Skip to main content

Deadball pitchers

Feature RequestSimLeague Baseball

Deadball pitchers dominate multi-era leagues and wreck offensive strategies that rely on homerun hitters. This has been the case for AGES in the sim and it really skews leagues when a guy like Addie Joss can pitch 300+ innings and only give up 4 HR. even when facing legendary sluggers from future years.

The core balancing problem here, as I see it, is that those homers don’t actually turn into something else. If you believe that Ken Griffey Jr won’t hit barely any home runs against Joss because he’s hitting a dead ball and that ball won’t go out of the park, he should instead be hitting more doubles, triples, and fly outs, things that would happen if you hit a dead ball very hard. But the sim doesn’t translate the missing homers into anything and power hitters just languish against dead ball pitchers. It makes playing across eras feel really imbalanced and I know many people who hate playing with deadball pitchers.

This is a long-standing issue with the sim and there could be several different ways of solving it, but something really should be done about the dominance of the dead ball era.

Posted by jholme44 ·
6 comments

Log in to comment and vote

Comments6

  • Just4me

    •

    Mar 19

    HR hitters were also part of this test and teams were required to draft a minimum number of PA with 5+ HR/100AB. Their lost HR were turned into other hit types. with how the decision tree works you can see that in the calculations.

    If you start here and read through some of this thread:

    https://www.whatifsports.com/forums/Posts.aspx?topicID=519598&threadID=11831329#l_11831329

    You can see how the decision tree and park effects impact HR and how they turn in to other hit types.

    • jholme44

      •

      Mar 19

      Oh, that’s very interesting. Good research and thanks for sharing. This doesn’t address my main concern here though, which is the affect the prevalence of deadball pitchers has on HITTERS. Because deadball pitchers basically eliminate home runs, and the sim doesn’t replace those HR in any way, then stocking up on home run-reliant hitters is usually a losing strategy. The quality hitters from the dead ball era can succeed statistically in any era of the sim, but the quality home run hitters from other eras will struggle far more against low HR pitchers.