Relief Pitcher Flexibility

[battists]

I think it would be cool to have sliders for relievers in the team setup. They could be things like:

Trust - the higher the trust you have in a pitcher, the more likely the AI would be to put them in
Favor Rested Pitchers - the higher this value is, the less likely the AI would be to put in a pitcher who threw 35 pitches yesterday
Respect Pitching Roles - The higher this is, the more likely it would be that the AI would pitch your closer as your closer, instead of putting in your middle relief pitcher to get the save. Similarly, setup men would be used as setup men.

Combined with settings for "pitch count," "favor lefty/righty matchups," and "hook", that would make it pretty flexible.

Some other possibilities:

"never pitch this player for more than X innings" - for cases like you see in MLB all the time - the setup guy who NEVER pitches more than one inning

"favor between innings changes" - stop the AI from changing relief pitches after 1 out, unless absolutely necessary

Just some more thoughts!

[bp_]

I like this. Anything to give us more control over the bullpen usage patterns will be helpful. I hate it when my closer ends up with less than 90% of my team saves for the year (unless he's a crappy closer).

[dodgecharger1968]

I think it would be great if you could rank the game situations that you would want to use a pitcher for (like the depth chart) rather than the current method. So you'd have things like "rotation", "big lead, late innings", "close game mid innings", "close game late", "way behind early", "face lefty", "get out of jam (fireman)", "spot start", whatever. You could decide not to have a closer, or have only one guy close games and only close games, etc.

Incidently, I think that this principle would work well for lineups, too. One guy might be your main #6 hitter, but he might be suited to hitting #2 when someone in the heart has a day off. So you'd have a depth chart for every lineup slot.

The last thing with these depth charts is that it would be important to restructure ALL depth charts slightly. The manager should be able to rank the priority of each "position" relative to other postions, and instead of having the starter/utility distinction, it would all be percentages like the utility section. Something I'd like to see, anyway.

[Eugene Church]

Originally Posted by battists

I think it would be cool to have sliders for relievers in the team setup. They could be things like:

Trust - the higher the trust you have in a pitcher, the more likely the AI would be to put them in
Favor Rested Pitchers - the higher this value is, the less likely the AI would be to put in a pitcher who threw 35 pitches yesterday
Respect Pitching Roles - The higher this is, the more likely it would be that the AI would pitch your closer as your closer, instead of putting in your middle relief pitcher to get the save. Similarly, setup men would be used as setup men.

Combined with settings for "pitch count," "favor lefty/righty matchups," and "hook", that would make it pretty flexible.

Some other possibilities:

"never pitch this player for more than X innings" - for cases like you see in MLB all the time - the setup guy who NEVER pitches more than one inning

"favor between innings changes" - stop the AI from changing relief pitches after 1 out, unless absolutely necessary

Just some more thoughts!

Good ideas.

The game cannot currently handle this.

It works fairly well for Modern Day Larussa Baseball with multiple pitching changes per inning, but not for historical leagues, where a starter was expected to finish a game and teams only had 5-8 pitchers on the staff.

That is why I play out the last 3 innings of every game, so I can make the changes, not the AI. It is a much more realistic game this way.