Quote:
Originally Posted by VanillaGorilla
I will agree with The Wolf and say these are all very good points.
Some added thoughts:
Baseball is a game of adjustments, and it has evolved over time, and will continue to evolve. One difference now, than even 20 years ago, is the ability for hitters to pull up video of pitchers vs themselves, similar batters, or any batters in any situation and look for trends and assisting them in "guessing" pitches. Knowing that their history can be compiled and parsed by future opponents to the degree that it is now results in an incentive to consciously not to pitch to form every occasion. If a big league hitter can guess what is coming, he can hit it. Just ask a gimpy, but fist pumping, Kirk Gibson in 1988.
As the idea of shifting catches on, as all successful ideas do, hitters will make adjustments and value will be placed on players with the ability to hit against shifts. As more shifting occurs, more players will hone this ability. 40 years ago, Dominican players had a saying that "You don't walk your way off an island" that explained the free swinging nature of these players. Scouts looked for guys that made contact and those were the guys that got a trip to the continent. Walks were not valued by teams and scouts, as they are now.
In the last 15 years, or so, making contact has been devalued in favor of power and walks. As shifts become more mainstream in their frequency of use and degree, players with the ability to "hit 'em where they aint" will be of greater value.
A simulation must make assumptions in how RL data is translated into the simulation, itself. OOTP takes historical which is the result of whatever conditions were in existence and uses a normalization process to translate the base data into a universal output for whatever type of environment we want to create.
If shifting is to be reflected in the game as a way of diminishing a player's offensive chances to a greater degree than it is in use now, the game must also give players an ability to "hit against a shift" that is separate from whether or not they are a pull or spray hitter.
How do you work that into the game? Would a more intelligent hitter be better at recognizing a game situation where it is advantageous to give up 150 slugging points to gain 150 batting average points, for instance? Would a selfish player just not care and want to hit the HR regardless of game situation vs a shift? Would a pull hitter with a high work ethic be more likely to learn to hit against the defense than one without a high rating?
To reflect the more nuanced shifts described in the linked article in the OP, OOTP would need to employ a much more diverse batted ball location grid.
I am in favor of the game being more detailed, but there is more than one part to the equation as far as OOTP working the use of advanced shifts into the game..
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Good post, but I think you're mixing some micro vs macro considersations here.
At the high level, OOTP classifies hitters as Pull Hitters, Spray Hitters, or Normal. Normal hitters should not be shifted against. I'm not sure if there's any argument for opposite shifts against spray hitters. Pull hitters should be shifted against.
Hitters who are able to consistently beat IF shifts, in my mind, should not be considered Pull Hitters by OOTP. Since teams are using specific player hit charts to determine whether or not to bother shifting against them IRL, then I feel like OOTP is simulating this process already just by accident via the Pull/Spray/Normal designation. Hitters who can consistently beat shifts aren't shifted against today, so we're only dealing with the subset of "Pull Hitters" to begin with as we're discussing what the impact should be against those hitters.
Since OOTP is simulating the end result statistics of the batter-vs-defense matchups, I think we would be best served to think of that end result as already having considered the shift-beat-change classification-adjust process.
I think you're thinking in terms of the individual batter analysis, while OOTP needs to be treating this at the higher level. Today, a hitter shows a pattern of balls put in play. Defensive teams analyze this data. For hitters who real world terms classify as "pull hitters", good defensive teams shift against them. If the defensive team is wrong about that hitter being a pull hitter, and the hitter is really a "normal" or "spray" hitter, then that hitter will beat the shift. The defensive team will adjust back to not shifting against that hitter. Hitters who are impacted by shifts should be classified by OOTP as "Pull Hitters", and therefore vulnerable to IF shifting mechanics. Hitters who hit the end result of Normal or Spray, even if there was a brief moment in time where a shift increased or decreased their capability in a particular game, or even in a particular week or month, should be classified as such by OOTP.
I don't think that OOTP needs to model the overall changing nature of the batter-vs-pitcher adjustments, because the end results of the capabilities should be reflected in the player classifications and ratings.
As an equivalent example, if a hitter has a month of hot performance with high contact, then teams adjust and he slumps, then he adjust and becomes a medium-contact, medium-power hitter, I don't think that OOTP should have a rating of that player (let's say it's a real player that OOTP is rating for the following season in the MLB roster pack) that changes based on when exactly those streaks happened, OOTP should give that player an overall aggregate rating based on the sum total of that performance. It doesn't mean that adjustments weren't made and that the player's performance didn't change, it just means that for OOTP's purposes, a final classification/rating at the end of that performance window should adequately capture the overall capability, which will then be influenced by the usual mix of hot/cold/ballpark/opposing defense/opposing pitcher factors when playing the game with that player.
I may have been unclear here, if so I apologize. I don't think further rambling will help at the moment, so I'll re-attack this point later today if necessary.