SCORESHEET OLD TIMERS BASEBALL: PLATOON SPLITS
In Scoresheet Old Timers Winter Baseball, all right handed batters have the same degree of platoon adjustment, and all left-handed hitters are treated the same as all other lefties. NOTE: This is different than our regular season game, where a player's platoon adjustment is based on his actual 'platoon difference' from the previous two seasons. But the database Scoresheet uses for the winter game does not give lefty/righty breakdowns, so we give all right-handed batters (RHB) the same 'platoon adjustment' as all other RHBs. Similarly, all left-handed batters (LHB) get the same platoon adjustments as all other LHBs.
The league average for platoon adjustment used in the winter game is:
vs Right-Handed Pitchers (RHPs):
- a RHB's batting average drops by 5 points
- LHB's batting average raises by 9 points
vs Left-Handed Pitchers (LHPs):
- a RHB's batting average raises 11 points
- a LHB's batting average loses 28 points
In real life and in Scoresheet, the 'platoon adjustment' for left-handed hitters is much more extreme than for right-handed hitters. Sometimes, benching some of your left-handed hitting players versus LHPs can be a very good idea!
Further, the number of hits, as well as the number of doubles, triples, home runs and walks are affected, and as a result, the slugging and on-base percentages change more than just the batting average. On average, slugging percentage (SLG) changes a little more than twice as much as batting average (AVG) does, while on-base percentage (OBP) changes a little less than twice as much. More precisely, vs RHPs, a RHB drops about 0.012 in SLG and 0.010 in OBP, while a LHB gains about 0.019 in SLG and 0.012 in OBP. Versus LHPs, a RHB gains about 0.023 in SLG and 0.017 in OBP, while a LHB drops about 0.058 in SLG and 0.038 in OBP. (These gains and drops are a result of what the batter does overall, and are based on the league average platoon differential from actual major league numbers over the past few years.)
Looking up every one of your player's on-base and slugging percentages, and then adding in these adjustments before deciding who to start, is possibly more work than many of us want to do. But, at the very least, if you have two players at the same position that have similar stats on our player lists, you should make sure you start the lefty versus right handed pitchers, and the righty versus left handed pitchers. And even if a player is starting against both types of pitchers, you likely want to change his spot in the batting order depending on from which side of the plate he bats. Once again, this is different from the way platooning works in the regular season baseball game at Scoresheet - in that game, each player is treated differently, as a player's platoon adjustment is based on his real platoon difference from the previous two seasons.
