[The Wolf]

Originally Posted by joefromchicago

No, it's a bell curve - or at least bell-curve-like.

Your model posits that everyone with sufficient talent (in the blue area at the far right end) will become an athlete, while everyone to the left won't. We know, however, that that's not true. Plenty of people who have the talent to be professional athletes don't take that path, while some people, with marginal skills, nevertheless make it into the professional ranks. There isn't, therefore, a straight black line separating the athletes from the non-athletes, but rather a blurred area near the right end of the curve that gets more blue as you go further to the right.

Isolating the athletes, therefore, doesn't result in a small section of a larger bell curve, it results in a bell curve distribution itself. And that's what we should expect. The average professional baseball player is ... well, average. There aren't a lot of players at the low end, as they tend to get weeded out, and there aren't a lot of players at the high end, because that's the way talent works. Where OOTP's player creation model goes wrong is ignoring the long "tail" at the high end, where the truly great players reside.

No way.