Miscellaneous thoughts from a 200 year sim

[greenOak]

Some people in the other thread expressed interest in some unrelated things I noticed from doing my 200 year sim. Here are some of them (I'll add more if I remember them or if I find something else).

1. The AI is very happy to play gold glove caliber shortstops (and to a lesser extent catchers and center fielders) who can't hit at all. This might be optimal in OOTP (tests in past versions of the game indicated that SS defense has a massive effect on winning), but it's not very realistic. My save has 25 generated players with at least 2000 plate appearances and a career OPS+ under 50. Bill Bergen is the only non-generated player meeting these requirements with Jeff Mathis just missing with a career 50 OPS+. The most extreme examples in my save are a CF with a career OPS+ of 20 (.155/.192/.242) over 830 games, and a SS with a career OPS+ of 30 (.158/.225/.241) who managed to play a whopping 1631 games. In fact, these are usually the very rare types of players to make the big leagues as teenagers. For example, Ismael Mota was a SS in my league who slashed .179/.247/.262 (41 OPS+) over 1719 games in his career while winning 7 gold gloves. The Giants thought it was appropriate to call him up at 18 where he hit .082/.108/.087 (a negative 49 OPS+) with 1 walk and 101 strikeouts in 79 games. The next season wasn't much better as he hit .103/.139/.124 (negative 28 OPS+) over 103 games as a 19 year old. In fact it wasn't until his age 22 season that he posted an OPS+ over 0.

2. Some players rack up an absurd amount of triples. The record holder in triples is a RF who amassed 366 triples in 2019 games including 45 in one season. He had two seasons of 40+ triples and six seasons with at least 30. There are a few other players who have multiple 30+ triple seasons and many with multiple 20+ triple seasons. As a comparison, since 1950 the MLB has seen a total of seven 20+ triple seasons. The one thing all these players have in common is that they have a specific "Triple Ratio" rating instead of the usual .000 which uses the speed rating to determine triples.

3. A lot of hitters will strikeout at absurd rates. While league wide strikeout totals remain similar to 2023 levels, certain batters strikeout at comically high rates. Mark Reynolds' record of 223 strikeouts in a season has been shattered hundreds if not thousands of times, with 271 strikeouts being required to even break into the top 100 leaderboard. The league has seen eight 300+ strikeout seasons with the record currently sitting at 318. As for career totals, the record is held by a 1B who managed to overcome striking out 4024 times in his career to make the hall of fame (753 home runs helps). Moreover, there are over 250 players in my league who have strikeout rates north of 40% over a minimum of 2000 plate appearances.

[Lukas Berger]

Yeah, the young guys getting called up too soon because of good defense but with bats that are not ready is something we've noticed as well. It's already on our list to make some tweaks here for a future patch.

Strikeouts is kind of a tough thing, especially in a 200 year sim, given that they seem to keep going up and up in real life, so the game is kind of modelling that. We'll probably take a look at the avoid K balance though, it might be possible to rebalance this to keep things a little less extreme for the high K guys.

The triples is interesting. I'm sure we'll take a look at the balance here as well.