[Syd Thrift]

As usual, I find myself in total disagreement with RonCo. Don't get me wrong; I think he is an unbelievably intelligent guy and the fact that he states his position so clearly that I can so vehemently disagree with him is a huge plus. Thanks to him, I think that scouting and development will greatly improve next year whether Markus takes his advice or the advice of his "opponents" (in quotes because in truth, I think we're all united behind the common goal of making the game better.

I'll go point by point with what I want to see:

- I think that adding a third "tools" rating in with actual ratings and potentials would not make the game more realistic; in fact, I'm thinking it would make it even less realistic than it is right now. If you want the game to generate how fast a guy can run the 40 or how many bench presses he can do, make the game generate those as cosmetic stats based on speed and homerun power and with a lot of randomness thrown in.

- I think that players not reaching their potentials ought to be a common, every day sort of thing - something that happens way more often than it does now. You want to recreate superstars? Give them high POTs, sure, but make their ACTs a very high percentage of those to start out with. A great player generally has a high percentage of his POT realized even when he's very, very young. A guy good enough to be one of the best players in history should probably be good enough to be a league-average player when he's 18. Or better. Look at how Ted Williams and Joltin' Joe DiMaggio tore up the PCL. With pitchers it's even more extreme, as historically speaking an *awful* lot of hurlers seem to have had better seasons in their early to mid 20s than in their early 30s. More on that in a second...

- That being said, I don't think it's unrealistic to occasionally see players lose potential when they are young. Should they actually drop below their current abilities? Eh, probably not except in the case of injury (but I could see that in extreme circumstances - see Bob Hamelin or Eric Yelding or Pat Listach), but there are absolutely tons of examples of young rookies who burst on the scene, looked awesome, but never became the superstars they were projected to be or even advanced beyond the players they were in their rookie seasons. Claudell Washington springs to mind. See also: Adrian Beltre (2005 notwithstanding). I sincerely doubt the game is going to model what caused Cesar Cedeno to slide from aWesome to very good from age 21 to age 27, so a random hit would be appropriate there too.

- You notice that I didn't ask why in those cases? I don't remember Claudell Washington or Pat Listach or Cesar Cedeno getting hurt (unless you count being heckled in every town for perhaps committing murder as a psychological injury). They just never cashed in on their potential, that's all. Or maybe their potential was false. Either way, IMO it is realistic to model this with POT hits.

- Some stats are ridiculous for scouts to be able to project at all. Eye and Control are the two that make me giggle (I know this has been stated elsewhere but still). I'm not saying you should remove potentials for these. They should be hidden whether you have scouts on or off.

- This seems unrelated, but trust me it is not: injuries ought to be even more plentiful than they are but at the same time there should be a lot fewer "OUT" injuries. Very rarely is a player so badly hurt that he is absolutely unable to play for a series, much less 2 weeks. Players even play through broken legs or hands (as long as they're not too badly broken) and then get surgery in the offseason. More often what happens is that a player complains that he's hurt (or tries to hide it) and the manager, GM, and coaching staff get together and decide that they'll be better off in the long run if they let him rest. This was close to the model that Baseball Pro '98 used. While injured, the player should be more prone to re-injuring himself, the injury should take longer to heal, and each day he's hurt there should be a (slight) chance of a ACT/POT hit to a different attribute depending on the extremity that has been damaged.

- Also, unless the player is hurt so badly that he can't play at all, we should have a lot less information on how badly he's likely to play. PureSim used a scale from Mild to Very Serious IIRC, which is a great way to set it up. Nobody should know that a guy has a "9%" injury; for one thing, a player with a sprained finger should have basically no hit whatsoever to his speed, and for another thing boiling it down to a number is silly and unrealistic. Sure, there should be a number in the back end but not even House could tell you a 9% injury is a 9% injury with a straight face. Well, maybe House but only because that man can tell brutal lies with a straight face.

- One effect of waaaay more injuries: more talent and/or POT hits. Maybe then we could get rid of the random drops and then RonCo would be happy! I am perfectly content to accept that, say, Listach suffered an injury the Brewers didn't tell anybody about following his rookie year and that's why he sucked donkey marbles afterwards.

- How many injuries is "waaay" more? I have an inkling that at any given time, roughly 1/3rd to 1/2 of all pitchers ought to be nursing some sort of injury. Maybe they don't affect them much except that they stand a greater chance to be hurt down the line if they're overused (although I think the majority of guys should see their abilities actually reduced) or whatever, but IMO a big part of being a real-life manager is figuring out which pitchers' complaints you can live with and which ones you can't. That would also help to solve another big issue with the game: the one where pitchers are far more consistent than in real life.

- I know (from talking to Markus) that PAPs play a factor there but IMO they should play an even larger one. A player who throws, say, 150 pitches in a game ought to have basically a 100% chance of getting injured. Now, if that guy is Randy Johnson in 1995 he's probably still going to be way effective even through a minor injury, but IMO the game right now does not sufficiently punish managers for behaving like Kevin Kennedy. Erik Hanson threw one - one - lots-o-pitch game and that essentially ruined him. The same thing set back Tim Wakefield for a couple years, even though he's a knuckleballer with a supposedly rubber arm. IIRC Bret Saberhagen was also essentially destroyed as an innings-muncher by one or two long outings.

- An alternate take on the above: while throwing a guy a lot of pitches in one game should hurt, what should also hurt is throwing a guy a lot more pitches than he's used to. If you train a guy to throw 100 pitches a start, you may be keeping him out of injury, but if he then throws 130 pitches he ought to have a far greater chance of getting hurt than a guy who averages 120 pitches a start. If we just model the game as above, the 120 averaging guy is probably going to be more prone because he'd have probably been injured several times before from overuse and his proneness rating went up. Should that trend be reversed? Hard to say... evened out maybe?

A lot of thoughts, I know. Coherent? I'll let you be the judge of that!