Quote:
Originally Posted by Syd Thrift
There was a deliberate move to uncouple power from contact this year. It definitely used to be the case that for a modern league, at least, Contact was an approximation of batting average whereas now it's really the "hit tool" and the "hit tool" alone. You're right; a guy with a 70 contact and 20 power will have a lower average, all other things being equal, than a guy with 70 and 50 in those ratings.
One issue I always had with that is that I think it led the AI to make poor decisions on players, particularly in historical contexts where there weren't as many HRs hit as there are today. Deadball AI will still do stuff like try to bat high Power guys cleanup, so it ain't perfect, but at least it'll see the total Contact-related value of high-average players from that era. To an extent people thought about baseball differently then; I do think, though, that IRL once power became a thing scouts separated power from contact even to this day and therefore that's the better way for the game to "think" about guys.
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I play some dead ball era, too, and this gave me an idea. What if we changed the settings so that the teams evaluate players mostly by stats? Would the computer-controlled teams bat the slugging percentage leaders in the middle of order, which are going to be guys with high contact and high gap during that era rather than being guys with high power? That might make a little more sense.