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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Who said anything about BB rates? I'm not sure there's a lot of correlation there either, but I will clarify here. In OOTP, as in real life, there are several different skills a player has:
1. The ability to avoid striking out
2. The ability to get hits out of balls in play
3. The ability to draw walks and get ahead in the count
4. The ability to hit the ball out of the park
5. The ability to get long hits in the park
The salient point is, the first 2 abilities are not correlated. Jim Thome is a great example of a guy who isn't so good at avoiding Ks but who is solid at generating hits out of balls in play. Ichiro(!) is good at both skills. Rob Deer was good at neither (although still good enough at hitting HRs and drawing walks that he was a solid player for a couple years). It should also be pointed out that Thome benefits from good power as well - homeruns are considered hits but not balls in play.
I never said that a player's K rates don't affect his ability to hit for average. Of course they do! When a player strikes out, he's not getting a base hit. The point is, some players are able to overcome this and some are not. In prior versions of OOTP and in every other baseball sim ever made, there is a tacit negative correlation between BABIP and K rates because there is no correlation between K rates and straight batting average. Does that make sense?
6, you may want to take another look at the projections Luis Rivera did, as they're based in part on this BABIP/K rate phenomenon.