Why is AI Starting a Rookie in World Series?
 

I have had this happen a few times in my historical league. In the World Series, the AI elects to start someone who has only pitched once or twice in the majors. In this case, it was the 1916 San Francisco franchise. The AI started in Game 1 Victor Holm who was 1-0 on the season instead of 21-7 Babe Ruth, 22-15 Jeff Tesreau or 6-4 Nap Rucker. Is this a bug due to Holm having better stuff or something? I'd like to keep things as realistic as possible with pitcher selection.
Thanks!

The first thing to check would be to see how rested the other pitchers were on Day 1 of the series. It is usually highest rested and maybe skipping the lowest pitcher due to the rest days. It is possible that the AI has made seen the young Victor Holm develop organically into a great pitcher. He never made it out of the minors irl and may have made-up minor league stats for him to leverage and develop on.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/r...d=holm--001vic

I have found that the AI is not capable of resting pitchers and setting up a post-season rotation, even where the playoff spot has been clinched, and the last few regular season games could be used to rest regulars and set up a rotation. So that has resulted in a weird SP3 versus SP4 playoff matchup, when the AI uses the most-rested SP to start the post-season. Ugh.

Interesting related article on MLB.com:

https://www.mlb.com/news/rookie-star...e-7-c299384188

It has this paragraph for one of the pitchers:

It seems to be handling this much better in 24. The AI will use a spot starter for the last few games of the season after clinching if the only rested starters are the #1 or #2.

While this may be true, I believe it's also gotten incrementally better over the last several versions.

In fact, Matt confirmed back in 2016 that it's essentially hard-coded to skip a team's top two starters in the last days of a regular season if a playoff birth is clinched. And I found where Markus said a year two before that, that AI will skip the top starters IF another starter is available. So that's likely the issue here. IOW, if, say, your number starters 3, 4, 5 are all fatigued, and even with expanded Sept rosters there are no scrub call-ups who are SP's, the AI simply has no choice but to start the team's #1 and #2 starters to end the season...

It really comes down to available players. In a more modern historical environment, AI will have more pitchers to choose from (to start meaningless end-of-season games). Not sure if that was the case with the OP'd scenario - not enough info - but it could be...