Quote:
Originally Posted by 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.
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This isn't entirely true, the way pitchers have been used over the last decade has led to a change in what we would consider "stamina." Yes, modern pitchers undoubtedly could throw hundreds more innings each year if they pitched in the style of 19th century pitchers rarely if ever throwing max effort and pacing themselves for hundreds of pitches a game, but they wouldn't resemble the pitchers we know them as.
The way modern pitchers approach the game throwing with max effort on every single pitch is a direct result of their current usage. We wouldn't have starters throwing 102 or having these incredible wipeout sliders if they were throwing 150+ pitches a start or expecting to throw more than 5 innings.