Diamond Mind Baseball's AI Can't Manage The Bullpen

More replayer woes.

The AI and The Bullpen

Diamond Mind Baseball’s AI gives me a headache from time to time.

Check out this boxscore:

The problem here is probably not obvious to you. Let me explain what happened.

I decided to have Dick Weik start the game for the Senators.

Now, Weik wasn’t exactly a superb pitcher in 1949. He didn’t pitch very well in this game, either.

However, he pitched better than you’d think. Sure, he gave up 6 walks in under 4 innings. However, he had also given up only 1 run and 3 hits by the time he was taken out.

Weik had also made only 74 pitches in his brief start. Yes, I know that he threw only 35 of those for strikes. It’s not a great ratio.

But, still, does that warrant taking him out in the 4th inning? I mean, Philadelphia was down 3-1, and had a runner on first base. There was no reason to expect that Weik couldn’t continue.

As a result, the Senators wound up using more than their normal allotment of pitchers in this one. In fact, it’s going to cause a problem in future starts. I clipped this picture of the Senators bullpen once this loss was in the books:

Weik was replaced by Dick Welteroth, who had thrown 45 pitches in a bad outing the game before. All in all, Washington wound up using 5 pitchers on the day, which will undoubtedly cause a problem when Ray Scarborough starts their next game. A number of these guys are going to be dead tired.

And it didn’t have to be. Weik could have stayed in there.

Roster Settings

Diamond Mind Baseball veterans will point right away to the roster profile settings.

And, yeah, that’s the culprit in this case. Here are the settings for Weik:

Setting “using relievers” and “using closers” to “most frequent” is almost certainly what caused this odd change.

Is that a realistic setting?

I mean, you be the judge.

We could point to poor starts, like this one on May 1 in Philadelphia where Weik gave up 4 runs in 4 innings before being taken out. But, at the same time, we could point to starts like this one in Cleveland on August 4, where Weik went 11 innings, giving up 5 runs and 9 hits despite giving up 8 walks. And how about this one on September 1 in Chicago, where Weik walked an amazing 13 batters, yet only gave up 3 runs and 3 hits in 7 innings?

I couldn’t find any examples of him being taken out after giving up 3 hits in less than 4 innings.

Solution?

The only potential solution here is the obvious one: make the game engine more transparent.

Sadly, that’s also the solution that we absolutely are not going to see.

Alternatively, we could have some sort of mechanism by which the computer manager has to ask permission to make a move — or by which we could force the computer manager to make a move that it wouldn’t normally make. But I doubt that will happen, either. I mean, we’ve been clamoring for an “undo” button for over 20 years now, and yet that seems less likely now than ever.

As it stands, we’re just going to have to shut one eye to this ridiculous AI management for the time being. And it’s a shame.