Another poor news report
 

In my fictional league (24th year), I just had a pitcher throw his second no hitter of the season, the first time I've had that happen. Strangely. both no hitters were against the same team. However, the recap and news report only mentioned the current no hitter, no reference to this terrific feat of throwing two in the same year. This is why I rarely bother to read the game recaps and definitely an area that needs working on as the game seems to ignore interesting feats like this.

You can edit news stories easily, in less time than it took to write your message. League Menu/News/Write Edit tab.

(My latest version is from a couple years ago, so they may have revised the detailed path since then. But I'm sure it can still be done.)

THey still don't have easy way for community to update and add to pbp news. They have not added to catogories that drive it.

One reason your specific scenario won't work is they don't even track no hitters. Go ahead, run a report on no hitters by team, year, player. Which player has the most no hitters. Which team has been no hit the most?

Now try grand slams, inside park home runs etc etc

I'll throw out that two no hitters by the same pitcher has happened six times in MLB history. I'm wondering if it's worth the developer's time to code in this specific news story?

I also see posts almost every year on these boards about not having a news story about combined no hitters. This is the first thing that came up in a google search...
I would have thought there were more. With current use of relievers I would think we would see an increase?

Personally I don't see the need, but if I could only add one news story it would be the combined over the "two in one season".

Do you know all of these for a fact? Or are some (not all) in the database but don't have a report/search option to get them? I honestly don't know. It is something you bring up regularly so I thought maybe you've exported stats and have an answer? IE what is there but doesn't have a report option, and what simply isn't in the database?

I'm sure they could add more fields to the database and increase the save size to get almost anything one might want. The question IMHO becomes which ones are worth the time to code?

Nine of the 25 no-hitters in the last six seasons have been combined efforts. It is very much a recent thing.

Pre-1967, there is a single combined no-hitter on the records, the (in)famous un-perfected game by Ernie Shore in 1917.

Shore got credit for a perfect game in many sources until the rules were clarified in the 1990s, long after his death.

Not surprised. I wouldn't oppose OOTP adding a news story for this or the OP's situation. The developer knows the code and how much or little effort it would take to add. I'd trust their judgement on the value it would add compared to the cost.

Having said that a combined no-no, while worth a mention on espn, MLB Network, etc., just isn't an impressive feat IMHO. To me it's similar to a team hitting three HRs in a game or a player hitting 3 HRs in a game. One carries a bit more weight than the other. :)

I just edit the game accounts to my own satisfaction. It's easy to do. Probably an AI program could be used to generate new versions.

I've done this many times with the headline when something big happens and I feel it needs to be highlighted.

I don't think the game stores no-hitters as a category per se; it will add them to that big "accomplishments" list and from there I guess you could make it do a string search but, like, the issue I see there is that the DB already bloats up kind of badly after a lot of seasons. Every column they add is more bloat - especially when the data point in question is going to be 0 for 99% of all players - and if they did the truly bloatiest thing imaginable and stored Project Scoresheet style data for the entire league for all seasons, that'd not only be massive, it'd potentially take forever to do database queries of the kind you're trying to suss out (number of times a pitcher had a game started with 0 hits allowed over that start and where the number of outs they threw = the number of outs available in the game... although even that query wouldn't hit the edge case where a guy throws a no-no through 9, then gets relieved in the top of the 10th in a tie game, and then the new reliever immediately gives up a HR to the first batter).

I'd love to see the game store a lot of the situational statistics past the year you're currently in (it does store lefty/righty splits like that). That's asking a lot though. I'd love for it to in general be Baseball Reference but that's a site with a pretty decent sized database, perhaps a bit too large for a lot of people to want to have it sitting on their hard drive for a fictional league.

I have posted many times that the game recaps do not really cover the game well... many times it picks the wrong player of the game... sometimes it leaves out the most important play in the game.

Sometimes it will say, "Joe Smoe had a great day with 2 hits and and 2 RBIs"... sorry, that is not a great game... this should not happen... "Joe Smoe had a good day" would be fine... they should watch the adjectives thay use in the recaps and make sure they fit the game performance.

A suggestion: those of us who can write well should volunteer for the Beta Team this year and help to improve the news stories and the recaps.

Recaps are more difficult to write than any other text in the game. It's a nice thought, rounding up writers, but it'd take quite a while for them to get up to speed. I can only imagine the errors it would spawn. Most recaps need multiple conditions, some of them up to a dozen. Even then, there's a strict limit on what details can be included in the recap. To do more with them, Matt will need to agree to it and find time to do more coding. It's not like he's not thought about it. I've had conversations with him over the years. If it was as easy as some suggest, he'd have expanded the recaps long before now.

Just include ChatGPT with the game and let it create a recap based on the box score and the game log!!!

I'm only a little bit kidding; I personally don't pay a lot of close attention to them because yeah, they sometimes aren't great.

I'm sorry to hear that the recaps do not meet expectations. Matt and I have worked extremely hard on them over the years. I guess you can turn them off, ignore them, or edit them. Choice is yours.

Sorry! Didn't mean to sound like I was bagging on anybody's work! I realize that they're very, very hard to do in a way that looks like there's a human writing a new one every time. And they do what they do pretty well by and large. I just mostly ignore them because, you know how it is, 10k+ hours in, literally every block of text begins to look samey.

As a former sports journalist, I would argue that adjectives should very rarely be used to describe a performance, unless it's an adjective like "dominant" that gives some context to what it meant in the grand scheme of the game. When is the last time you read a beat writer's story (or a bland AP recap, for that matter) that described a player's day as "good" or "great"? Those are lazy adjectives that don't really say anything.

Thank you for explaining the problems with the game recaps.
I know if you have trouble with them, it would be beyond me.
They are just too complex to program well.

I always thought whoever was doing it wasn't much of a sportswriter.
I now know that game recaps are in very capable hands.
I did not know how difficult they were to condition.
Now I understand.

If you are involved in the game recaps, I know that they will be done to perfection, if that were possible.. I know how well you used to do the PBP... you were the very best person I worked with on the Beta Team years ago.

Apologize to you and Matt Arnold for my previous observations on game recaps... I did not know how involved it is.

No reason for me to volunteer for the Beta Team... if pstrickert has trouble doing it, the task is way beyond me.

Can't argue with a journalist... thanks for the post.

Eugene, I wouldn't want to discourage anyone from working on the text team. News stories, PbP, scouting reports, etc., can always supplemented with new material. Recaps are a different breed. It is so easy to forget a condition or choose the wrong one. By the time you realize the mistake, you may have already perpetuated the error. To his credit, Matt has added many new tokens and conditions over the years. Some of them, though using a similar name, do different things (or their use is restricted to certain recap elements). Try as I might, I make mistakes. I read lots of recaps, hoping to detect errors before others do. But I'm sure I've missed some of them. ;)