[Charlie Hough]

To me, there is a fundamental difference between "stamina" and "usage," and this is what is leading to so many complaints and issues with pitcher stamina in OOTP, especially with usage tendencies over the past 15 years.

In a baseball sim context, pitchers are largely locked into their stamina rating, which is determined mostly by usage tendencies and not by their actual physical capabilities. They'll become fatigued and less effective based solely on how they were used and the resulting statistics.

In theory, any pitcher today could pitch as many innings as pitchers from any other era, albeit with all the attending risks. The pitcher might need some time to adjust to throwing more pitches, but with modern strength and conditioning, many pitchers are already in a state of fitness where they could start throwing significantly more pitches without a huge amount of additional training being needed. There is nothing physically preventing it. It's not as if they don't have the potential to throw a lot more pitches than they do, and it's not as if they would suddenly be totally ineffective if they did so.

This poses a problem for baseball sims because they're not designed to simulate the difference between stamina and usage. They combine both things into a single concept, and all we can do is adjust sliders one way or the other. But it would be nice to see a smarter and more nuanced way of simulating stamina vs. usage, although that gets into speculation, especially when player ratings are almost entirely based on stats.