Testing a few limits

[injury log]

I recently completed the first season of a 2007 MLB style league, in which I was trying out some things I wouldn't normally think a good idea to try. I first made all ratings invisible except speed and fielding, and only acquired players with max speed, and pitchers with max velocity. I had no idea if I had any good players. I played out about 100 games, simmed the rest. Some results I found interesting, some of which perhaps point to game issues:

-Even though I never used 'send forced', and didn't 'Run and Hit' all that often, I still ended up with eight players with over 65 stolen bases. One stole 160, and six stole 90 or more. Despite having the worst OBP in either league, my team stole 971 bases in total. SB success rates ranged from 75-85%;

-I moved center fielder Paul Wagner to catcher to get some speed in that spot. I checked in the editor, and his catcher arm and catcher ability are both rated a 1 on the 200 scale, even after playing the position for a full year. He started 123 games, and despite 16 passed balls, he threw out 29.6% of attempted steals;

-I went with a 1-man rotation for a week, with a pitcher who didn't seem to be very good (4.80 ERA when I started, with mediocre peripherals). He was awful in his third start, but in every other start he gave me 3+ innings of 1 run ball. I normally pulled him after 60-70 pitches. In his fifth start in five days, he pitched a 1-hitter for 6 innings. No injury, then or later in the year, despite throwing 350 pitches in 5 days;

-I moved my 'manager-recommended' closer to the rotation. At the end of the year, I checked his endurance- 8 out of 20 (low 80s in the editor). Despite the fact that he would tell me he couldn't move his arm after 50 pitches, I left him in when he was doing well, and he ended up throwing 4 shutouts (and would have had a fifth if I'd been able to score a single run), including two one-hitters, with 7 complete games in total. In a few games he got over 150 pitches. He threw 200 innings on the year, with a 2.96 ERA, and with no injuries;

-High-velocity pitchers seem pretty good bets, even if velocity itself doesn't influence game results. My staff walked more batters than any other, but also struck out more, and led the league in ERA. This probably partly has to do with my team defense- speedy players seem to also have good range, in general, and my BABIP against was best in the league;

-Pickoffs seemed far too easy, especially on slow runners on second. I stopped trying to pick people off midseason;

-This surprised me: in the sixth round of the amateur draft, held in June, I picked the fastest catcher left, a 22-year old named Luke Lynch. My backup in the Majors at the time was brutal, so I promoted Lynch directly to the bigs, and he ended up hitting .280 on the year, with a decent OBP and a few doubles and a few steals. He can't have been very good when drafted; he was still available in the sixth round, and the only reason I picked him was that he was faster than the other catchers. Still, he immediately gave me respectable production for a backup, admittedly in a small (110 AB) sample. I've never looked at his ratings.

Anyway, I thought some of these results might be interesting to discuss, and perhaps others have noticed similar things.

[Honolulu Blue]

Very interesting. A couple of comments:

Originally Posted by injury log

-I moved center fielder Paul Wagner to catcher to get some speed in that spot. I checked in the editor, and his catcher arm and catcher ability are both rated a 1 on the 200 scale, even after playing the position for a full year. He started 123 games, and despite 16 passed balls, he threw out 29.6% of attempted steals;

Only 16 passed balls? Interesting. How many stolen bases did Mr. Wagner allow?

Originally Posted by injury log

-This surprised me: in the sixth round of the amateur draft, held in June, I picked the fastest catcher left, a 22-year old named Luke Lynch. My backup in the Majors at the time was brutal, so I promoted Lynch directly to the bigs, and he ended up hitting .280 on the year, with a decent OBP and a few doubles and a few steals. He can't have been very good when drafted; he was still available in the sixth round, and the only reason I picked him was that he was faster than the other catchers. Still, he immediately gave me respectable production for a backup, admittedly in a small (110 AB) sample. I've never looked at his ratings.

The draft pool generates a fair amount of guys with 6 and 7 current ratings in contact (out of 10) that are MLB-ready but not regarded as prospects. My guess is you lucked into one. Their power and eye ratings are usually 2 or worse, so all they really do is punch singles and the occasional double; and they don't develop much, if at all. But still, as a backup, you could do a lot worse. It's a quirk or flaw of the pool that should be looked at sometime.

[injury log]

Originally Posted by Honolulu Blue

Only 16 passed balls? Interesting. How many stolen bases did Mr. Wagner allow?

He allowed 162 steals, caught 48 trying, with 16 errors (.984 FPCT) and 16 PBs. His Range Factor was 8.26. Relative to the league, his FPCT was in the bottom third, but certainly not the worst. One genuine catcher with a 4/5 catching ability allowed 18 Passed Balls, though Wagner was second. His CS% put him dead in the middle of the league. His Range Factor was third best, which perhaps shouldn't be surprising for a CF-turned-catcher, though I have no idea what fielding ratings OOTP uses to determine catcher range- it might just be random luck. By comparison, Lynch, who had above average ratings in arm and catcher ability, only caught 4 of 43 attempted basestealers.

I think you're right about Lynch, although he does have good fielding ratings (despite very poor results!), and with his bat, he makes for a more than acceptable backup in the league. He was a pleasant surprise after my first backup catcher, who started the season 3 for 39, "good" for an .077/.182/.077 line.

[RonCo]

Originally Posted by injury log

-High-velocity pitchers seem pretty good bets, even if velocity itself doesn't influence game results. My staff walked more batters than any other, but also struck out more, and led the league in ERA. This probably partly has to do with my team defense- speedy players seem to also have good range, in general, and my BABIP against was best in the league;

I'll not discount any other study, but I have much data that shows high velocity, on the average, impacts play in some fashion.

-This surprised me: in the sixth round of the amateur draft, held in June, I picked the fastest catcher left, a 22-year old named Luke Lynch. My backup in the Majors at the time was brutal, so I promoted Lynch directly to the bigs, and he ended up hitting .280 on the year, with a decent OBP and a few doubles and a few steals. He can't have been very good when drafted; he was still available in the sixth round, and the only reason I picked him was that he was faster than the other catchers. Still, he immediately gave me respectable production for a backup, admittedly in a small (110 AB) sample. I've never looked at his ratings.

Just a couple points that I verified by writing a little routine:

If 1,000 .200 hitters get 110 AB, ~ 17 of them will hit .280 or better
If 1,000 .220 hitters get 110 AB, ~ 70 of them will hit .280 or better
If 1,000 .230 hitters get 110 AB, ~ 120 of them will hit .280 or better

[RonCo]

It is always interesting to me to see how wide a variance randomness alone provides. For example, if 1,000 .230 hitters gets 500 AB, they will most likely wind up hitting somewhere between .180 and .280--though it will be rare that they will hit under .190 and over .270. OOTP users will often get in a huff about a guy like that who has been providing .230-.240 batting averages "suddenly becoming cruddy and hitting under .200 (say), when the law of random averages say that at least 5-6% of hitters in that category had _better_ have that happen, or else you've just proven that the game is not random.

[RonCo]

Another example -- about 2% of .300 hitters will hit under .260 in a season of 550 AB. So if a league has 100 pretty good hitters in it, 1-3 of them should be expected to hit poorly, even if their ratings don't budge. 14 or so should probably hit under .280. A couple should hit upward into the .350s.

[RonCo]

I started having fun, so played around even more, running thousands and thousands of hitters through my little routine. Here's the span of results of .300 hitters given a certain # of seasons.

#	Low	High
5000	.240	.360
10000	.232	.367
50000	.225	.376
100000	.225	.381
500000	.210	.385
1000000	.207	.385

So, basically, if your ratings say you're a .300 hitter, this data says you have well under 1 in a million chances to hit .400. On the good side, you should _always_ hit better than .207.

EDIT: The highest I could get in subsequent testing of 1,000,000 hitters at a time was .392.

[RonCo]

Originally Posted by injury log

He allowed 162 steals, caught 48 trying

Let me preface this with a standard "only Markus knows for sure" comment. But if I had to guess, your data tells me that Markus has set the default catcher's arm at somewhere around 25% CS. Of course, more runners will run against a poor arm (210 attempts kind of proves that), so Waner was probably throwing against a lot slower set of runners than the average catcher. This has the effect of artificially raising his % RTO number a little from random. So maybe the default RTO% is closer to 25%.

I would also guess that Waner's IF arm is probably fairly high. There is a correlation between arm strengths as I remember.

[zukes]

Originally Posted by RonCo

I started having fun, so played around even more, running thousands and thousands of hitters through my little routine. Here's the span of results of .300 hitters given a certain # of seasons.

#    Low    High
5000    .240    .360
10000    .232    .367
50000    .225    .376
100000    .225    .381
500000    .210    .385
1000000    .207    .385

So, basically, if your ratings say you're a .300 hitter, this data says you have well under 1 in a million chances to hit .400. On the good side, you should _always_ hit better than .207.

EDIT: The highest I could get in subsequent testing of 1,000,000 hitters at a time was .392.

Just makes .400 all the more magical.

[RonCo]

Yep. hitting .400 in a year says your "true" combination of power/avoidk/babip skills probably add up to a "contact" rating of something over .340, give or take a little. Anything lower than that starts to get into some pretty low probabilities.

[injury log]

Originally Posted by RonCo

I'll not discount any other study, but I have much data that shows high velocity, on the average, impacts play in some fashion.

Thanks for your comments RonCo; always interesting to read. The velocity comment is based on resoxford's results, explained in post 48 here:

http://www.ootpdevelopments.com/boar...=148281&page=3

That said, velocity appears to be correlated with Stuff when OOTP generates fictional players, so high velo pitchers are often good. I'd be interested to know whether velocity plays a role in pitcher development, i.e. whether high velo pitchers are more likely to receive potential boosts.

Originally Posted by RonCo

Just a couple points that I verified by writing a little routine:

If 1,000 .200 hitters get 110 AB, ~ 17 of them will hit .280 or better
If 1,000 .220 hitters get 110 AB, ~ 70 of them will hit .280 or better
If 1,000 .230 hitters get 110 AB, ~ 120 of them will hit .280 or better

I did just check Lynch's Contact rating, and it's a 69 on the 200 scale. If I trust the 'projected stats' in the editor, that makes him a .202 hitter, so I guess it was about a 1 in 50 shot he'd hit as well as he did- not quite winning the lottery, but I still feel lucky to have gotten that kind of performance. He was more impressive when he was hitting .320 after about 85 at bats, but he tanked at the end of the season.

[Burgandy]

Originally Posted by RonCo

I'll not discount any other study, but I have much data that shows high velocity, on the average, impacts play in some fashion.

This is just a wild theory. I'm pretty much an OOTP rookie and all I have is theory! Maybe you savvy vets can run with it.... or squash it.

I can best explain by showing an anomoly...

Example> I recently traded a guy that just may be better than any real-life knuckleballer we've ever seen. (Sorry Charlie and Phil and all the rest!) He was in the running for RoY with some really great numbers... and his main stats were something like 13 STU, 16 MOV AND 10 CON. Looking at his pitches, he didn't even have a fastball of any kind. His number one was the knuckler, then a slider, a curve and a knucklecurve. His displayed velocity was appropriately 80-82 (hoping that's on his slider), but that didn't stop him from having excellent stats across the board, including more K's than IP and a sub-3 era.

My main thoughts are that there is likely a correlation because a high-velocity fastball also means you probably have good stuff, but it's not a requirement. But there's such a high number of fastball pitchers, that the correlation would be very strong, even if it's not the velocity that is THE driving factor.

[injury log]

Originally Posted by RonCo

Let me preface this with a standard "only Markus knows for sure" comment. But if I had to guess, your data tells me that Markus has set the default catcher's arm at somewhere around 25% CS. Of course, more runners will run against a poor arm (210 attempts kind of proves that), so Waner was probably throwing against a lot slower set of runners than the average catcher. This has the effect of artificially raising his % RTO number a little from random. So maybe the default RTO% is closer to 25%.

I would also guess that Waner's IF arm is probably fairly high. There is a correlation between arm strengths as I remember.

Six catchers, all with average to slightly above average arms, faced more steal attempts than Wagner (in similar playing time), although two of those were in my division, and had grossly inflated numbers because my team stole so often. These catchers threw out between 22% and 31.5% of basestealers (22% was an outlier; the rest were between 27.5 and 31.5%). Overall, the data does confirm a rough 24-25% baseline, but this among catchers with catcher arms rated from slightly below average to outstanding. I played out most of my games, and it didn't appear that slow runners were attempting many steals- I don't remember a single instance, in fact of a below average speed/steal runner attempting- although it may well be the case that above average but not great runners were attempting more often than they otherwise would. In a way, though, if 70% is about break-even to make stealing profitable, and I'll throw out 30% with a catcher with the weakest possible catcher arm (because more people try stealing), there doesn't seem to be much advantage to having a decent-but-not-exceptional catcher arm.

His infield arm is 4/200, and his outfield arm is 96/200, so he actually can't really throw at any position.

[ctorg]

Good stuff here.

Out of curiosity, what was your record for the year?

[Honolulu Blue]

Originally Posted by injury log

He allowed 162 steals, caught 48 trying, with 16 errors (.984 FPCT) and 16 PBs. His Range Factor was 8.26. Relative to the league, his FPCT was in the bottom third, but certainly not the worst. One genuine catcher with a 4/5 catching ability allowed 18 Passed Balls, though Wagner was second. His CS% put him dead in the middle of the league. His Range Factor was third best, which perhaps shouldn't be surprising for a CF-turned-catcher, though I have no idea what fielding ratings OOTP uses to determine catcher range- it might just be random luck. By comparison, Lynch, who had above average ratings in arm and catcher ability, only caught 4 of 43 attempted basestealers.

Thanks for sharing. I would have expected far more attempts - certainly in real life, a converted outfielder at catcher would be constantly tested by everyone who can run a little, and many who can't.

Range factor for catchers includes the pitchers' strikeouts, so his good placement in that rating mostly reflects the fact that your pitchers struck out a lot of people.

Originally Posted by injury log

I think you're right about Lynch, although he does have good fielding ratings (despite very poor results!), and with his bat, he makes for a more than acceptable backup in the league. He was a pleasant surprise after my first backup catcher, who started the season 3 for 39, "good" for an .077/.182/.077 line.

Since you looked at his real ratings, you now know that RonCo's research applies more than my theory. He got lucky, and unless he develops a lot, shouldn't be expected to hit .280 again.

P.S. 96/200 outfield arm rating isn't that bad.

[RonCo]

Originally Posted by Burgandy

This is just a wild theory. I'm pretty much an OOTP rookie and all I have is theory! Maybe you savvy vets can run with it.... or squash it.

I can best explain by showing an anomoly...

Example> I recently traded a guy that just may be better than any real-life knuckleballer we've ever seen. (Sorry Charlie and Phil and all the rest!) He was in the running for RoY with some really great numbers... and his main stats were something like 13 STU, 16 MOV AND 10 CON. Looking at his pitches, he didn't even have a fastball of any kind. His number one was the knuckler, then a slider, a curve and a knucklecurve. His displayed velocity was appropriately 80-82 (hoping that's on his slider), but that didn't stop him from having excellent stats across the board, including more K's than IP and a sub-3 era.

My main thoughts are that there is likely a correlation because a high-velocity fastball also means you probably have good stuff, but it's not a requirement. But there's such a high number of fastball pitchers, that the correlation would be very strong, even if it's not the velocity that is THE driving factor.

Correlation does not mean guarantee. In addition, you can have a correlation between a rating and the performance it drives and still see variance. Going by memory only (I don't have my data with me, so I apologize if I'm off a bit), the correlation strength between an OOTP pitcher's Stuff rating and his K/BF performance is ~ .6 (where 1.0 is very strong, and .0 is totally non-existent). The correlation between an OOTP pitcher's velocity and his K/BF performance is ~ .25, or just under half as strong. However, this does not mean you cah pencil a high-stuff/high-velocity pitcher into the #1 slot of the order and guarantee a better-than 1 K/inning value. All it means is that it is a very likely occurance. Much more likely than, say, drawing to an inside straight.

Note, all of this assumes a scattering of _hitter_ talent that is fairly routine for OOTP-developed players. If you're playing with a custom roster, or even a roster created from a Lahman database entry, the scatter of player hitter skills could be different. If pitchers are facing hitters with higher AvoidK ratings, for example, the correlations between ratings and performance will be different.

Remember: OOTP stats result from the iteraction between the ratings of players in the universe, the universes league totals, and the ballparks in the univers. Change one of those three legs and you change the output.

[RonCo]

That said, the fact that velocity has less of an impact than stuff is probably the reason that your example of a knuckleballer with > 1 K/IP exists. That should probably not happen often at all, and is an example of why I will occasionally say that the OOTP model would probably be better served to have those two strengths reversed.

[RonCo]

Originally Posted by injury log

Six catchers, all with average to slightly above average arms, faced more steal attempts than Wagner (in similar playing time), although two of those were in my division, and had grossly inflated numbers because my team stole so often. These catchers threw out between 22% and 31.5% of basestealers (22% was an outlier; the rest were between 27.5 and 31.5%). Overall, the data does confirm a rough 24-25% baseline, but this among catchers with catcher arms rated from slightly below average to outstanding. I played out most of my games, and it didn't appear that slow runners were attempting many steals- I don't remember a single instance, in fact of a below average speed/steal runner attempting- although it may well be the case that above average but not great runners were attempting more often than they otherwise would. In a way, though, if 70% is about break-even to make stealing profitable, and I'll throw out 30% with a catcher with the weakest possible catcher arm (because more people try stealing), there doesn't seem to be much advantage to having a decent-but-not-exceptional catcher arm.

His infield arm is 4/200, and his outfield arm is 96/200, so he actually can't really throw at any position.

That's interesting all around.

[Geebob]

Originally Posted by RonCo

That said, the fact that velocity has less of an impact than stuff is probably the reason that your example of a knuckleballer with > 1 K/IP exists. That should probably not happen often at all, and is an example of why I will occasionally say that the OOTP model would probably be better served to have those two strengths reversed.

Just to clarify, Ron, the two strengths you are talking about are velocity and stuff? And you believe that velocity should have more impact on K/IP than stuff, correct?

If this is the case, I agree with you, although there might need to be some reworking of the velocity figures as the player ages. I tend to see a lot of 40 year-olds throwing 98 mph fastballs.

[RonCo]

Originally Posted by Geebob

Just to clarify, Ron, the two strengths you are talking about are velocity and stuff? And you believe that velocity should have more impact on K/IP than stuff, correct?

If this is the case, I agree with you, although there might need to be some reworking of the velocity figures as the player ages. I tend to see a lot of 40 year-olds throwing 98 mph fastballs.

Yes. That's what I think. There is an established real-life correlation between velocity and strikeout rate that is very high. Note--this does not mean that all high velocity pitchers are successful, only that they tend to strike out a lot of hitters. It also does not mean that all good strikeout pitchers throw 98+. It just means that a strong majority of pitchers who have high strike-out rates also throw in the higher velocity ranges.

I also agree with you on OOTP's ability to manage the development of velocity over a pitcher's age.