We recently had two teams have their relievers get hammered by fatigue on the 2nd game of the season. All pitchers had fatigue settings at 80%. I'm used to seeing SPs have their fatigue plunge after the 1st game of the season, but I've never seen relievers get hammered this badly after one game, which, if caught at the time, would have required the owner to immediately swap them out with AAA pitchers. I was under the impression that, as with batters, there is about a 15 game grace period before fatigue is calculated in over a 162 game season, although if you grossly overpitch those relievers, fatigue would be expected. If batters were dealt with as the relievers were, every single batter should be below 100% at game 2, but that grace period for these teams seemed to only apply to the batters. Can anyone explain why this happened to two teams' relievers?

Here is the box score for one of them from game 2:

Player	%	IP	H	R	ER	BB	PC	PC in game 1	Full season IP/G
Bob Hooper, L (0-1)	100	6.0	10	6	6	4	110
Rex Barney	24	1.0	2	1	1	1	20	18	1.68
Eddie Erautt	26	1.0	6	5	5	0	26	26	1.98
Joe Murray	12	0.2	1	2	2	1	16	16	3.75
Ralph Branca	100	0.1	0	0	0	0	0

So my understanding is that they started at 100% going into game one, then plunged to below 30% at the start of game 2 (so those numbers above constitute what they started the game at, not afterwards). A starter was brought in after these pitchers to finish the game, rather than bumping them because they were below 80%.

Those relievers were brought in again in game 3, before the owner saw what was going on.

pitchers have appearance fatigue as well as usage fatigue, which hitters do not have. these pitchers would get back to 100% after a game or two off, which wouldn't happen without the dampening.

Murray for example threw 32 innings the whole season and he's on pace for about 162 innings after one game, without the dampening he's below 100% for four or five games