[Syd Thrift]

So, I don't *think* the game engine currently takes whether a hitter is a spray or pull hitter into account when determining park factors just yet. It probably should but for non-fictional leagues this might wreak havoc with player ratings. For instance, you'd probably have to bump Ted Williams' power up even *more* to make up for the fact that he was a dead pull hitter who played his entire career in a park that was much nicer to right-handed hitters than to left-handed ones (then again, Fenway Park at the time *did* have a very short right field - just over 300 feet and I think that might have been a bit longer than it actually was - that bowed out pretty quickly to the alleys, but maybe Teddy Ballgame hit a lot of HRs down the line). At the same time, you'd probably have to smooth out the hitting profiles of spray hitters... although that raises the point, too, that power hitters tend to be pull hitters whereas spray hitters tend not to hit a lot of HRs. In fact, opposite field HRs were an extreme rarity until around the 1980s.

I'm interested to know how the game treats flyball hitters. With pitchers it's pretty obvious and I think the game does pretty well in terms of basically turning Movement into something akin to HR/FB. So for pitchers, yeah, in OOTP you could absolutely hide a homerun prone pitcher in a big park, at least half the time, and if there was a "solution" for Coors Field, it was to get a lot of guys who keep the ball down in the zone. For pitchers I don't think it's 100% "first determine if this player hits a fly, then see if it's hit out of the park" kind of thing but there's definitely a correlation. Anyway, I figured that the hitter rating was just something that applied to outs but apparently not, and this is what I get for thinking about a modern baseball game in Strat-O-Matic or APBA terms. Is the "Power" rating actually now something of a HR/FB rating itself? More ways in which a fictional league gets enhanced but more pitfalls for guys playing "historical" (which I put in quotes because, well, these still aren't real players).