[PSUColonel]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

I'm not sure what's being argued here. Should scouting only update a small number of times per year? I'm for that; it's already (more or less) monthly except when you ask for it. Should scouts have a much harder time disclosing that a player has "lost it" than they do in the game? There I think the answer is "yes, absolutely, 100%", and if that's what OP was getting at then I agree: if you've got some 40 year old guy who's completely fallen off a cliff, your scout should probably be the last person to be able to tell you that (and this is in part why I play with ratings off altogether).

I am going to *guess* that that's not it though, that the OP is complaining that they signed someone and they turned into a pumpkin. As a Mariners fan I'd like to introduce you to Kolten Wong. I'm sorry, did I say Kolten Wong? I meant to say Chone Figgins. Wait. Did I say Chone? Sorry, I was thinking about how Bret Boone suddenly fell off a cliff the one offseason. This happens *all the time* in real life. Sure, most players don't do this in any one contract situation but a lot of the time the end does in fact arrive all at once. I suspect OP will hate my answer, which is that it's much more realistic for you to cut the guy because he's hitting .180 but your scout insists he's got a couple miles left in the tank.

I also think it's a good idea that development occurs more or less year round. Having set days that you can go and look at player ratings probably makes things a lot easier but it's not anywhere close to realistic.

Here are some great ideas that InjuryLog had about scouting at one time. I still believe they hold true today even more so now that the international leagues are NOT included in OOTP. As far as I am concerned this was a "masterpiece".


Pathways

Scouting and player acquisition are inextricably linked. In real life, players join MLB organizations for the first time through a few conduits:

* Amateur Draft
* as international amateur free agents (big bonus)
* as international "discoveries" (small bonus)
* as established international free agents (Japan/Mexico/Taiwan/Korea)
* through the posting system (Japan/Korea)
* as Cuban defectors
* from Independent leagues

The more comprehensively we model these, the more strategy options we offer a GM. And by correctly modeling the important features of each pathway, the more interesting team-building strategy becomes.


Countries

Real life countries funnel talent to MLB organizations in different ways. A few examples:

* USA+ Canada: Amateur Draft; independent leagues
* Japan+Korea: established international FAs, posting system
* Mexico: established FAs, international teenage FAs and 'discoveries'
* Cuba: defectors
* DR+Venezuela: international teenage FAs and 'discoveries'

A team scouting Venezuela is doing so for different reasons than a team scouting Japan - they will acquire different types of players. Players from Japan might help immediately, while players from Venezuela will not. One feature of an improved scouting model should be choice: a choice of which countries to scout. A rebuilding team would naturally make different choices from a win-now team.


Strategy

It is obvious looking at the behaviour of real life teams that MLB teams use very different team-building strategies. These decisions are Scouting decisions:

* International teenage FAs: in 2014, NYY spent $17.8m, while OAK and BAL spent $827k and $980k respectively.

* Independent League signings: in 2014, ARI signed 21 guys out of indie ball, and ATL signed 14. Five teams signed 0 players.

* Cuba: LAD has invested a total of $163m in five Cuban defectors since 2012, and BOS has spent north of $100m on Cubans in the same time period. Most teams have spent $0.

* Japan: several teams have never signed a player directly from Japan (CIN, MIA, etc), while some have signed several, eg SEA has signed five.

The choice about where to acquire new talent is one of the major decisions real life GMs make. Modeling these choices properly is, I think, the biggest thing left for OOTP to do in order to make GM strategy more interesting.



Outline of a Model

Instead of making Scouting about spending (how much to spend on different areas), which is not very interesting since you can't really notice a difference, we should make it about choices - deciding what strategy you want to use to build your team.

So in outline, I think Scouting should work as follows:

* teams automatically get complete scouting of the Majors and minors, and of (most of) the Amateur Draft pool.

* when spending the default, teams could choose, from a list of options (see next post), what types of 'assignment scouting' to perform. GMs should make that choice once a year only, just as we do with budgets now. Teams should probably be able to choose ~4 scouting assignments when spending the default.

* teams could choose to add a fifth option (or more) by spending additional money. But that should be very expensive - it's not a choice at all if you can reasonably afford to do everything. Of course teams could save money by cutting options too.

If a default scout budget is $10m, I think adding an additional assignment should probably cost $5m (on the theory that $5m = 1 win), and cutting an assignment should save $2.5m.

* the options would not all be "equal", nor should they be. Some strategies will be better for rebuilding teams, others for contending teams. And if we want to implement things in a sophisticated way, we could make the value of certain strategies change in different situations. And these strategies will be most interesting if there's a lot of variety, so GMs can, by changing scouting strategies, feel they're playing the game in a whole new way.


The Options

The below is just a tentative list of the kinds of 'assignment scouting' options we could offer the GM. Most require further explanation, which I'll do a bit later. We don't need to implement all of these to make a working model (some could be saved for later versions, and others might be bad ideas) and the world can be divided up in a blocky way or a granular way, so it's easy to change the below to reduce or extend the number of options if we want to.

Assignment Scouting Options

* Amateur Draft: Area Scouting
* Amateur Draft: signability scouting
* Advance scouting (on upcoming opponents)
* MLB scouting: intensive
* Minor league scouting: intensive
* US/Canada Independent Leagues
* Japan
* Korea
* Taiwan
* Cuba
* Mexico
* DR
* Venezuela
* rest of South America
* rest of Central America
* Europe
* Africa
* Middle East and South Asia
* rest of Southeast Asia and Australiasia


Amateur Draft: Area Scouting

I've read the occasional scouting report on a draft pick who fell in the draft because he wasn't heavily scouted, and one team 'discovered' him and liked him. I think it would make the draft more interesting if there were about one round worth of players, maybe a bit less, in a standard 25 round draft who would go unscouted except by teams that specifically chose to do Area Scouting for the draft. These guys could just be chosen randomly, so there'd normally only be one first round talent, one second round talent and so on. Since it's likely a few teams would scout these guys, if you found one you liked, you'd have an interesting decision to make about how long to let them slide in the draft. Naturally these guys shouldn't have OSA reports, and we'd need to work out what to do about their HS/COL stats so their talent isn't obvious to teams who didn't bother to scout them.


Amateur Draft: Signability Scouting

I'm not sure this is a great idea, especially not if we leave the signing bonus model unchanged, but part of real life draft scouting is assessing signability. Some OOTP draftees now have 'Impossible' signability, with no info at all about what kind of bonus would be needed to sign them. If Signability Scouting were a scouting option, teams electing to scout signability could learn fairly precise bonus estimates for a good fraction (maybe 1/2) of those players, while other teams would be in the dark about their demands.

Advance Scouting

I could see Advance Scouting working as an option in several different ways, some easy to implement, some not. Teams could get up-to-the-minute scouting reports on upcoming opponents' 40-man rosters. And as a simple advantage, teams could get minuscule (1 point, probably) BABIP improvements in game, because advance scouting presumably allows them to use better defensive positioning or pitch selection. In a more complicated model, an advance scout could provide a Manager in-game advice about how to shift a defense against each batter, for example, but that's probably too complicated to be worth doing.

MLB Scouting: Intensive

I think OOTP scouts too frequently now. It's clear observing real life teams that they behave with more uncertainty than do OOTP teams - for example, real life teams call prospects up to the Majors without having a completely clear picture of whether those prospects are ready. That doesn't happen in OOTP now if you scout every 2 months, but it would happen if you got just one scouting report in January, and had to guess in June if your prospect's current ratings had improved enough to make him a viable big leaguer.

So I think we should reduce the frequency of reports - on default, teams should either scout MLB once or twice each year (I think once is best). But by choosing to scout intensively, we could provide teams an additional complete scouting report during the year, in early July (just before the Trade Deadline). So contending teams intent on trading for help at the deadline might want this option to make better decisions for the stretch run.

Minor League Scouting: Intensive

Similarly teams could get an extra scouting report on minor leaguers at midseason if they choose to scout the minors - so teams intent on trading for prospects at the deadline could have more info to work with.

The remaining options all have to do with player acquisition from different sources. For these options to work well, we need to model each player funnel properly. We'd also need to extend the World DB a bit to accommodate the various player pipelines - that seems easy to do to me, but it's a bit technical.

The Special Countries

US/Canada: Independent Leagues

Indie ball players share certain characteristics in real life - usually in their 20s, position players are rarely toolsy but sometimes skilled, and the pitchers with any shot are almost always relievers. Teams would scout indie ball if they were hoping to find some very inexpensive ready-now big league bench pieces, and some relievers. Only very rarely should teams find truly good players outside of the occasional John Axford closer type.

This could work much as it does now (scout signs indie ball guys on the GM's behalf, always to minor league deals) though it should happen at a fixed time of year (end of season).

Japan: Established FAs, Posted Players

The current Posting system only works if you operate a league in Japan. It would be great to extend that to one-nation leagues (just generate posted players from scratch, as the established FAs are now).

Teams that do not scout Japan should not receive scouting reports on posted players or on established FAs from Japan. They should have only OSA to work with. Teams that do scout Japan should receive complete scouting reports on these players. So that scouting Japan is truly useful, we'd need to do two other things:

- disguise player value better when determining a player's contract demands. Right now I don't need to scout to know if I should sign a guy to a contract;

- make it so a decent proportion of players will only sign with teams that have scouted them. This seems to be true in real life (even more so for teenagers) - players develop relationships with certain organizations, and become much more likely to sign with those orgs. If we make it so that 1/2 of all players from Japan will only sign with you if you've scouted them, scouting becomes more relevant. As an elegant solution, players with above average Loyalty could be those who only sign if scouted.

We also need to overhaul the Player Creation system for established international FAs, because it's not right at the moment - ages are wrong, and player ability is wrong.

Korea: Established FAs, Posted Players

South Korea is similar to Japan except it provides a lot fewer players. At first that might make it seem stupid to scout Korea instead of Japan. But if we model scouting choices (not the actual scouting reports, just the decisions) for AI teams as well, then there could still be a reason to scout South Korea: if no one else does, you'd have a huge advantage whenever a Korean player is posted, or becomes an FA.

Taiwan

We might want to group Taiwan and Korea together, even if that makes no geographical sense.

Cuba

Cuba is unique in the world in that players defect to MLB. So they can join MLB at any time of year, and they can be absolutely any age. The only way to get a Yasiel Puig is to sign him out of Cuba.

I think we should model defections. They should be a bit of a lottery - some years should be very good, and some years should be fallow. But it should be the only international pipeline that might let you sign a superstar near-ready prospect age player.

Again, Cuban players should often only sign with teams that have scouted them. I think there's also an argument for not providing OSA reports on defectors, since it wasn't always the easiest place to scout (though obviously things are changing).

Mexico

Mexico is unique in that it provides MLB with some established veteran FAs, but also with some teenage prospects, though not a big supply of either. The established FAs should work just as those from Japan do. The teenagers should work as do those from the countries in the next post.


Hidden Players, International Amateur FAs

The rest of the world only provides talent to MLB organizations as teenage international players. We have two separate teenage pipelines:

* 'hidden players'
* international amateur free agents, the big-bonus guys available July 2 each year



Hidden Players

There are quite a few issues with hidden players now - there are way too many of them for one thing (my FA pools are insanely huge on defaults after five years) and there are way too many bad ones for another. I know our MLB percentages of international/domestic players look good right now, but those really bad hidden players aren't having any meaningful effect on those numbers. They almost never make MLB - the pitchers in particular very possibly never make it.

So:

* there is a rule in MLB we should borrow: when signing international teenagers, teams get six "exemptions" for players signed for under $75k (those bonuses don't count against the 'cap'). We should use that: teams should be able to sign six 'hidden players' for free. After that, if they want to sign more, it should count eat into their spending cap (and cost money).

* so teams should be making choices of which 'hidden players' will actually join their org. The scout should provide a list of 'discovered' players, and the GM should choose up to six, or more if he wants to pay.

* there are two ways this could work. Either things could work as now, with the scout 'discovering' players throughout the year, forcing the GM to decide 'sign this guy or wait to see if someone better pops up later'. Then any bonus penalties would apply to the upcoming July 2 pool. Preferable I think is a system where the scout contacts you on July 2 with a complete list of players he has found, and the GM decides then which players to add.

* we'd have to do a bit of math to work out how players should be distributed; this is where things could get complicated. Obviously on defaults, DR provides way more players than anyone else. But if lots of teams scout the DR, that competition over players should make players commensurately harder to find. We could permit players to be discovered by more than one team, or we could reduce the number of discoveries according to the number of teams scouting a country. That way there might be some reason to scout Australasia or Europe, rather than the DR, if they were not saturated with teams. Of course Africa or Middle East/South Asia would rarely be worth scouting, except in a custom setup.

* if the number of teams scouting a region affects the number of players available, that could make the 'Explore World' option more interesting to look at. It could report how many teams were active in each region in the previous year, and if AI teams don't radically adjust their strategies too often, the human GM could use that as a basis for his own strategizing.

* I'd also love to see international origin %s subject to League Evolution, as an option. If sometimes new countries instituted baseball programs and the number of players from each place could change, then it might make sense to one day scout a country you wouldn't contemplate on modern-day defaults.

I can specify the mathematical details of this kind of system - how to use the international origin %s - a bit later, I think it's a bit tricky but very possible.


International Amateur FAs

* As with other FAs, teams should not get scouting reports unless they scout an FA's country.

* and again, many players should only sign if they've actually been scouted by a team

* OSA should not scout these players either. GMs get way too much info right now with human scouting reports, OSA reports, and bonus demands. I don't even need my human scout to know which players are good.

* we really need to redo the bonus demand system, and the contract negotiation system, for these prospects:

-- the bonus demand reveals way too much information about ability.

-- the players all use idiotic negotiation tactics. Because of scouting error, there's always a chance a 16 year old will be viewed as a potential 5-star guy by one team. That team might pay $2m for him, but not if he demands $40k.

-- when a player is 'in demand', he obviously should not raise his demands incrementally by tiny amounts. He then guarantees himself the minimum possible bonus. If teams will meet his demand, he probably should shoot for a lot more, then come down if he overshoots.

-- it can be really annoying for the user when you 'meet demand' eleven times over three game weeks, adding $200k to your offer each time, and still don't sign a guy. It can take far too many offers.

* just as importantly, the distribution of bonus amounts is completely off from real life. If you look at the top 30 bonuses in real life, they'll all exceed $500k. In OOTP, the majority of the top 30 bonuses are less than $200k, and lots of them are less than $100k. If we're modeling the top 30 international teenage FAs, they all need to sign for way more, and they only will if they change their demands, and if we let scouting error govern what teams will pay. Teams will only overpay if they can't reference OSA or bonus demands for additional ability info.

* player creation is a bit weird, when you compare with real life. In real life, there's almost no such thing as a superstar SP prospect among international teenagers, with very few exceptions. Most of the big bonuses go to hitters. There are lots of successful pitchers eventually, but it's not very clear who they'll be when they're 16. OOTP creation seems the opposite - lots of amazing looking pitchers, few good looking bats. Really the pitchers shouldn't look as good, but more should benefit from talent boosts a bit later.

* we could very easily at least implement one of the provisions of the 'new' CBA: the spending cap teams observe when signing international amateur FAs is variable, based on a team's performance the previous year. Bad teams are allowed to spend more. So we could make the spending cap different for different teams, allowing rebuilding teams a bit more of an opportunity to sign these prospects.
injury log is offline Report Post