Authentic gameplay: Defensive subs, IBBs & PRs

[SteveP]

These are a few more of the subjects I’ve looked at, in trying to get more authentic gameplay in OOTP. (Note: I’ve been playing out the 1960 season several times, while looking at all box scores and game logs from the same games IRL. My focus is on what happens during individual games, rather than on season or career stats per se.)

Defensive substitution behavior, which can be influenced in the League strategy page, turns out to be a pretty easy call. The only sensible setting is “Very rare”. With this setting, defensive subs come in when the game score differential is 3 or less. Like other aspects of the OOTP AI (and simulation games in general) it’s a little too automatic, which means that defensive subs come in more often in OOTP games than they did IRL (even at the “Very rare” setting). Also, defensive subs are sometimes only marginally better in the field than the players they are replacing. However, the results – with one exception – are close enough to authentic gameplay for me that I don’t think about it too much any more.

The exception is that the game brings defensive subs into the lineup when the game is tied. I haven’t seen any evidence that real life managers do this (though I will keep looking). It also doesn’t make sense as good baseball. If you want to win a tied game, you keep your best offensive team in the game. If you just want to lose slower, you put in defensive subs. It’s irritating to see it happen in OOTP games, but there is nothing we can do about it with game settings. If the AI is calling the plays for both teams, it somewhat equalizes the win probability (though the behavior tends to favor the visiting team). If you are calling the games for your team, then you just have to expect to win more than your share of these close games.

The other point worth making is that I wonder why this is a League strategy setting. It ought to be a Team strategy slider. I suppose that the Stat Police have discovered that adjusting this setting produces some benefit when you are collecting career stats ten years at a time. (But then, the H&R setting also puzzles me, for the same reason … ).

On IBBs, I don’t really have much to say here except that the game seems to mirror authentic gameplay reasonably well when the Team strategy sliders are set at or near the midpoint. Setting this slider at two notches above the middle or three notches below the middle are as far as I would go in creating some variety in team behavior. At those levels, they can produce some extreme results, but this is hard to predict since IBBs are situational in nature. One would think that teams which gave up more doubles and/or SBs might end up IBBing more often, but I can’t detect any correlations from my stats. The AI may call too many IBBs with men on 3rd, less than 2 outs. But I can’t say that it’s badly out-of-line – not nearly as much as when the team at bat in that situation, with men on 1st & 3rd, calls a sac bunt!

I mentioned pinch running in another one of these threads. I’ll just come back to it to say that this is devilishly hard to control in OOTP. Even setting the Team strategy slider to “Never” doesn’t prevent the AI from taking out a fast runner for a slightly faster one in a close game. I think I will likely be setting this at “Never” for all teams as I go forward – or at least no more than one notch up for 2-3 teams.