After years of absurdly good luck in Division Series, it seems to have all caught up to me. 1-4 in the first round, and the team that made the LCS is down 0-2. Oh well - hope it evens out in round 2

Tough learning experience. I set up one weak team (110M), three good (but not great) teams, and two other teams (90M and Var Cap) that were mostly solid, but each about 40-50 innings short. I'd never had to manage situations like this before without a waiver wire to bail me out, and either I didn't do enough to remedy the errors, or there wasn't much to be done. Starting pitchers at 96% or so every game is not going to beat good teams often enough.

Ended up with 5 teams in the playoffs, but the two tired teams didn't really have much of chance of advancing past the LDS, while the other three teams lost LDSs that weren't much different than coin flip series. Could blame the sim/Sparky, but I know I'd have advanced to Round 2 had I not shorted myself on the innings. First-time WISC blunders.

Best wishes all for an exciting finish to R1 and a terrific R2. I'll be following.

Starting pitchers at 96% or so every game is not going to beat good teams often enough

I disagree with this statement. Pitchers at 96% won’t have any negative results due to fatigue. I’ve done a lot of fatigue testing with pitchers, and the difference between 100% and 90% is pretty much non-existent. You won’t really see any real change in performance until 85%, and even then it’s pretty small.

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. There is in-game fatigue that occurs, so it would stand to reason a pitcher at 96% couldn’t throw as many pitches effectively as a pitcher at 100% could. They’ll hit their “wall” faster.

Posted by chargingryno on 8/6/2020 11:10:00 AM (view original):

Starting pitchers at 96% or so every game is not going to beat good teams often enough

I disagree with this statement. Pitchers at 96% won’t have any negative results due to fatigue. I’ve done a lot of fatigue testing with pitchers, and the difference between 100% and 90% is pretty much non-existent. You won’t really see any real change in performance until 85%, and even then it’s pretty small.

I'm a statistician--so I'll start by saying ideally I'd have collected the data and done a true analysis comparing the starts of 100% versus those in the 95% vicinity. But my observations were definitely that my pitchers got lit up more and more as they crept down to 95%. In the Var Cap league in particular, where every hitter is something like .350/.430/.500, the punishments sure seemed quick and harsh.

Does your fatigue testing include caps of all magnitudes?

No, the tests I’ve conducted are primarily with $80 caps. As caps increase, the gap would likely increase (virtually no effect at $80m may have a slightly higher effect at $120, and so on. But I also think that as the cap increases there’s an even more chance of “bad luck” on any given outing So it makes testing for “fatigue” more difficult. In the variable cap, where offenses are stacked, its hard to know what is fatigue, vs what’s the effect of just facing a .350/.470/.560 lineup.

I’m not a math wiz like my brother, but here are some stats/numbers he’s compiled regarding fatigue. if a pitcher starting had a line of .220oav/2.00bb9/1.0100whip, at 96% he’d be starting with a line of .224oav/2.08bb9/1.0129whip...or 3 extra baserunners per 1000PA. Over the course of 2-4 seasons, you may see that whip jump to 1.02.

im currently running a fatigue test team, with Scherzer, Santana, and Cole as my 3 starters, all pitching at 70%-75% right now. The big drop is after you hit sub 80% and then again after 75%. But between 80-99, there’s not much of a decline depending on the pitchers you start with. The better they are to start, the less of a decline they will have.

I would venture they would perform about 5% worse at 95%. That may seem imperceptible, but it's something. I don't see why it wouldn't be the case. I'm assuming WIS is literally changing your pitcher's underlying stats by 5% in the "bad" direction.

I think what's often missing from these discussions is the replacement level of the pitcher you'd start instead. Even assuming your stud pitcher is 5% below normal ability, isn't it likely he's still dramatically better than your spot starter or long man at 100%?

I’d always start the fatigued pitcher and lower his pc a wee bit...

I don't have any stats to back it up, but I've noticed that my pitchers tend to be ok starting at 97-99%, but for some reason, they definitely tend to perform much worse when they get to 96%... Could be just bad luck or could just be in my head... but that's my anecdotal observations.

From my Fatigue test team - There's still a long season to go - but just notice the differences between 100-90-80...and then 70. There's definitely a slope involved with the drop off imo

2005 Johan Santana:

	Date	Opponent	%	IP	BFP	PC	W	L	R	ER	H	SO	BB	ERA	OAV	WHIP
Last Start at 100%	7/17 pm	@Slip Slide & Away	100	7.1	30	90	0	0	1	1	9	2	0	1.47	0.211	1.17
Last start at 90%	7/21 pm2	@Rug Pissers	91	6	21	83	1	0	1	0	2	7	1	2.22	0.215	1.22
Last Start at 80%	7/27 am	APPLES 2	80	7	27	90	0	0	2	2	4	6	2	2.21	0.212	1.14
Last Start:	8/6 am	Processed Meats and Bad Beats	73	7.1	31	104	1	0	1	1	8	4	2	2.94	0.226	1.24

2019 Gerrit Cole:

	Date	Opponent	%	IP	BFP	PC	W	L	R	ER	H	SO	BB	ERA	OAV	WHIP
Last Start at 100%	7/18 pm2	Lets Bash Them!	100	6.2	24	93	0	1	2	2	3	9	2	1.51	0.134	0.62
Last Start at 90%	7/19 pm2	AVERY&Ivory	90	5	26	90	1	0	4	4	9	6	1	2.12	0.168	0.77
Last Start at 80%	7/24 pm	Red Sox	83	7.2	30	97	1	0	2	1	4	8	2	2.52	0.181	0.91
Last Start	8/5 pm2	@Newport Beach Bums	71	7	31	104	0	1	5	5	9	10	2	4.28	0.251	1.24

No ones saying a pitcher in the 90s won’t do well. But they won’t pitch as well as a pitcher at 100% and they can’t pitch as long before falling off a cliff from in-game fatigue.

Posted by Jtpsops on 8/6/2020 4:18:00 PM (view original):
No ones saying a pitcher in the 90s won’t do well. But they won’t pitch as well as a pitcher at 100% and they can’t pitch as long before falling off a cliff from in-game fatigue.

That’s my point though, I don’t think you can make that claim without question though. Santana lowered his whip from 1.17 to 1.12 between 99-80%. He is also pitching as deep into games At 70% as he did at 100%. I don’t think we know as much about how fatigue works as we think and we’re still learning a lot (difference between in game fatigue, pitches fatigue, and appearance fatigue with each one affecting the results differently)

There is definitely an effect to pitchers pitching with fatigue, I don’t think we can say what it is exactly yet - and i think a pitcher not having success at 95% has as much to with just luck of the sim not going his way, as it is about him being at 95%, if not more so - and the higher the cap/better the hitter the better the chance of the pitcher not performing as well regardless of stamina levels.