Popularity player - Yelich
 

Yelich won 5 MVP and is still just a "Well Known". Even on your team it is not the most popular.

To be fair...unless you live in Milwaukee or are a major baseball fan...you won't know who Christian Yelich is. He doesn't have the personality of Harper or the media obsession of Trout or the shine of a big city. It's sadly realistic.

He is 5 or so years in the future and Yelich has 5 MVP awards, it is not realistic at all. 5 MVP awards is would put him solidly in the conversation for the greatest of his era. After someone goes on a run like that they are a household name, and that goes for any sport.

Locally he should be a higher in popularity.

But he was a Marlin for a while and check his personality ratings as well.

But yea, 5 years straight MVP with the same club, he should be higher at least locally.

in my experience - I love the concept of popularity - but their are a few problems.

1. popular & notoriety are not the same thing - EVERYONE knows who Barry Bonds was - but his popularity is a lot more complicated. same thing for ARod, Clemens.... the game treats them as more or less then same thing.
2. the game doesnt do a great job of putting the popularity with the "right" players - especially historically where the popularity is more or less known. I would love to see this addressed at some point. Personally I tend to do a lot of popularity editing because immersion is everything.
3. we dont see enough of "local hero" - every city I visit (tends to be a lot with work travel) their are always guys who are considerably more famous, beloved in their town then remembered in baseball history. we have the separate ratings for local and national which is great. but it seems they ratings are usually mirrored in the game, which I do not believe is reflective of real life.

Honestly, I hope they don't spend valuable programming time on this

As has more or less been stated, popularity isnt really just name recognition but a kind of measure of how much the local area would be bummed if he left and how much a generic team's fanbase would be jazzed by his joining. You could make a case for late era Barry Bonds not being popular by OOTP standards because when the Giants did finally say "okay, we've had enough, bye", the city of San Francisco did not exactly rise up in protest and for all the talk of teams wanting to bring him in, at the end of the day nobody decided to pay that salary.

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Ahhh yes. I remember the rumors (not sure if they're accurate but I believe they're spot on) about Bonds being such a prima donna that he wouldn't fly with the team, and wanted his own buses and chartered jets so he didn't have to deal with teammates.


There's a reason only one former teammate showed up to his number retirement ceremony, after all. The guy was considered a total jerk. But man could he hit.

Well, even *that* stuff could be presented in OOTP by his being a clubhouse cancer (there's a guy with a profile similar to what I imagine Bonds has IRL in the game I'm playing right now and even though he's a great pitcher, every time he gets traded the players tell me that they are secretly glad that he is leaving the club). With Bonds, on top of all the jerkishness towards his teammates, *fans* were not all that happy with him either, especially towards the end when it was common knowledge that he'd juiced and his general reaction is "yeah, I did and I just broke Hank Aaron's record. What are you going to do about it?".

On the other hand, a guy like Mark Grace, who from what I've read was a complete ass in the clubhouse, was also revered by the fans during his time in Chicago, so he'd be something like a clubhouse cancer (I mean, not on Bonds levels) with high popularity ratings. Maybe Rickey Henderson at the end of his career might be an example of a guy who was a good teammate but who had a lot of detractors in baseball fandom so that people were often a bit "meh" on his arrival and departure even though he was still a very useful ballplayer well into his 40s.