Jokers Gone Less Wild

Putting some restrictions on the designated hitter rules

One of the things I did in O27 baseball was introduce the Pesäpallo rule that gives teams 3 designated hitters (called jokers) who replace any batter in the batting order during a half inning. I'd long wondered what this would do for a sport, mostly that it'd make it harder on pitchers, replace bat hitters and improve the offense capabilities of clubs.

What I've found instead in this python sim -- besides the fact that the whole mechanic is a little foreign for a basbeall sim -- is that it ends up replacing othrwise useful players from ever hitting because a joker can just replace them in the order. This becomes more acute in a 27-out half-inning because it means you never have the liability of getting that light hitting infielder at bat and having to navigate out of situations, you can just use a joker and have them drive runs instead.

I did this initially because it felt like a good tactical choice, but the way the AI has chosen to utilize it, is to always use jokers in the offense. In games where the score is very low, you'd see jokers hitting 6-7 times per game, and it just felt a bit weird to look at, as well as it not really producing results. I've done a lot of work in the recent weeks of building the sim to make it more "baseball-like," by adding a batted ball model, more defensive tracking and a bevy of other additions. When I first started working on this, my goal, like my other sims was just to develop a plausible looking box score/random-number generator for this sport i'd been considering for a long time.

What's evolved is something far more ridiculous, but has been fun to explore.