10/23/20

Notes About the Injury File We Use

Most leagues I’ve been in use the Low setting for injuries. My other league, PCL Redux, also used that setting for many years. By the time I started the American Circuits, I was of the opinion that Low was too low. In a league that is supposed to be as realistic as OOTP can muster, fudging on the injury frequency didn’t seem appropriate.

So we started using the Normal setting when this league began play with human managers. Boy, is there a huge difference between Low and Normal in OOTP. The difference, in a league this size, seems to be from about two or three injuries a week (Low) to about three or four injuries every day (Normal).

I don’t know if Normal is realistic; I do know that Low isn’t. Since a good many of the injuries are of the day-to-day variety, it’s hard to compare them to real life, since those types of injuries aren’t always reported in real life. Lacking any hard data to use as a comparison, I decided to accept that the frequency of injuries under the Normal setting is realistic, or realistic enough, anyway. If injuries were occurring a little too often or a little too infrequently I wasn’t going to worry about it.

We were, however, getting what seemed to be a ton of what I would call devastating injuries. By “devastating” I mean injuries that cause a player to miss an entire season or more. These types of injuries, obviously, are not unusual in real baseball; they happen every year. But because of the massive impact they can have on a team’s chances of contending, I decided that it was very important to err on the side of caution with regards to how often we would allow them to occur. Minor injuries happening a little too often to be realistic? No big deal. Devastating injuries occurring too often? Very big deal.

Since there is no setting between Low and Normal, the only way to address the problem was to amend the file the game uses to determine injuries. There were several false starts on this process since I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, but eventually I got my arms around it.

What I changed

• The duration of some of the injuries (I cut some of them down a bit, usually not by a huge amount)
• The frequency variable of some of the injuries (each injury has a 1-5 frequency range; I changed some 5’s to 3’s, and some 4’s to 2’s, for example, so certain injuries would not occur as often)
• The name/description of many of the injuries (I used terminology more familiar to people who didn’t go to medical school; “acromioclavicular joint irritation”, for instance, becomes “sore shoulder”)
• The number of times certain injuries appear in the chart (In the original file, many injuries are repeated, sometimes multiple times; in the revised file, devastating injuries appear less frequently, and common, less serious injuries appear more often. For example, if there were five torn labrums in the original file, I kept one or two of them and changed the others to shoulder tendinitis or something similar.)
• The chance for an injury to be a career-ending injury (no injuries in the revised file are career-enders; see below)

What I didn’t change

• The overall number of injuries (the original file has 281 injuries; my amended file also has 281 injuries)
• The number of injuries for each specific body part (there are the same number of injuries for Arm, Leg, Back, and Body in the revised file as there are in the original; I changed some of the serious injuries to less serious ones involving the same body part)

Why I eliminated career-ending injuries

I didn’t, really. Let me explain.

In real life, many if not most players’ careers end as the result of an injury, or a succession of injuries. Some end for other reasons, and some end because age eventually erodes everyone’s skills. But for a substantial percentage of players, injuries are at least part of the reason they have to call it a day.

What you almost never, ever see in real life, however, is a player who suffers an injury, and then announces his retirement the next day. It just doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t even work that way if a doctor tells the player, “I’m sorry, but the damage is too great; you’ll never play again.” What happens instead is, the player 1) has his surgery (if applicable), 2) rehabs, and 3) attempts to play again. And his team will usually give him a shot, and he either pans out, or he doesn’t, but if he doesn’t pan out, he tries to make a comeback with some other team. And another, until it becomes painfully clear that he is no longer able to play at the highest level.

So a real “career-ending injury” is one that causes a player to retire not at the time of the injury, but after repeated comeback attempts over a protracted period. A “career-ending injury” in real life often takes several years to actually end a career.

With injuries occurring as often as they do in our league, we see plenty of injuries that diminish players’ skills (ratings) and eventually force them out of the league. It works exactly as it’s supposed to, without using the “automatic” CEIs from the game’s original file.

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