Injury Settings in your league?

[snnort]

I'm in an online league that uses OOTP 11.2.28. The file is great and clean and talent spread is perfect. We created it in OOTP 11.

In a previous league file we had for MANY years, it was created in version 6.5 and ran for 10 seasons. Then we converted to OOTP 10 and it really borked the file. Well... lets just say that a lot of the talent ratings were already very out of whack. We saw a TON on injuries and chalked it up to the file trying to correct the bloated talent rating. The injuries go bad, way too many. And multiple .400 hitters were starting to creep up.

When OOTP 11 came out, we figured that trying to beat a dead horse (trying to fix the file) maybe it just was not meant to be in the file conversion and we would just start anew with a fresh league file, redraft, and basically go on with "version 2" of the file.

Now I think the injuries are WAY too few. In fact, we have teams that have played into August with not a single player EVER needed time on the DL.

The setting we use is "very low" and I am proposing we increase it. Keep in mind, we want to have a few more injuries to make things somewhat more challenging, but we don't want to have so many injuries that it's no fun.

What setting should we use? Or should we just leave it as is because "very low" it the best for online league play?

Essentially...I'm asking... what injury setting does your league use and are you generally happy with it?

[TribeFanInNC]

Definitely not very low. Normal is fine if you like a few injuries, but not 5 guys at once. High is realistic for modern day baseball, but some find this a little too much (like a couple guys get hurt in your org every sim).

[snnort]

We ran some test sims with "low" and compared that to "very low" and this was the results (note that the "very low" is our current season):

__________________________________________________ _
Current (Actual) SIMBL Injury Log "very low" setting
Current (Actual) SIMBL Injury Report "very low" setting

Fictional SIMBL Injury Log "low" setting
Fictional SIMBL Injury Report "low" setting

Counting only the beginning of the file (February) until the Aug 9th date (where we are in our actual file) and comparing the two files (the current file with "very low" setting against the fictional one with the "low" setting) we see:

40 instances of injuries that last 1 to 7 weeks long in the current file and 99 instances of the same length in the test file.
8 instances of injuries that last 2-12 months long in the current file and 35 instances of the same length in the test file.

The current number of players on the DL in our real file is 11 players in the test file it is 62.

Now 62 players on the DL might seem like a lot, but this is roughly half of what the real MLB has when you pro-rate it to 24 teams. 62 players is less than 3 per team on average. AND remember that the DL is for ALL players on the 40 man roster... and when you run a computer managed team (all the teams for the test run were coverted to CPU-controlled, the human manager was fired) it basically runs a full 40 man filled roster at all times.

That means that 24 teams times 40 man rosters means there are 960 possible players available to be on the disabled list and in our test 62 were disabled for a 6.4% injury (again, just the 40 man rosters). In the actual MLB the injury rate is closer to 10-12%. SO basically all the data points to the "low" setting being at approximately HALF the injury rate of real life MLB.
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[kcroyalgm]

Low is probably half the real life rate.
There are lots more injuries in real life than most people imagine.
That said, OOTP Classic setting results in a lot of injuries, probably closely resembling real life.
But realism isn't everything.
Lots of injuries, especially long, SEI, and CEI injuires, have a severe negative impact on GM retention.
It's not a lot of fun to play a game where lots of your key players get hurt a lot.
Fun does matter.
The low setting provides for annoying injuries while not making the injury rate a critical factor in team success.
There's plenty that's not realistic in OOTP - like who gets designated a class A free agent and who doesn't, just as an example. Or like you can't have non-roster invitees to spring training as another.
SO:
If realism is your goal, go with OOTP Classic or higher.
If enjoyment and GM retention seems more important to you, go with low for the injury setting.

[snnort]

So it looks like, from the small sample size thus far, most online leagues use the "low" setting for typical (modern) setup. All of my personal research points to that setting as the best compromise of enough injuries to give the GMs a challenge but not so much as to take away the fun factor.

[Killebrew]

One of the reasons an online league might choose to use low injury settings is because the human manager/GM is often not around to take injured players out of the lineup - for example, if several of your starters get injured on day 1 of a 14 day sim period. Note that fully trusting the OOTP AI to follow your depth chart is not going to be a winning strategy:P.

Many online leagues also use an edited injuries.txt file to reduce the % of season ending injuries which has been very high in the last several versions of OOTP. Additionally, this edited injuries.txt files often remove the career ending injuries as well, since those are terrible (as pointed out above) for GM retention.

[udbacker58]

Personally I like the higher settings as they offer a real challenge; but as a commish I like the low setting because I want to keep GMs

Funny that everyone always says they want realism but when players get injured at a realistic rate and player development is as volatile as real life, they bitch and moan about how 'broken' things are.

[Sabermetric Baseball]

My league ran testing of the number of *new* injuries each month in each OOTP injury setting compared to real life in the 2010 season, and the "Low" setting was the closest to real life. The balance of pitcher to hitter injuries is going to be unrealistic in any setting and you just have to live with it.

The "talent change randomness" value is probably more significant than the injury setting. This defaults to 100, but you should probably have it around 50 (maybe even closer to 25 if you're using real life players and want them to resemble their counterparts). Most players in real life do not have their talent wiped out if they have an injury that sidelines them for just a few weeks; if you leave the Talent Change Randomness at 100, that will happen all the time.

[udbacker58]

Originally Posted by Sabermetric Baseball

My league ran testing of the number of *new* injuries each month in each OOTP injury setting compared to real life in the 2010 season, and the "Low" setting was the closest to real life.

I would disagree greatly with this. The realistic setting is definitely the closest to real life I have come across. Using the Low setting in both of my leagues, there are generally only 4-6 guys in the majors who have to be put on the 15-day DL per team. In real life, there are 4-6 guys on the DL per team at any time.

[JWay]

Originally Posted by udbacker58

I would disagree greatly with this. The realistic setting is definitely the closest to real life I have come across. Using the Low setting in both of my leagues, there are generally only 4-6 guys in the majors who have to be put on the 15-day DL per team. In real life, there are 4-6 guys on the DL per team at any time.

Agreed, the injuries are spot on, however, they don't discriminate hitter/pitcher, so hitters get injured too much, pitchers get injured too little.

We use the default setting, while it makes life hard sometimes, the league has learned to fall in love with depth.

[JWay]

Also if you don't force your players to playing outside of their ability (giving prone guys more days off, giving pitchers pitch counts) injuries are less frequent.

[snnort]

I want to thank everyone who has posted with incite thus far as well as everyone who has voted. Your posts and time taken to vote on this discussion and poll is greatly appreciated.

[Sabermetric Baseball]

Originally Posted by udbacker58

I would disagree greatly with this. The realistic setting is definitely the closest to real life I have come across. Using the Low setting in both of my leagues, there are generally only 4-6 guys in the majors who have to be put on the 15-day DL per team. In real life, there are 4-6 guys on the DL per team at any time.

Sports Illustrated is a great resource for tracking real life injuries. Here's a sample page: Los Angeles Angels Injuries - MLB - Baseball - SI.com

Total up the number of *new* injuries in March across all of MLB for each category (dtd, 15 day, 60 day). Repeat for the new injuries in each subsequent month.

Sim a season using the "Realistic" setting. Open the Transactions page. Total up the number of *new* injuries in March across all of MLB for each category (dtd, 15 day, 60 day). Repeat for the new injuries in each subsequent month.

When my league ran our analysis, the number of new injuries each month in "Realistic" setting doubled, sometimes tripled, the number of new injuries in real life.