Player Development in Baseball Games (OOTP)
 

Been chatting about this, and I figured I'd share it here.

To start, some have complained about the randomness in OOTP dev. I actually don't have a problem with randomness itself. What I had a problem with Markus saying that it *wasn't* random, when pretty clearly it was (which he's since found was due to a bug). I do think there should be times when dev probably shouldn't happen (huge shifts don't seem to make sense in the offseason). And the randomness looks ridiculous sometimes -- negative one week then positive the next, leading it to look like a big ping pong ball. But overall, I can accept that take on dev.

However, I find myself coming back to Jim's approach with FOF. A player is what he is (except in rare volatility instances), we just don't always know what that is starting out. I think this is a really good approach - there really isn't dev by-and-large (again, some random happenings here and there are fine). In fact, I think it could work better for baseball than for football -- this is actually an instance where stats could be meaningful. In FOF, it's really hard so tell what a mask is based on stats; no minors, crappy guys often don't get to play, small sample sizes, individual stats for some positions are hard to analyze, etc. Jim kind of gets around this with his emphasis on combines and interviews. But in baseball, if you have a guy with huge potential that over the course of 1000 AB can't
seem to put it together in the low minors...you might begin to wonder about him. Same goes with a roster-filler who just happens to keep hitting .300. He looks bad on paper, but might actually be masked - and if you look at performance, you might gain some clues about that mask (or, it might be a string of lucky rolls). Eventually though, the mask goes away and you know what you have.

Thoughts?

We've talked about it before, of course. But for my part, I think that player development in a baseball sim HAS to reflect the part that the minor league system has in actually helping to GROOM talent. Right now, they're just holding pens for prospects who are already good or who are 1-star talents. I want to see a scenario where we can groom a 1-star kid into a 3-star talent with the right investment in our minor league system. With a team that lacks resources, that would mean not spending on free agents or something, but that's a far more realistic model. Or having a 5-star kid flame out due to misuse in a system where he's rushed to the majors versus grooming him and giving him time to grow and reach his actual potential.

I think this is a terrible idea because I don't think it's really that common. In fact, I don't think it ever happens. This is where the FOF theory of masking true ability comes in. 1-star talents on draft day working to become solid major leaguers comes from the masking situation, IMO. You can't "improve" someone's talent. You can just unmask it.


This is great and I thought something approaching it was already in OOTP.

By the way, I think that the boom or bust idea has a place in OOTP. Sometimes it becomes obvious very quickly when a player is simply not making the transition to wood bats, for example. A player whose high school or college stats were greatly helped on off-center hits by the forgiveness of metal bats. Some of these guys should fool the scouts and have high ratings but never produce in the minors. Meanwhile, other kids may outperform their amateur numbers over time for the opposite reason. They pured it on the bat more often but also missed more often.

Of course, this would all play very well in a baseball sim engine that uses line ddrive percentage, fly ball percentage, ground ball percentage, etc. in determining a batter's performance. ;)

that's a great point. no matter what, we can tell the career roster filler from absolute stud prospect. we use the minors mostly as a place to keep our stud prospects while they develope, but we don't use the minors as a place to try to get those 1 and 2 star duds to blossom into something more. Mike Piazza would be a great example of a guy selected in a really low round, who was drafted as a favor to his dad and went on to become one of the greatest hitting catchers of all time. he's basically the 1 star prospect who blossomed into a 5 star major leaguer. this wouldn't happen in a text sim game (or OOTP to be more specific).

Piazza is a good example of a fairly quick boom, though.

His third year in the minors at high A ball is when he really exploded. I definitely think there should be booms in the development model and even busts. But I think busts should happen earlier in their pro career while booms may extend a little later. Piazza boomed at age 22. He made the majors the next year at age 23.

That's another problem I have with OOTP. The player development seems a little slow overall, but I haven't really studied it that closely.

I'm not saying improve their talent. I'm saying it would make them serviceable major leaguers. I think the stars detract from that and focusing so much on talent, that ability doesn't correlate is a real problem. Because we're talking here specifically about talent v. ability. Talent is something we care about in a prospect, ability is what you care about in an experienced player that's been around a while. Lots of players who have little talent, but ability can be serviceable players for you, but in OOTP, there isn't an account for that because it's almost ENTIRELY focused on an initial scouting report that was done when a guy showed up on your radar screen as a draft-eligible prospect.

That's just not realistic.

Agree with you there.

For the past few years, I've simply infused talent of the 'boom' variety into the game to account for the lack of realistic talent produced. It just doesn't do it with any real regularity on its own.

I've done the same thing in some of my solo leagues, using a random number generator and a sliding scale of probability in the draft to dole out 8 talent ratings (2-8 scale).

Just to clarify my booms and busts information from before, that is meant in terms of some players having higher or lower actual talent values than there is any way for the scouting in the game to see or predict. Meaning some players simply look good and produce at lower levels but their true ceiling is lower and they peaked early. Obviously their true ceiling doesn't change, that's the one thing I hate about OOTP's development. Just that there is no way to tell who is a late bloomer and who is an early bloomer sometimes.

I'm not so sure about the slow thing. Sure, I've had guys that I drafted at 18 which take 7 years to make it to the majors. But I've also had guys that made it in 2 years. You know that superstar guy who every time you scout him converts a few of his potential ratings into current ratings. Love those guys. ;)

I've had plenty of Round 14 guys get a few random talent changes and go on to be multi-year starters on my team. Same with the 5 star guy who lost some of his potential.

I don't like the randomness of it in the game, but it does serve it's purpose. You never know if that 1 star guy will suddenly "discover a new pitch" and become effective later on.