[RonCo]

Originally Posted by 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.

Nothing wrong with a good, healthy debate.

- 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.

Improvement would depend on how well the change was done, of course.

- 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...

I agree with all that.

Using a more stable potential platform would probably make it easier to write a good development engine.

- 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.

The occasional mysterious loss of top-end potential would be fine. That said, I don't see any of your examples actually showing that in their stats:

Bob Hamelin - Had one great year at 26 yo. However, two warning signs...he was a 25 yo rookie (old), and his great season included only 31 AB (terrible sample size).
Eric Yelding - One of my favorites...I kept using him on my fantasy team because he was so speedy. Unfortunately, he was never a good baseball player, never registering an OPS+ of greater than 69...Yikes...
Pat Listach - Wow, what a bad player. Great example of hype/scouting being way off. His ROY season consisted of 579 AB of less than league-average performance (99 OPS+). Beyond that year, he never had another that even came close to league average. Given his age (24) and that so much of his value was due to his speed (which is known to be falling heavily at that age), I find is unsurprising that his performance quickly fell to Yelding levels and below.
Claudell Washington - Another great example of hype. His actual performance his first two seasons show no signs of greatness (except for his age). But he was very fast, and some people liked that. So, despite an OPS+ that was never much better than just over league average, the scouts all raved about his potential. Taking the scouts out of it, perhaps he did have great potential but just didn't grow into it. Dunno. Washington was never knows as a great worker as I recall.
Cesar Cedeno - The best argument you've got, due to his 21-22 yo seasons being so outstanding. If you do the mathematical probability and statistics on it, though, I'll be willing to bet a lunch that the chances of a guy who routinely puts up 130 OPS+ numbers like Cedeno did throughout his career, putting up a couple 150s by random chance is pretty high ( my pure guess would be he had a 10-15% chance of having those numbers just by random chance assuming his later performance was a "true" baseline of his skills.

- 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.

For the most part they "didn't reach their potential" because they never had that potential to begin with...it was all scouting/marketing, or an inability to understand the story that the stats they actually put up were telling about them. Cedeno is the only example you've given that his even close to a mystery to me.

Regardless, each of these could be equally or better modeled by the system I've proposed.

- 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.

Eye = BB/PA
Control = BB/BF

I agree they are difficult for a human being to project. Your argument just bolsters my side of the equation, I think.

- 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.

The injury system seems greatly improved to me, but I'm sure it can always be done better. I really haven't studied it closely.

- 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.

Per above, Listach's problem was he was not as good as some folks thought he was to begin with.

I'll touch on pitch counts and pitcher injuries in another post.