Quote:
Originally Posted by Pelican
Wow, sounds like you are a victim of TCR. I do recall Roberts being an inconsistent and streaky player; but that stat line is worse than mere inconsistency or a bad patch. I have a feeling it is not going to get any better. And I’m not sure you can do anything but bench him. I mean, for curiosity sake, you could release him, see if he gets picked up, and if that changes anything.
I am struggling through a mediocre 1971 with Dick Allen, who IRL excelled for LA that year, and then won the AL MVP in 1972 with the Pale Hose. He’s not that awful, but only 10 HR in September, and 55 RBI hitting fifth or sixth in a decent lineup. He’s even playing a decent LF, though no arm at all. I keep thinking he’ll bust out, and now it’s too late.
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If he’s a vet and the ratings aren’t seen to go down, it’s almost certainly not TCR. Even very low scouting will update you on if a vet declines almost immediately.
It’s possible though that it’s just wildly bad luck. If memory serves, the standard deviation for batting average is around 25 points for a full season. That means that roughly 2/3rds of the time a player who has the ability to hit .260 will hit between .285 and .235. A third of the time though they’ll hit above or below those totals, and about 5% of the time they’ll hit above .320 or below .210. If that seems really low, bear in mind that there are going to be somewhere around 250 seasons like this in a given season, meaning that given normal distribution you should still expect like 12 or 13 guys to hit way above or way below their projected mark. And around a third of *those* players will hit above .345 or below .185… so in every 30 team league there’s likely to be a guy or two who would hit below the Mendoza Line out of sheer bad luck.
It’s a low chance but are the other possibilities, for instance that your scout whiffed on him like 3 straight months (scouts just don’t do that for veteran players, like a guy who’s been in the league for even 5 years gets a wildly anomalous report 0% of the time), higher or lower? To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, we remove the impossible and we’re left with the improbable sometimes.