A Question About "Pitching Clutch"

[VitaminKG21]

OK, so I'm doing some pretty intensive research on pitchers and how to better create them when doing CAPs based on their career stats.

What I've done is create a set of 5 starting pitchers who have different H/9, HR/9, K/9, and BB/9 ratings and simming five seasons with the staff (individual seasons, not franchise where they will get better).

Pitcher A has all his ratings at 90% or 90 clicks, Pitcher B has them at 70% or 70 clicks and so on so that there is a discernible difference between them. I've also done this with their ratings at 100%, 80%, 60% and so on.

Also I raised all their durability ratings to 100% in order to get plenty of innings out of them in simulation.

I've gathered 5 seasons worth of stats for each with the pitching clutch rating set at a random level for each and I've also got stats with the pitching clutch rating set at zero to figure out what the impact of that rating is on a pitcher.

From what I can tell the only thing it really does is affect pitch count. When I set the pitching clutch rating at zero, every one of my created pitchers threw significantly more innings than they did with the rating bumped up and in the same number of starts as well.

Five year averages in H/9, HR/9, BB/9 and K/9 moved a bit, but in both directions and not enough to say that the pitching clutch rating had much effect at all on the numbers.

So I'm wondering if anyone has any insight as to what that rating does? My guess is that it's an "in-game" rating, meaning that it only affects a pitcher when you are actually playing a game and has really no bearing on simulated stats. My other guess is that it affects a pitcher's confidence in-game, so if anyone could confirm this through anything they may have heard or found I'd appreciate it.

Also, I'm going to be working on this for the next several weeks and trying to see if I can get a really tight system in terms of how to create consistent CAPs with realistic ratings that produce realistic numbers.

Once I'm done I'll post my findings and share my spreasheets and all that of people are interested.

[VitaminKG21]

One quick thing I want to share...

I tested my ratings on Johan Santana whose career numbers are as follows:

7.33 H/9 - .99 HR/9 - 2.47 BB/9 - 9.46 K/9

After simming 5 seasons with Santana and adjusting his ratings so that his H/9 was at 100%, his HR/9 were at 79%, K/9 were at 100% and his BB/9 were at 94%, these were the numbers I came up with.

8.02 H/9 - .73 HR/9 - 2.38 BB/9 - 8.90 K/9

As you can see the numbers are pretty close, not perfect, but close. I've simmed 15 seasons with a pitcher whose H/9 and K/9 were at 100% and not once have I seen a guy in a 5 season stretch allow fewer than 8 hits per 9 IP or strike out more than 9 batters per 9 IP. So I'm skeptical that I could even get Santana's simmed numbers in those categories to ever match up.

BB/9 seems dead on, but of course I'll have to try it with different pitchers and for a lot more seasons to see if it's right.

As for the HR/9, that one is obviously a little off. But I'm curious to see what happens over more seasons and different pitchers.

Anyway, you get the idea of what I'm trying to do. This is a massive undertaking which may end up with me adjusting every single pitcher in the game to come up with numbers that are more correct. Not sure if I'll ever have enough time for that (heh), but we'll see.

[hellblazer]

Interesting project. I'll have to check back on your progress Vitamin.