[Johnny Slick]

Originally Posted by Erich Ingram

Things that I would like to see and please bear with me because I did not go through the whole list before putting these thoughts in.

1. Catchers ratings: I would like to see a rating for a catcher for calling a game, there are many catchers out there that can make a huge impact on a game by their ability to call a great game and will lead to them getting much larger paychecks. Jason Varitek anyone.

Not an actual ability, anyone? Actually, I would like to see a switch for this, because there is some evidence that non-catchers are at a disadvantage when it comes to calling a game compared to catchers. That being said, there hasn't been a study yet that's found that some actual catchers have the ability to call games better than other catchers. More often than not, "he calls a good game" just seems to be an excuse given by a manager with an average backstop.

2. Coaching: I would like to see this get expanded a bit more with coaches leaving to coach with other teams as managers. I would also like to see the managers have their own attributes so that teams will get different results based on different managers. This would be great for General Managers/Scouts as well and would lead to differing philosophies affecting teams. I would like to see more information about the coaches as well, things like did they play in the majors(would love to see retired players become coaches, have yet to see this), were they career minor leaguers, did they even play professionally. Ambition would be a good addition as well, would lead to whether or not you wanted to hire the coach.

I do agree with all of this, and in addition would love to see coach/scout ratings hidden. What's the point of even having them if you can just go "oh look, that guy is LEGENDARY. I think I will pick him"?

3. Warm up Pitcher: I think that if this is enabled, and am a big believer in always enabling this, the CPU team should have to do the same and it should be announced to the human owner that the reliever is up and warming. A line like the Phillies get Todd Worrell up in the pen, or if he isn't needed then a line like Worrell sits down.

I understand your point, but at the same time ISTR other games (Tony LaRussa from the early 90s?) totally killing relievers by making them toss in the 'pen. At least there's one more level there that the AI can't mess up.

4. News: It would be cool to have a local paper for each team that does a weekly story for the team with who had the best and worst week hitting and pitching and how the team did as a whole. A lot more could be added to the News as well.

IMO the news is the area where OOTP is most lacking in comparison to its "competitors" PureSim and Baseball Mogul.

5. Player career information: Rather than having the transactions at the bottom of the first page, create a player history page with listings of all contracts signed, firsts, broken records(team and league), transactions,

Download Catobase, my man! That's an order!

6. Stat sorting: This is something that I think is essential to the game, the ability to sort players by career stats. Presently we can sort players on their teams by current and previous stats and the whole league by current year stats. We need to be able to sort active players by career stats both in the team pages and in the league leaders. This is something that has been available to gamers in games like FPS, I wouldn't think it would be too difficult to add in to OOTP.

This'd be nice... but again, Catobase helps out a lot with that kind of thing. For now, anyway. With Jeff Cato missing, I doubt there will be one for v7. Which may well bite.