balance between feeders/roster limits/draft rounds
 

I haven't seen much discussion on this, but what do people feel the best balance is. Clearly there must be a relationship between the number of draft rounds you use, the minor league roster limits(providing you're not using ghost players) and the number of feeder leagues you're using. The way I see it, there's got to be a perfect balance between all of these in order to ensure the league maintain a competetive number of players (not too many, not too few). It would also dictate what the talent distribution of the league might look like.

I don't think there'd be a "perfect" balance, but there should be a rather tight range of the numbers. It would be good if people who use these post their results. Obviously we would wind up with a huge list since there are so many combinations of leagues that people use, but even if we got some for standard MLB, and then a mix of fictional, ie: a 20 team league with full minors, a 24 team league with just 3 levels of minors.

Something to think about and track when setting up a league to see what outcome you get.

I have been playing around with htis quite a bit the last several days. I would like to set up an MLB type league with the top 128 NCAA programs as well as the top 500 high schools as my feeder leagues. This is obviously plenty of talent to feed into a 30 team MLB with full minors.

In fact, what I am finding out (as others have already)- is that this type of set-up isn't really practical becasue there seems to be no way to proportion the number of 5 star players on these teams- and the MLB league is quickly overrun in several years with an abundance of talent from the draft. Every feeder league team has several 5 star players- which isn't exactly realistic to either college or high school. Every 3rd or 4th Div I school in college might have a 5 star prospect- and 1 out of every 50 or so in high school- but with 5 or so per team, the talent is disproportional....Is there any way to address this that anyone can think of? Can Markus or RonCo or someone who has a better feel for how the draft is designed comment on a way to make this work...I am a little bummed out that we now have the flexibility to utilize HS and college feeder leagues but are aparently limited to a "magic number" of teams to make the draft operate properly.....Perhaps a variable where we can set the % of draft worthy prospects for our desired feeder system would work- but I don't see how it can be done currently....Help!!!!!!

I know that you can adjust player creation modifiers and keep talent levels down in any level of the minors. Are you able to do the same adjustments in feeder leagues to get your desired results?

I haven't attempted to tune a feeder league league with a primary league, but yeah, I would think you could do either one of two things:

1) Adujst PCM (or MLE) of the feeder league to tone down prospects
2) Turn the rate of random talent changes down on either the feeder or the primary league.

I should have some time this weekend to play with it a little. I'll report back what I find.

Thanks for your reply...I have tried #1 on the list- but all it seemed to do was decrease the players INITIAL ratings- but I still had 5 or 6 5 star players per team- in other words it didn't seem to effect their talent potential when I did this- which is really what I am after...Please let me know what you find out- I'd really like to make this work!

Will do. PCM should affect both talent and ratings. MLE can be more flakey.

The feeder leagues don't seem to have MLE's....do they? I also tried putting the talent differential modifier from 1 to 200 as suggested- and at first glance it didn't seem to effect anything either way .....I think I am stumped...But there MUST be a way to do this correctly!!!!

I'm playing around with this tonight. Probably a day or two before I can make any serious suggestins, though.

Looking forward to it! The more I play around with this, the more I am convinced it's going to be a problem....and maybe even for the default league size for a league carrying a HS and college feeder league....I mean, there are hundreds of 4 and 5 star players- one quarter of which will be available for the draft in June- this is WAY more than I am seeing when not using feeder leagues.

The only thing that makes sense to me is that a large number of these guys fizzle out as they move up the system- but the same could be said I guess for a draft with no feeder league- and it has the disadvantage with starting with a LOT less highly rated prospects...Sigh...I am probably overlooking something- hope you come up with some good news!

hmm, something i never bothered to check....

are feeder league players compared to all other players in the universe, with respect to stars, or just the players in their respective feeder leagues?

Good point- I thought of that as well- but with scouts off, the stars are just a graphical representation of the players "talent" correct????.....and with respect to the parent league. I guess what I am saying is these guys all have REALLY high ceilings ratings wise....Just seems too obvious to be overlooked.

has anyone set up a test league to sim out 8-10 years and see if those 5-star, ungodly rated players actually keep their talent and take over the league?

How many seasons have you played and what quantifiable impacts are you seeing in parent league performance? I'm really early in this, but what I'm seeing right now is that the first 5-8 seasons sees an overall rise in average quality of the feeder leagues to a point of some stability, with a similar (but much smaller magnitude rise in average parent league quality. I'm doing everything on default ratings right now just to get a solid baseline of data that I can work from to make either in-game recommendations for you, or clear problem statements for Markus.

Still very early. :)

I'm working on that now. My guess is that a large majority don't.

I am working on this a bit now- should have more info tomorrow- you are right, of course- this is really the only way to get to the bottom of this.

Dola...

Ron,

I am in sim year 3- default settings 400 team HS feeder....Looking at the MLB page- only a few guys have made it up from the 1st year- but two 19 year olds made it to the bigs in their first year...Very weird ratings. Contact ratings for both in the mid 60's- both actual and potential- but absolutely wretched in every other category BUT- very, very fast...100 speed 121 stealing.... These guys are hitting well over 300 (and not much else)- and stealing tons of bases and leading the league- totally unrealistic.

After a quick perusal of the HS feeder league- I am noticing a pattern of clones of the guys mentioned above- no fewer than 150 guys in high school with 100/100+ speed/stealing. Not sure what's up- but a lot of these guys are going to be in the bigs if they can hit at all- and a few have contact ratings already in the 50's- in high school!......Are you seeing anything like this? I am going to bed- will look into this more after the league sims 8-10 years out...

I've run through a 20+ season study and I see (at least partially) what's happening. I'll be feeding Markus some detailed data here later today. The basic issue is that the average talent in feeder leagues rises quickly each year for about 8 seasons, then hits an equilibrium--so feeder leagues player creation algorithms are not well-tuned to their levels. After about 6-8 seasons, everything comes to an equilibruim and things seem to work out okay, at least.

One interesting chart that indicates what I'm saying is the average age of major league players when viewed over the seasons. It takes a dip for a bit, then recovers....

Age by Season:
28.1682
27.9994
28.1858
28.3087
28.1618
27.7311
27.789
27.6101
27.6443
27.776
27.5768
27.6394
27.8492
28.1211
28.4033
28.4232
28.5763
28.8665
29.2188
29.1241
29.1075

There's more to it--everything is more complex than it first appears. :) But the good news here is that the algorithm is not fundamentally broken--but it does appear to need some fine-tuning. I'm guessing Markus can improve this fairly easily if presented with the right data. I will keep working on this today and post more as is appropriate.

In the meantime, you can most likely mitigate this behavior a bit by setting your development speed modifiers down a little. Just eye-balling it, I would select something like .7 to start with. That will retard the rate that younger players develop. [DISCLAIMER: I haven't tested the rate modifiers on feeder leagues, but I know it works properly on the professional minors.]

A few more bits of information. I set up 80 HS teams and 80 college teams as my feeders -- and had a total of 4116 players in my initial HS/College level file. Of the 50 most talented HS and College pitchers in that initial file, 13 were eventually drafted (4 from the HS ranks, 9 from college). 11 of those were in the majors after ten seasons. Five of those were very valuable pitchers. Three were at least a little above average. Three were average or a little below.

Overall, the flow and yield rate itself doesn't seem particularly off--but I am certainly going to suggest some player creation or dev changes to smooth the feeder leagues out a little. Still trying to decide exactly what those changes need to look like...but it's coming clearer.