I looked through all the posts for the past year and did not see an answer to this...

How does Sparky use specialists? I have '88s Milacki and Randy Johnson set to a pitch count of 5 and 8th inning or later. 10 games in...they have yet to appear.

Comments, suggestions? Thanks.

I almost never use the specialist settings. They rarely seem to work they way I want. I'm trying a guy as a LH Specialist (10-15 pitches, available in the 7th) right now simply as an experiment in one of my progressives, but he hasn't seen play in the full week I've had him there.

The only way I can get them to work is to use those specialists settings for almost every reliever in my pen. It's working quite well for one of my teams at the moment.

I did a lot of work a couple of years ago to try to reverse-engineer the bullpen use algorithms...most things were pretty easy to figure out.  Specialists were not.

My current hypothesis is that Sparky will always use a rested Set Up A - and in most cases a rested Set Up B - before going to the specialists.  If anyone is able to confirm or refute this, I would definitely be interested.

Try using 5th or 6th inning(or maybe ANY) and see what happens.

It does appear that Setup A and Setup B have priority if both are available along with the specialist.  This is just observational though and I have no real data to back it up.  Making the specialist(s) available earlier than the setup guys could help get them into more games.

The way I see it is that Sparky chooses the Setup guy instead of the LHS is because if you have a lead in a certain inning, the Setup guy is likely a better pitcher than the specialist.  If Milacki was set as a specialist in the 8th inning and the 8th inning setup guy is a lefty, you'd likely see Milacki enter the game a lot more because (1) he will be the better pitcher for Sparky to choose from than those that are also available for that inning, and (2) most hitters in OLs are righties.