Why Are All Our Pitchers So Tired?
What's going on?
Why Are All Our Pitchers So Tired?
I’ve been keeping a secret from the readers of this blog.
You probably know about it if you’ve been watching my YouTube channel, however.
The secret is that I’ve been doing a third project at the same time as my other two replays. I’ve taken the 1986 Mets in Out Of The Park Baseball 24 and have stuck them in 1962 to see how they do.
You can find a bunch of videos here.
It hasn’t exactly been going well.
We’re in second place, sure — but we’re 9 1/2 games out of first place:
We’re doing better than San Francisco, which is a plus. They’re now 11 1/2 games behind the Dodgers, stuck in third place.
But we really should do better. We’ve lost 5 in a row now, and have looked really bad.
We’re not the only New York team that has been struggling, by the way. The Yankees have been hovering around .500 for the entire project. I don’t think the Yankees are going to win the pennant, and I fully anticipate the Twins to win out in the American League.
But that’s not the biggest surprise.
5 Man Pitching Rotation
It turns out that you shouldn’t play around with 4 man pitching rotations.
I thought it might be fun to mess with — and, boy, was I wrong.
I was surprised in the most recent game to discover that all of my pitchers were tired:
Like Diamond Mind Baseball and Action PC Baseball, OOTP’s fatigue system is a bit of a mystery. There is some logic to it, but it’s not easy to figure out what is going on inside the system.
But it turns out that my mistake was relying on a 4 man pitching rotation.
We started Randy Niemann in our most recent game — a big loss to the Giants. He gave up 4 runs in the first inning. He settled down a little bit after that, but couldn’t get through 3 innings.
That’s when I realized my mistake. Take a look at what our pitching rotation has looked like over the course of the most recent road trip:
The first two double headers were at home against the Houston Colt .45s.
As you can see, we’ve been starting everybody on 3 days of rest. And that’s why they’re all too tired to pitch.
In real life, the 1986 Mets pitching staff had 4 days of rest before almost every single start. The 5th starter was Rick Aguilera, who I’ve been using as a long relief man in the bullpen.
Interestingly enough, the 1962 Mets pitchers also had long rest over this period of time:
Of course, Casey Stengel didn’t exactly have a set rotation, and those Mets didn’t have the same roster constraints we have. As was the case in 1986, so it is in my project: I’m keeping the roster exactly as it was in real life, which means 24 players at a time.
Anyway, there you have it. I’m not sure if the change to a 5 man rotation will stop our hitting slump. At least now I know what I was doing wrong.