Unrealistic!!!!

[RonCo]

I must be getting better, though. I thought I was being a know-it-all much earlier than that.

[Ted]

How about the fact that if OOTP is going for "realism" then using PAP at all is ridiculous (at least the original version of PAP. Some of the modified ones are marginally better). The original PAP was debunked at least half a decade ago.

538 article about pitcher injuries. Touches on PAP and how it's a more or less useless model. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/th ... ant-solve/ I've read excepts from the book that is linked to about PAP but can't find them right now. And the Carlton data is good.

[Ted]

Among the things that makes this conversation amusing is that Boise is the BBA team that is factually the least injury bitten team in the BBA. I know Ted's argument is more holistic, but California has been 24th least injured team in the league.

You mention this, but again, I'm not really making these points in relation to what I see on my big league team. I'm more concerned about the league environment, and the fun of it, and I don't like the trend. I'd rather see division winners decided by talent than luck. I'd like to see last place teams benefit from their draft status, not be lumped into a crap shoot with everyone else.

Being a winning team is about acquiring a "critical mass" of talent. Once you have that, you can keep trading it as it gets older for younger players, keep developing, keep managing your assets and win indefinitely. The only thing that can stop you is another team creating a bigger mass of talent. Injuries to young, developing players keep this from happening to the have nots more than they do to the haves, because the haves can trade young players for developed talent more easily. Doing the same as a building team doesn't really work as well.

[bschr682]

[Ted]

https://slate.com/culture/2004/05/baseb ... njury.html : "Of the 36 major-league hurlers diagnosed with labrum tears in the last five years" (that's 7 per year ... ours is 8 this year )

Ours is not 8. It is 11. Partially torn labrum = torn labrum. That's actually a pretty large difference. There were seven MLB shoulder injuries last year that required surgery. Whether or not those were seven complete labral tears, I'm not sure. We've lost or will lose 4,815 days due to shoulder injuries. Being almost done, well probably end up right around or just over 5000. MLB lost 6,638. Looks like we're on track to be under at about the same rate we are for the other injuries I have the data on.

I would again like to make the point that we are about 70-75% of the MLB injury rate at some setting that is lower than the MLB rate. I don't know what Recte has us set on. If this is one of the lower settings I would be concerned. (For those of you who don't know they are: very high>high(MLB realistic)>normal(OOTP classic)>low>very low>extremely low). In my mind, this rate is odd. I'd think normal would be maybe 80% of mlb realism, low would be 60%, very low 40-50%, etc. If you don't have that big of a difference, what's the point? Recte has said he's turned injuries down, and I believe he said before that that we were below "high/mlb realistic" already. So that puts us at low most likely, and with that we are at a 70-75% injury rate compared to MLB. That's a bit rough.

So, anyway, it looks like we're going to find out that, surprise surprise, Markus and co have done good research into injury distribution and what we're getting is pretty close to a realistic model, relative to the particular injury setting we have. Now I'm dithering about what the various settings in game should mean. Really, all of this is less important to me than what this is doing to our league. My take is that is is bad. And you're all probably tired of hearing me repeat myself.

[Ted]

How about the fact that if OOTP is going for "realism" then using PAP at all is ridiculous (at least the original version of PAP. Some of the modified ones are marginally better). The original PAP was debunked at least half a decade ago.

538 article about pitcher injuries. Touches on PAP and how it's a more or less useless model. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/th ... ant-solve/ I've read excepts from the book that is linked to about PAP but can't find them right now. And the Carlton data is good.

So basically, injury rates don't increase until 110-115 pitches, and really don't noticebaly change until 130. I don't know how OOTP is using PAP. But if PAP contributed to Mercado's injuries, they are doing it wrong.

[Ted]

Is that bad injury luck?

I don't think so. In my mind deciding to throw a pitcher more than 100 pitches an outing for a long time is called rolling the dice. You can argue my position all you want, but we've been discussing injuries for a very, very long time. The game uses PAP. We know it uses PAP. To ignore it in your pitcher usage is tempting fate, and when a pitcher dies on you when you do that, it's not just bad luck.

This is wrong. See my previous post. Read more about how PAP has worked out. 100-110 or so pitches is no more risky for injury than 100. Also, 90 PAP over the course of a season is next to nothing, and pitchers with that level of PAP have no statistically significant change in injury rate compared to guys with zero. If Markus is using PAP differently, he is wrong. As an aside, you mentioned somewhere that Mercado is listed as RP. I don't know why that is happening. Every pitcher in my organization that is not in a starting rotation (including on the DL) is being listed as RP. Even pitchers I have as starters have their scouting reports as RP sometimes. I;m not sure why this is happening. I thought it was everyone.

I am going to change every pitcher in my organization to sub 100 pitch counts except the ones I don't care about though, to see if it makes a difference.

[RonCo]

So basically, injury rates don't increase until 110-115 pitches, and really don't noticebaly change until 130

We'll agree to disagree on how to interpret the articles you've linked to.

We could, of course, just turn injuries off. I mean, this is serious. If we want maximum focus on team building and zero impact on luck of injury, that's the way to go. I personally think that's no fun. But I'm just one voice.

[Bumstead]

Boise = Least Injured???? Really? Almost every single player on my team has taken a ratings hit. If they haven't had a physical injury, they have certainly been whacked by ratings killer that is OOTP19 for virtually no reason other than it creates reality tv and drama. I think sitting around watching OOTP injure your players and crush their ratings just creates a less competitive atmosphere skewed toward the teams with the big budgets. It creates a lack of fun and it will lead to more teams turning over and over and over. Like Boise has. It's a shit team that you are lucky to have found someone that probably will stick around at least long enough to fix the organization and move it in a positive direction. Otherwise, this team might as well have been sucked into the league and eliminated. Yes, it's that bad and y'all let it get to this point. The ratings crushing will just set the team back another season or 2. How fun is that? Ratings smashing through no fault of the GM...boy, think how fun that is! I can see why you love it, you have your thumb squarely on my team's neck with no reason to worry about it for 3 - 5 seasons. Enjoy your fun...I will be looking for my moments of entertainment, but it's not likely to come with this shitty version of ootp (not that I have any confidence that future versions will be more fun)...

[Ted]

So basically, injury rates don't increase until 110-115 pitches, and really don't noticebaly change until 130

We'll agree to disagree on how to interpret the articles you've linked to.

We could, of course, just turn injuries off. I mean, this is serious. If we want maximum focus on team building and zero impact on luck of injury, that's the way to go. I personally think that's no fun. But I'm just one voice.

I'm not trying to be contrary. If there's something I don't understand, I'd like to. PAP, at it's inception, was a scoring system, without any data to back it up. It was a theory. A decent one, but still a theory. When I read things that later try to correlate PAP with injury rates, I see no correlation until the PAP gets really high. Am I not interpreting the data correctly? Help me out here.

[Lane]

So basically, injury rates don't increase until 110-115 pitches, and really don't noticebaly change until 130

We'll agree to disagree on how to interpret the articles you've linked to.

We could, of course, just turn injuries off. I mean, this is serious. If we want maximum focus on team building and zero impact on luck of injury, that's the way to go. I personally think that's no fun. But I'm just one voice.

I'm not trying to be contrary. If there's something I don't understand, I'd like to. PAP, at it's inception, was a scoring system, without any data to back it up. It was a theory. A decent one, but still a theory. When I read things that later try to correlate PAP with injury rates, I see no correlation until the PAP gets really high. Am I not interpreting the data correctly? Help me out here.

Jumping into this thread against my better judgement.

I think the issue is that PAP in real life has been proven to be pretty meaningless, except, as you're saying for the extremely high pitch counts.

However, we don't really know exactly how OOTP incorporates PAP except that we know it's there. So, even though the pitches from 100-110 don't show much negative in real life, it could have significant negative in OOTP because PAP points are being applied.

Hope that makes sense. Personally it seems that they should do away with PAP in the game, or at least tweak it to better reflect reality.


Bottom line though is that this is all a ploy for Ted to have an excuse to leave the league and get out of the Michael Best bet. Speaking of Michael Best, he's currently at 5.1 WAR! Also he's still just 22.

[Ted]

Nooooo!! My nefarious plan exposed!!!

[RonCo]

We'll agree to disagree on how to interpret the articles you've linked to.

We could, of course, just turn injuries off. I mean, this is serious. If we want maximum focus on team building and zero impact on luck of injury, that's the way to go. I personally think that's no fun. But I'm just one voice.

I'm not trying to be contrary. If there's something I don't understand, I'd like to. PAP, at it's inception, was a scoring system, without any data to back it up. It was a theory. A decent one, but still a theory. When I read things that later try to correlate PAP with injury rates, I see no correlation until the PAP gets really high. Am I not interpreting the data correctly? Help me out here.

Jumping into this thread against my better judgement.

I think the issue is that PAP in real life has been proven to be pretty meaningless, except, as you're saying for the extremely high pitch counts.

However, we don't really know exactly how OOTP incorporates PAP except that we know it's there. So, even though the pitches from 100-110 don't show much negative in real life, it could have significant negative in OOTP because PAP points are being applied.

Hope that makes sense. Personally it seems that they should do away with PAP in the game, or at least tweak it to better reflect reality.


Bottom line though is that this is all a ploy for Ted to have an excuse to leave the league and get out of the Michael Best bet. Speaking of Michael Best, he's currently at 5.1 WAR! Also he's still just 22.

I don't think it's right to say people think PAP is meaningless. I think it's fair to say sample size is low and PAP is hard to confirm (or reject). The original study is interesting and compelling. The follow-on of PAP^3 (which I believe, but do not know, is at the core of OOTP's injury algorithm for pitchers), is as compelling or moreso. That said, the system is not so strong as to be able to show through every lens. So it's probably off in some way. Or there are multiple paths to injury, and PAP is just one. Or...

The article Ted linked to suggests that biometrics is supporting the base idea behind PAP (throwing fatigued is a major cause of injuries). None of the data in it confirms or denies PAP as a basic way of looking at the situation.

Regardless of its perfection--or lack there of--the game needs something to model injuries. At the end of the day, the numbers in OOTP are at least not far off. The fact is that baseball pitchers get hurt, and they get hurt a lot.

[RonCo]

Regarding the use of the term "abuse" for low 100 pitch counts:


First off: I could be wrong about all this. Feel free to ignore it all.

But my point here is that abuse begins at pitch 101, though it's small. And that PAP is a cumulative thing that builds over time. So, as I understand it, the system does three things: adds up total fatigue (abuse) against overall pitches thrown over a period of time, uses these numbers to assess pitcher stress, then projects injury based on career situation.

The second part is key. PAP is a career cumulative thing, and--if I'm right--likelihood of injury goes up for every pitch higher than 100, but that likelihood is mitigated by how many pitches he's thrown overall. Injury via PAP is a career thing, not a game-by-game thing.

So if I throw two pitchers in six games:

• Pitcher 1: 109, 98, 98, 94, 87, 95
• Pitcher 2: 106, 105, 108, 104, 105, 106

Pitcher 1 threw more pitches one outing than Pitcher 2 threw in any of his outings, but in accumulated PAP/Pitch:

• Pitcher 1 = 9/581 = .015
• Pitcher 2 = 34/634 = .531

As I recall, the original PAP studies called this PAP/P value a stress factor. Right or wrong, this is how I understand PAP to work.

In other words, the stress factor is a kernel that leverages injury for Pitcher 2 almost four times larger than Pitcher 1. That's not to say Pitcher 2 is four times more likely to get hurt. The actual increase depends on how OOTP does its thing. My guess is that the real difference is very small--but it's still there. Mercado's usage pattern--which has seen him throw more than 100 pitches every game he's not hurt--suggests he's been lightly, but consistently, abused.

AND THEN THERE'S AGE
Now, given that, I think you also have to throw in a factor for age. Mercado, for example, has been very young through most of that abuse. My pure guess is that bumps up his "effective" stress.

I still wouldn't say he's guaranteed to get hurt, but it almost certainly means he's at least a little more likely to get hurt than a pitcher who's seen a profile like Pitcher 1 above.

[Ted]

Regarding the use of the term "abuse" for low 100 pitch counts:


First off: I could be wrong about all this. Feel free to ignore it all.

But my point here is that abuse begins at pitch 101, though it's small. And that PAP is a cumulative thing that builds over time. So, as I understand it, the system does three things: adds up total fatigue (abuse) against overall pitches thrown over a period of time, uses these numbers to assess pitcher stress, then projects injury based on career situation.

The second part is key. PAP is a career cumulative thing, and--if I'm right--likelihood of injury goes up for every pitch higher than 100, but that likelihood is mitigated by how many pitches he's thrown overall. Injury via PAP is a career thing, not a game-by-game thing.

So if I throw two pitchers in six games:

• Pitcher 1: 109, 98, 98, 94, 87, 95
• Pitcher 2: 106, 105, 108, 104, 105, 106

Pitcher 1 threw more pitches one outing than Pitcher 2 threw in any of his outings, but in accumulated PAP/Pitch:

• Pitcher 1 = 9/581 = .015
• Pitcher 2 = 34/634 = .531

As I recall, the original PAP studies called this PAP/P value a stress factor. Right or wrong, this is how I understand PAP to work.

In other words, the stress factor is a kernel that leverages injury for Pitcher 2 almost four times larger than Pitcher 1. That's not to say Pitcher 2 is four times more likely to get hurt. The actual increase depends on how OOTP does its thing. My guess is that the real difference is very small--but it's still there. Mercado's usage pattern--which has seen him throw more than 100 pitches every game he's not hurt--suggests he's been lightly, but consistently, abused.

AND THEN THERE'S AGE
Now, given that, I think you also have to throw in a factor for age. Mercado, for example, has been very young through most of that abuse. My pure guess is that bumps up his "effective" stress.

I still wouldn't say he's guaranteed to get hurt, but it almost certainly means he's at least a little more likely to get hurt than a pitcher who's seen a profile like Pitcher 1 above.

I get what you're saying here, and the theory is sound, but none of the injury data collected bears any of this out. The PAP/P stress factor value is theoretical. You're right about sample sizes and difficulty in collecting the data in the first place, but again, there's no hard evidence that pitchers on the low end of PAP totals are any more likely to be injured than guys with zero PAP. I get that OOTP needs a model, but I'd prefer that they not use one in a way that hasn't proven to be real or predictive. The age thing is murky too. One of the more popular hypotheses, "the Verducci Effect" which theorizes that pitchers under the age of 25 who throw 30 innings more than the previous year, etc, are more likely to get hurt is has also been shown to be not really predictive at all. The idea that young guys can't throw as many innings without injury appears to be bunk. What is more likely happening is that young guys who are more injury prone are weeding themselves out. But the number of innings, or pitches thrown, or anything like that seems to have almost nothing to do with it except that maybe it happens a tad sooner. A percentage of guys are just going to get hurt, or are already hurt in a less detectable way. Over time, they weed themselves out. As best as we can tell, it's still closer to random than any model. So in my mind, that's what OOTP should be doing, not pushing wonky models that haven't been borne out.

[Ted]

Actually, you know what? I retract my last statement. I don't really care what wonky injury model OOTP uses, but they need to tell us specifically what it is. Using a theoretical model that is controversial and has little statistical evidence without telling people what it is is simply bad game development. This is a consistent complaint of mine in regards to OOTP. There's too much black box. I get that there are many things in baseball that are not well understood, and you have to come up with some model for them. That's fine, but when the model is going to heavily affect your development, they need to be clear on what they are doing. Ditto for coaches, how much your settings versus the manager preferences matter, scouting and development budgets, etc. Trial and error to figure this shit out is largely impossible, given the sample sizes needed. So fine, OOTP, do what you want. I'll adjust. Just let me know what the hell you are doing.

[RonCo]

We are in total agreement that I'd like OOTP to say what they do with all their algorithms. That said, it's also a true statement that there are a LARGE number of people who do not think like you or I, and who think being told what's really happening is somehow removing the magic. I disagree with those people, but they are themselves and are obviously fine to have their own viewpoint.

Markus/Matt, whoever, need to be aware of their market--and being too open might hurt them that way, too. (of course, the fact that this also allows them to get away with obscuring things is also helpful to them).

[agrudez]

This is a consistent complaint of mine in regards to OOTP. There's too much black box.

I might be in the minority, but I kind of enjoy that different people have different opinions about different things in OOTP - which is a byproduct of its "black boxiness". I love that when I hunt for trades of prospects I am looking for "bumpers" while someone else is looking for guys with good intangibles and still someone else is looking at injury history trends. If we knew infallibly every equation in the code then we'd all be able to make spreadsheets that essentially emulate the code and then we'd never be in disagreement at all.

[RonCo]

We also agree the PAP/P stress level is theoretical. It has data setts where it appears predictive and data sets where it does not seem to matter. So to date, I think it's best to say it's neither proven nor discountable. My pure guess is that there are multiple paths to injury, PAP being one.

It would surprise me none that the Verducci concept was easily proven wrong. IP seems like a horrible metric, since pitchers of different capabilities will throw more or less pitches per inning--and better pitchers would be expected to throw more innings merely because they can get more guys out with fewer pitches. Batters faced is better than IP, and pitches is better than BF. I'd guess teams are looking at injury rates based on pitch types and quantity of pitches, too.

At the end of the day, OOTP is kind of damned if they do and damned if they don't. If, for example, OOTP were to enact a purely random injury system that modeled MLB injuries perfectly, then the complaint would be that everyone hates the fact that it's purely random and "there's nothing you can do to avoid it, so it's just unfair and no fun!"

The bottom line is that if we want to avoid injury complaints and the inherent random unfairness of them, the only way to do it is to turn them totally off.

[RonCo]

This is a consistent complaint of mine in regards to OOTP. There's too much black box.

I might be in the minority, but I kind of enjoy that different people have different opinions about different things in OOTP - which is a byproduct of its "black boxiness". I love that when I hunt for trades of prospects I am looking for "bumpers" while someone else is looking for guys with good intangibles and still someone else is looking at injury history trends. If we knew infallibly every equation in the code then we'd all be able to make spreadsheets that essentially emulate the code and then we'd never be in disagreement at all.

Yes. There's an element of what it means to be a highly competitive/good GM here, too. While I would prefer personally to know the algorithms, I'm completely fine with the fact that most are hidden, and I'm generally willing to do the sweat equity to come up with my own position on what things are most valuable. Its OOTP Moneyball in that sense.