Quote:
Originally Posted by sixto
Yes, but I was trying to avoid making comparisons because I certainly can't vouch for the validity of any one comparison. I mean, Joe Carter and Dave Kingman had a lot of power, and very little patience, but I can't use them to say that it's valid for the game to generate hundreds of players like that because I can think of two.
I brought up Jim Thome because obviously it would be false to say that a player's BB and SO rates have no bearing on his ability to hit for average. What concerns me isn't the notion that it's impossible to predict how one of a thousand players will hit based on his SO rate. It's that we would use the fact that it's impossible to correlate the two to justify the idea that it doesn't matter.
Let's face it: some people are still scarred by the players in the game who hit .173 with 40 HR, or who hit .340 with 180 SO. Sure, that may have been common in OOTP4; maybe it's totally eradicated now. But it's part of the game's history and it's going to take a lot of work to earn the trust back, and statements like Syd's are just a little scary to me. Even though it seems to me like OOTP2007 really will be a big improvement on 2006.
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Actually, strikeout rate does correlate significantly with batting average. Its at a strength of about .35 in MLB if I'm remembering right. This is among the reasons sabermetricians get so excited when a hitter reduces his K-rate. His average rises specifically because his BABIP does not change (as much)--hence he gets more hits as his K-rate falls. Hitters in OOTP 2007 will tend to exhibit this behavior.