Very good points injury log. I, too, love the fact that it is random especially since I play in an online league. The fact that it is random gives it a strategic element when drafting in an online league. Do I burn a 1st round draft pick on that stud closer with only third pitches in hopes of him developing a third pitch?
I know users have wanted a way for users to aid a pitchers to learn a third pitch citing that it is ridiculous that a pitcher cannot be "forced" to learn a new pitch.
The way I imagine it, every two-pitch pitcher is trying to learn a new pitch. It's just most of them become unsuccessful at it. Just because they are unsuccessful does not mean they are not trying.
We've seem Mariano Rivera develop a killer cutter that made him one of the best closers of all time. Just because Rivera has an awesome cutter, it does not mean every John Doe can develop a cutter as effective as Rivera's.
Not everyone can develop a Randy Johnson slider or Trevor Hoffman change up. I don't have evidence to support this but I think learning a new pitch is harder than most people think? Sure anyone can throw any type of pitch they want. It's just a matter of grip and throwing motion. But throwing it effectively is a totally different story. Not everyone can throw a curveball like Bert Blyleven. If developing a pitch was so easy, every 5.00+ ERA pitcher would have already developed a Rivera cutter, Hoffman change up, and Brandon Webb sinker.
This is why a Roy Halladay or a Tim Lincecum makes so much money. No pitcher can pitch like them.
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Originally Posted by injury log
Only Markus knows for certain, but I think it's determined at random who learns a third pitch. Learning a new pitch is essentially a 'talent boost', so it also only seems to happen to younger pitchers. If Intelligence or Work Ethic play a role in determining who receives talent boosts (and I don't think they do, but I don't know for sure - my understanding was that they only influence the direction of small ratings changes), I imagine they probably also play a role in determining who learns new pitches. In any event, it's a very rare thing in the game, so don't count on any of your pitchers developing that killer knuckle curve.
This came up on beta, as endgame mentions above, and I made my case against:
* Right now, we can have a perfect development model, since the user can't intervene in player development. The instant you give the user control over how players develop, we get away from real player development and into fictional player development.
* We also, with the new pitching model, finally got away from an issue that plagued earlier versions of OOTP: it used to be that a guy's Stamina would creep up over time, and you'd have a lot of good relievers who became starters later in their careers. That's pretty rare in real life. If you can train people in new pitches, that's going to start happening all the time again.
* For gameplay reasons, there needs to be some disadvantage to training a new pitch; otherwise you'd just have every pitcher in your system working on that screwball. What could that disadvantage possibly be? What real life data do we have to base this on?
* As someone pointed out in beta, the user can't determine whether a player develops his bunting skills, or baserunning skills, or control, so why should he have the option to determine whether a pitcher learns a forkball?
* This would add yet another exploit to the game; the human user is likely to be able to determine more intelligently than the AI when it will be profitable to train a guy in a new pitch.
* I also think that adding this kind of control completely changes OOTP from a baseball sim into something more like those fantasy games where you might train your dwarf character in archery, winemaking and herbalism. That's not the kind of game I want to play when I load up OOTP.
It would be a great idea for a game like ITP, I imagine (never played it), but I don't like it for OOTP.
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