roster composition and player utilization significantly depending on what type of run scoring environment was applied.

One would actually have to play hundreds/thousands of 6 inning games over a period of time to get sufficient results and somehow record how certain strategies and player utilization works. It actually sounds like an interesting experiment.

The point is if limited circumstance 7-inning games can be incorporated at some point without negative issues, then allowing all games to be 7 innings (or other length) ought not to be a major problem since having functional shorter games would have been demonstrated.

I think you are missing the point of the OP.

The user wants something that OOTP cannot as yet do. There are examples of what the user wants in real-world professional baseball albeit in limited circumstances. If OOTP can eventually be able to do those limited circumstances, then that is a demonstration it could handle the wider scenario the user wants.

Get the limited scenario working and the wider one ought to be possible. That is all I am saying.

LGO is dead on to what I was saying/asking. I spent years on beta and I lead a huge programming team (in my day job and have for over a decade) so I understand the constraints of technical projects. I wasn't going off on a rant, really. And i'm notorious for shooting down ideas I think are insane in here, so...I was initially taking a dose of my own medicine.

Except now.

The origin of this post is, if you know anything about cricket...you know that there are different forms all based on time. The most popular at the moment is Twenty20 cricket which is a limited amount of overs and outs.

I have a theory that baseball would regain popularity and would be better if games were shorter. Since if every game in a year were rained out, 5 inning games would count, I think baseball games should all be 5 (or 6) innings because it'd change the entire complexity of the game.

I'd be super curious to simulate that over a period of time and see what it'd do, etc. etc. and test it out. I could do it in OOTP now if I wanted to, if I played both teams out and essentially did something like manage them both or whatever. But...I don't really want to do that. Though now that I type that i'm considering it.

Even if the game allowed for inducing a rain delay or making it so you could end a game after 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 innings due to rain, it'd serve my purpose the same way.

I don't want the code base to be changed to reflect this idea AT ALL. ONLY the functionality to shorten games because IN THE REAL WORLD baseball games DO NOT ALWAYS go nine innings and in OOTP they ALWAYS do because rain delays exist, but no games end with rain.

So I just went from asking for a thing that's "unrealistic" to actually asking for a thing that more accurately reflects baseball in the real world.

ACTUAL rain shortened games.

There.

Thanks for the debate and helping me flesh this out, gang.

Apparently rainouts and delays are in OOTP16, so...depending on how implemented (can a user induce one in commish mode?) this would solve this issue.

I don't think OOTP16 will have rain-shortened games. It will have rainouts, but I think those will be games that are cancelled before they're ever played, not games that are called mid-game. I could be wrong here - we'll have to wait and see. But there is definitely no way in OOTP15 to have a game that is less than nine innings.

That was what I was thinking about by saying "do it badly." It would be nice to have rain-shortened games and rainouts, and if they put that in they could just make an option where you choose to force a rain-shortened game or somesuch. You'd have to do fiddling with the usage settings to get the AI to respond remotely rationally to the situation. (Were I a manager suddenly put in such a league, I'd probably go to a more-or-less all-bullpen approach; nobody ever pitches more than 2-3 innings at a time; obviously the AI would never do that)

I can't possibly imagine this being true. It's possible if you were starting from scratch people might like that better; but at this point the 9 inning standard is deeply, deeply embedded in people's understanding of what "baseball" is.

I refer you to what happened in the 80s when Coca-cola tried to reformulate their soda based on what people said they wanted. There was a lot that went into that fiasco, but a huge part of it was failure to appreciate the fact that once a brand is well established, people have very strong expectations for it to keep being what they are used to, and tend to have negative reactions to change -- even if that change is, by some objective metric, an improvement.

Pace of play is a much, much bigger issue than game time, IMO. I think most people want to keep the same amount of baseball and reduce the stalling and scratching and the nine pitching changes.

They said the same thing about cricket. :)

Pre-Knickerbocker baseball rules weren't played to 9 innings but essentially until both teams scored 21 aces or until one team did (what runs used to be called...) the average game back then lasted about six innings. There was no standard amount of players, but teams often played with 7.

I have been asking for this for years - i.e. college double headers or even high schools games. Option to set game length and able to change ERA settings to reflect 7 inning games instead of 9 inning games (high school)

I'm not necessarily on board with the OPs idea but I do believe OOTP is at a place now where more customization of games and setups are the next step in the games evolution.

https://twitter.com/tangotiger/statu...69647549698048

This tweet made me go find this thread, because I know it's unlikely to happen (look at the replies...) but I'd love for the option to exist even in crude form "like an exhibition mode where you can set the # of innings or a game, though it'd be nice to be able to set it for a whole season, too.)