Ridiculous GCL rosters

[thomash35]

I have tried starting from ground zero as a manager for a GCL team, hoping to work my way up through the leagues. I am sick and tired of the GM's (and I've tried several different teams) making the kind of roster moves that would never happen in the real world. My latest Player Transaction left me with 3 SP, 4 MR, 2 3B, 2 SS, and 10 C. You tell me how I'm supposed to win with that. My pitching staff is always exhausted and no one in the field can make a play.

[Le Grande Orange]

Just curious, but what is your roster size? Also, what are the positions of the remaining players? Your list only accounts for 21 players.

[NYY #23]

I feel your pain, except I started out in the AZL Rookie League, and had little outfielders, nobody really qualified to play the middle infield position, and anywhere from 10-12 catchers at a time. I used the standard 2009 quick start, and I think one of the problems were too many catchers were either created, or drafted by my team, and there were no outfielders or middle infielders even in the free agents, not even bad ones.

Someone suggested to me to use either feeder leagues, or fill the rookie leagues with fictional players. I had gone too far to do, and struggled through a miserable 18-35 year. Year 2 with another team, in the Appalachian league has gotten better so far, although there have been some weird things, like starting out with 56 players on my roster, or a group of 11 scrub first baseman leaving then coming back over and over again. I'd try either filling the rookie leagues with fictional players, or starting in 2010 because it has gotten much better after one year, with the couple exceptions I noted which slowly seem to be correcting over the course of 2010.

[knockahoma]

I'm not sure what level of minors you're managing. But, one thing that may help feed the imagination and ease the pain:

I was reading a Bill James article not long ago. He was explaining why so many people start at SS in the minors and then get moved. It has to do with the Defensive Spectrum. If you start your guys at SS in the minors, or another difficult position, then they can move down the entire spectrum. In other words, more options later on for the player, versus starting him at 1B, for example, the easiest position on the spectrum.

IRL, you'd probably have a bunch more middle infielders... well, a lot of SS. I read another article a few years back showing there were very few 2B drafted high at that time. Shortstops got moved to 2B in the minors.

But, on the defensive spectrum, catcher is the most difficult position to play.

The defensive spectrum looks like this:

Designated hitter
First baseman
Left fielder
Right fielder
Third baseman
Center fielder
Second baseman
Shortstop
Catcher

So, maybe the AI is giving you a lot of catchers in order to allow you to spread them down the defensive spectrum. That actually happens in real life, but more from the SS position, I think. The idea being that the best players at high school and college often are SSs.

Anyway, food for thought. It would be very interesting to see the defensive tools on these 10 catchers and whether any could move to the middle infield positions. I don't think THAT is a frequent occurence IRL, going from catcher to SS, but maybe the AI sees infield potential in some of these catchers?

It would be great to see the AI use Bill James' theory at the lower minors, with a lot of SS's popping up, being filtered to other positions as they rise in the minors.

I seriously doubt that's the design behind all the catchers popping up, but... maybe thinking of it as the Bill James spectrum distribution plan will ease your pain, until a fix comes along.

[84Hammy]

Do you have ghost players enabled? If so, I wonder if the AI cares about the position of the players it puts in the minors because there is always a Joe Nobody to fill an empty spot.

[MimesisBTG]

Originally Posted by thomash35

I have tried starting from ground zero as a manager for a GCL team, hoping to work my way up through the leagues. I am sick and tired of the GM's (and I've tried several different teams) making the kind of roster moves that would never happen in the real world. My latest Player Transaction left me with 3 SP, 4 MR, 2 3B, 2 SS, and 10 C. You tell me how I'm supposed to win with that. My pitching staff is always exhausted and no one in the field can make a play.

As a rule, I do not manage in the lowest level of minors. The AI has never handled those rosters very well.

[tajoumaru]

I recently inspected all the minor league teams in my league. Most were well-apportioned until I reached the bottom level, Rookie Ball. Several of the Rookie league teams were chock full of catchers (e.g., 10 of 18 position players were catchers and only 1 or 2 were OFs), while a few were extremely middle infield-heavy. One or two had way too many outfielders.

How did I resolve this? The painful way--went through and manually edited the players to adjust their positions and even things out. I won't be doing that every year, however, or maybe ever again...too much work. I'm curious to see how things go from here.

[knockahoma]

Just out of curiousity, could you list the defensive tools of 5 or 6 most athletic catchers? In real life you don't see a lot of catchers move to 2B and SS, but I'm curious whether that might be the case in OOTP. Do you suspect a few of those catchers could easily be moved to 1b, 3b, 2b, of, or even shortstop?

[spark240]

In line with what knockahoma is saying, when you're looking at a batch of brand-new (to the game world and to you) players, try looking at just their ratings, ignoring their (initial) assigned positions. Maybe think like a little league coach. These are the kids you have to work with. How can you run them out on the field in the least-embarrassing way for everyone?

[Carlton_Willey]

I've noticed the 'dozen Cs in rookie ball' issue many times myself. What I'm starting to conclude is that this is a function of a few things:

1) At higher than rookie league, teams don't carry more than two catchers. If you don't count the emergency types the game creates, that is.

2) Because of this, all surplus catchers get shoved to the lowest level.

3) If you draft 3+ catchers each year, you will build up a catcher sludge in your organization that only the release button will clean up. I like to draft good arm catchers in late rounds and hope to catch lightning in a bottle with one of them learning how to hit. Hence my 6-8 catchers at the two rookie teams.

4) Similarly, once I get past the first few rounds and obvious hitting prospects, I tend to pick all CFs and SSs, mostly SSs because there are is more need for infielders. Again the surplus will get pushed to the bottom causing SS sludge to build up in your organization.

To summarize, if you have MLB, AAA, AA, A and two rookie teams, you have twelve (6x2) catcher spots in your organization. If you draft 3-4+ catchers every year, you will quickly have a lot of young catchers who aren't playing and developing, thus hanging around at the lowest level. The AI won't promote them, so you get 'catcher sludge' in Rookie Ball.

[tajoumaru]

They should all be shipped off to the Island of Misfit Catchers.

[hmatthias]

I set my rosters in rookie ball to 40 man, and did a "fill with fictional players" once (after the first draft for the league in June), and it seemed to fix the problem. The AI dropped the extra catchers, and kept the position players it needed, which the program filled correctly. The filled players were mostly scrubs, so it didn't really effect game balance at all.

[VARoadstter]

Originally Posted by knockahoma

Just out of curiousity, could you list the defensive tools of 5 or 6 most athletic catchers? In real life you don't see a lot of catchers move to 2B and SS, but I'm curious whether that might be the case in OOTP. Do you suspect a few of those catchers could easily be moved to 1b, 3b, 2b, of, or even shortstop?

Craig Biggio was converted to 2B from C. I can think of several who went to 3B and even more who ended up at 1B, particularly when they were older and couldn't catch every day.

[Questdog]

Originally Posted by VARoadstter

Craig Biggio was converted to 2B from C. I can think of several who went to 3B and even more who ended up at 1B, particularly when they were older and couldn't catch every day.

Dale Murphy went from C to CF.....but he and Biggio are very rare cases.....

[Big T]

I manage my rosters as such.

Including my MLB team, I have 7 teams. Prior to the draft, I do a quick cleanse and pare down my roster to the following by releasing a few off my scrubs. (allowing for injury)

Catchers 16
1b/3b 23
2b/ss 23
OF 27
SP 32
Rel 39

Total 160 players.

Then I ensure I draft a min of 4 at each of those groups with the final 6 rounds looking for sleepers at any position. So when all is said in done, after the draft I have about 190 players and fairly balanced at each position. With 10-20 players injured in total at any given time, my Rookie leaque roster is usually between, 25-30 players.

The key is doing the annual cleanze of scrubs.

Just my thoughts.

[brewdog]

Like Big T just mentioned I do the same, sometime within a month of the draft I'll go through my minor leagues and release the players I feel have the least possibility of making the majors at any time in the future this helps me by keeping a realistic roster size at the lowest level (and in theory prevents that 28 year old Single A 1B from being a development stopper)

[knockahoma]

Originally Posted by knockahoma
Just out of curiousity, could you list the defensive tools of 5 or 6 most athletic catchers? In real life you don't see a lot of catchers move to 2B and SS, but I'm curious whether that might be the case in OOTP. Do you suspect a few of those catchers could easily be moved to 1b, 3b, 2b, of, or even shortstop?

Craig Biggio was converted to 2B from C. I can think of several who went to 3B and even more who ended up at 1B, particularly when they were older and couldn't catch every day.

Yeah, I can think of several catchers who wound up at the corner infield and outfield spots. BJ Surhoff played some SS in college and then went on to be a catcher.

I can't think off-hand of anyone else who went from catcher to a middle- infield position outside of Biggio. But, surely, Biggio had a predecessor?

But, for OOTP purposes, when the game stacks 10 catchers at the low minors level, it might help the pain to think of them as distributable to the other positions. There is that distribution situation in the minors. If anything, there should probably be 10 shortstops instead of 10 catchers. It's been said that the "best" players tend to play shortstop at the little league, high school and possibly even college levels. I know on my college team we had several players who were shortstops in summer ball and high school, distributed out to other positions at the next level.

I read a few years back that very few 2B are drafted highly. The people we think of as 2B are usually converted shortstops from high school and college.

Here's an interesting article and conversation from Tango on the defensive spectrum.

http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/inde...ense_spectrum/

The interesting thing with this chart is that it can serve the basis for aging modeling. As an infielder gets older, we see that a few more players each year lose the necessary skills to remain in the IF, and become OF or 1B. As they move into easier competition fielding-wise, they are now compared against a tougher competition hitting-wise.

[knockahoma]

I read Bill James a few months ago explaining why some guys play shortstop in the minors. According to James, playing shortstop in the minors (one of the toughest positions on the defensive spectrum) gives flexibility to the player later on at the major league level. He can slide down the defensive scale later, as opposed to starting out at 1B. The theory is that climbing up the scale is very difficult and something few have accomplished.

Here's an interesting article on how many hitters start out at SS, but "slide" down the scale. Interestingly, it's getting tougher these days to find "true" shortstops.

by Kevin Goldstein




Sure, Ryan Braun is cocky, but he tends to back it up when he steps to the plate. One aspect of the game that Braun is not cocky about—and with good reason—is his defense. A shortstop at the University of Miami, Braun was initially moved to third base as a pro, but that lasted all of 112 games in the big leagues before he went to the defensive wasteland of left field. The frustrating thing for many is that on a pure athleticism and tools level, Braun has everything required to be a solid if not an above-average player at the hot corner, but his defense has always, even in the outfield, been best described as indifferent.

He's certainly not the only prospect to befall such a fate. In the ten-year period from 1997-2006, 20 players were drafted in the first and supplemental first round as third basemen, but of those twenty, less than half (nine, to be exact) stayed at the position as professionals. That said, the position has created a surprising number of great players, as of the nine, four (Troy Glaus, Evan Longoria, David Wright, and Ryan Zimmerman) have become stars, and two (Alex Gordon and Ian Stewart) still have a chance to join that group. Among those who had to move, the list includes Pat Burrell, Mark Teixeira, and Billy Bulter in addition to Braun.

The lesson to take from that fact is that if you can mash, they'll find a position for you, but for some inside the game who are responsible for finding new talent, there is a bigger issue here: some believe that true left-side infielders are more hard to find than ever. The problem is even more profound at shortstop; fewer seem to be available with each passing year, as baseball has seen a steady decline in merely the number of shortstops selected in the draft:


Shortstops Taken In Picks
Years 1-100 1-50 1-10

1965-69 16.2 9.2 1.8
1970-79 14.0 8.2 1.8
1980-89 13.6 6.7 2.1
1990-99 11.8 6.0 1.2
2000-09 10.6 5.3 1.1

Beyond the numbers of shortstops themselves is the fact that the position itself is often a misnomer. The best athlete at most high schools is usually the shortstop, but that rarely means it's a legitimate reflection of those players' eventual position; it's easy to forget that even Gorman Thomas was drafted as a shortstop. In draft history, 581 shortstops have been drafted among the first 100 selections; of those, 116 had major league careers spanning 500 or more games, but just 46 spent the majority of their career actually at shortstop. Put more simply, only about two out of every 25 players drafted as shortstops in the first 100 picks had anything resembling a career there.

The reasons for the decline are numerous. The loss of athletes to sports like basketball, football, and soccer continues to be an issue, and there's also now a mindset for many teams that tells them that up-the-middle players are better sourced from the international market, specifically Latin America. However, one scouting director noted that there's more of a lack of focus on the position itself when in comes to player development for young players in North America. "Part of the problem is that the kinds of players that play shortstop in college and high school aren't the kind of players that we see as playing there in the big leagues," one scouting director explained. "Often it's not the best athlete as much as it's the steadiest fielder playing there; we see that all the time, even in college, so often what teams are doing doesn't match what we're looking for."

[NYY #23]

Here are a couple of examples from year 2 of my league. It looks like most teams got better in year two, but a couple rookie league teams still seem to have that issue. Kind of weird that most teams have somewhat properly constructed rosters, and a couple don't. Note the number of players on the roster is in the 70's. Both are completely computer controlled and "some" may qualify to move to another position, but most do not. By age they all look like they are recently drafted.