Injuries and Aging in OOTP

Player Development

Injuries and Aging in OOTP

While injuries are a thing in most baseball sims (and usually can be turned off or ignored), they play a special role in OOTP.

You see, unlike most other baseball sims (with the obvious exception of Baseball Mogul), OOTP is a career game, not a sim limited to a single season. In other words, your players will age, get injured, and eventually retire.

Players in OOTP have injury proneness ratings that impact how often they are injured. This is normally hidden, though you can unhide it if you want.

Additionally, players who experience injuries to certain parts of their bodies (i.e. their legs) at one point in their career might suffer from further injuries in that area later in their career. This is similar to how injuries work in Football Manager.

Pitchers in particular are prone to injuries based on past usage, rust (i.e. when they haven’t pitched for a while because of injuries or because it’s spring training), as well as their current pitch count. In other words, getting a 145 pitch complete game out of your 21 year old pitcher is not necessarily a good thing.

The “past usage” setting for pitchers comes from “Pitcher Abuse Points,” which is a Baseball Prospectus invention. Basically, pitchers have 0 abuse points until they hit 100 pitches. Any start with more than 100 pitches earns pitcher abuse points. You take the pitch count, subtract 100 from it, and then raise the number to the third power. If your pitcher threw 160 pitches, for example, he’d get 60^3 abuse points, or a whopping 603 abuse points.

It’s not clear that OOTP uses the same formula for all seasons. I haven’t tested out deadball era seasons thoroughly enough to know if the same strict formula applies there.

There is a good question as to whether the PAP formula is appropriate for simulating past seasons. If you’re interested in knowing more, this 1998 article is a pretty good start — and pitcher abuse is a subject we’ll cover in more depth in future posts.

Players in OOTP also accumulate fatige as the season goes on. Tired players have 2 yellow bars on player lists; players at half stamina end up with two orange bars; and exhausted players will have a single red bar. Naturally, you want to manage your roster in a way that prevents tired players from playing. Note as well that superstars will also get tired, including Cal Ripken Jr. and Lou Gehrig.

Now, the really confusing part is that you can change the settings for aging and development. These settings show up in Game Settings > Players & Team, and look like this:

The OOTP manual doesn’t explain this well, but this post does. Think of these ratings as a kind of “fast forward” speed, as if you were watching a video. 1.000 means 1x speed; 1.500 means 1.5x speed; 0.500 means 0.5x speed. In other words, if you stick batter and pitcher aging at 0.500, you’ll likely get guys who play into their late 40s or later. If you set development at 0.500, you’ll see guys who take a long time to get up to major league speed.

More recent versions of OOTP also include development and aging target ages, which are even more confusing and poorly documented:

It’s confusing because you don’t actually set a target age. You have a few generic ranges to choose from:

“Default” means that the player’s development will likely end around age 25 and the aging curve will kick in around age 30. Make it younger and maybe his development will end around age 23 or so, and the aging curve will start around age 28 or so. You’d have to experiment to see if you could nail down the exact ages — and remember that it plays together with the aging and development speed.

Finally, there’s everybody’s favorite tool, Talent Change Randomness:

This determines how much a player’s ability will randomly change as time goes on. Good players might suddenly become awful if this is set to the max, and bad players might suddenly become great.

There’s a long debate on the OOTP forums about which Talent Change Randomness setting is actually “accurate.” The truth is that baseball player development usually doesn’t follow an easily defined set pattern — though part of this is because players who play poorly for long enough don’t get enough game time to theoretically turn things around.

Trying to get all these settings right is a chore, and leads many OOTP players to automatically play through different variations of a project before starting it in earnest.