Historical pitchers hit too many homers.

[markmcghee]

I've suspect for a long time that historical pitchers hit way too many homers. I finally decided to take a look under the hood. What I found was that historically generated pitchers(starting pitchers for the most part) have batting rating that are wholly unjustified compared to their lifetime batting stats.

I'll give one example. Bob Buhl from my 1966 league. With over 160 w's he was an above average hurler. He was an abysmal hitter, though. His lifetime average was .090 and his SLG was a robust .092. Yet OOTP generate the following batting rating for him:

BABIP--63
AVOID K--76
CONTACT--62
GAP--65
POWER--65
GETTING HBP--69

Using these rating and extrapolating out for a full season, OOTP expects the following results for Bob BoomBoom Buhl:

PA AB H 2B 3B HR BB K AVG OBP SLG OPS
589 550 104 17 1 10 35 124 .190 .243 .283 .525

Bob Buhl would've killed to have these sort of batting numbers. Shoot, the guy was a stiff at the plate. He had two doubles and no other extra base hits in 800+ career ABs. He is just one example. I inspected the batting stats and batting ratings of every pitcher in my 1966 league. I found that every starting pitcher had batting ratings similar to Buhl's. For some reason most of the relief pitchers had ratings that were more in line with reality. What I did, as a work around, was to edit every pitcher's POWER rating until their expected OPS number came into line with their career OPS. For Bob Buhl this meant dropping his POWER number from 65 to 6. This isn't a perfect fix because there are still too many pitchers that hit too proficiently, ie. they get too many extra base hits, they walk too much and strike out too infrequently. Now, maybe I'll decide to go in and monkey with ALL the batting ratings of every pitcher until they all start to hit like pitchers, but I was sort of hoping that this could be handled under the hood by Marcus. Any help on fixing this in OOTP2009 would be greatly appreciated.

By the way, I tried to upload Bob Buhl's career batting and ratings screens but the server said that at 9megs, the files were too large. Let me know if there's anything you'd like me to upload for your perusal such as the lg. file. It is not so surprizing then, based on what I found with ptichers' batting ratings, that when I look at the 1966 batting stat for pitchers in my league, how many of them have hit their first career homer in 1966. I imagine that you don't need my specific lg. file in order to examine this phenomenon. Just generate a historical league and then take a gander at the batting ratings for pitchers as compared to their career batting performance. The discrepancy is pretty stark.

I am running OOTP 8.0.0.13. I have a dell 3.4ghz 2 meg ram running xp home.

[NCBeachBum]

I think the game just makes up hitting ratings for pitchers (and pitching rating for hitters, for that matter) without actually using their statistics.

[Nutlaw]

I notified the historical beta testing team of this thread, just in case they weren't currently aware of it.