Quote:
Originally Posted by dougaiton
The other big thing is historical stadiums. Essentially, Brooks Robinson was the example I always used for my '69 league. Brooks had 10-15 homers a year power, but Memorial Stadium made that more like 20-25 homer power. OOTP imports a 20-25 homer player as it doesn't account for parks, and then sticks him in Memorial Stadium, where he becomes a 30-35 homer player!
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This is a good point. Setting ratings off the Lahman DB is essentially baking in park effect, since the stats were generated in parks the players actually played in. When a historical simmer then places the players in "accurate" parks, they are essentially doubling the park effect...assuming, of course, that the players are playing in the parks where they played in real life (and the models are close to right).
Now, you could decide to make all ballparks neutral, but then you're effectively sending players from place to place, but having them carry their park effects with them--since they are imported off straight stats, there's really no way to get around that. It's a built-in modifier that adds a small off-set that will be noticeable if you dig deep into the details. Neutral parks would also result in a player putting up equal stats regardless of ballpark. A casual glance at the stats would probably reveal them to be pretty good, though.
Ultimately, this is one of those areas where historical simmers are caught between a rock and a hard place. They want ballpark effects to be accurate, and they want to be able to play whatif/trade games, but they also want "realistic" stats. Since the import process is driven by stats created and influenced by ballparks, this is actually an impossible design box unless the import process is given enough intelligence to derate ratings based on park and statistical environment. That's doable, but would require fairly complex logic. I would be surprised if Markus would consider biting that off in a patch release--and maybe not even in 2008. That's for him to say, of course. I have no real idea what his code base is like.