babip

[hibees70]

Sorry if this has been explained elsewhere,but how can babip be a rating in PT23.I thought babip was a stat that basically showed whether a hitter was unlucky or lucky in hitting the ball to fielders.If a good hitter had a low rating early in the season ,the odds were that he would raise his average later.So babip is a stat like obp,not a rating like eye or avoid ks.Am I wrong?

[kq76]

BABIP is less luck dependent for batters than it is pitchers. That is, batters have shown a BABIP ability.

Apparently some people wanted BABIP separate as Contact includes BABIP, Power, and AvoidK(, and maybe other ratings?).

Yeah, it might be a bit more confusing, but I think you can safely ignore it if you prefer. Or, you can ignore Contact now.

[Ozzie7227]

Originally Posted by hibees70

Sorry if this has been explained elsewhere,but how can babip be a rating in PT23.I thought babip was a stat that basically showed whether a hitter was unlucky or lucky in hitting the ball to fielders.If a good hitter had a low rating early in the season ,the odds were that he would raise his average later.So babip is a stat like obp,not a rating like eye or avoid ks.Am I wrong?

As hibees said, you can ignore BABIP if you find it confusing. The Contact rating is a result of the combination of BABIP, Power, and Avoid K's. Discussion around the understanding of BABIP and its impact on hitter performance was pretty intense during PT 22, so I'm assuming the devs decided to make it visible (and moved the Contact rating to be a sub-layer of those 3 ratings that determine it, as indicated by the indentation in the ratings panel).

[ncap99]

It is something you can mostly ignore I think, until you get to upper levels.

One of the more frustrating things in previous versions was watching a hitter with very high contact rating produce poor results in the batting average department. Using Babe Ruth as an extreme example - his contact rating was the highest in the game, but he would produce an average in the .260 range in a typical year. That is because his power rating was making up a much higher percentage of his contact rating than some other hitters.

Contact in a lot of ways became at best confusing, and at worst completely counter intuitive. This was because contact always was a composite metric of multiple other things, and understanding of how those components interact was a key factor in team construction at the diamond+ level.

The counter intuitive nature of contact I felt was a real problem in PT22. As an example, if you took Tony Gwynn and his 121 contact and 56 power and simply increased his power to 100 - his batting average would drop. So Tony Gwynn with 121 contact and 56 power hits for a higher batting average (by a lot) than Tony Gwynn with 121 contact and 100 power. As you see with the ratings displayed in PT23, that is because increasing his power and keeping his contact the same would result in a decrease in BABIP, which up until now was a hidden rating.

All of this is compounded by the fact that power hitters in PT22 were frankly just garbage. I think there are a lot of reasons for this - normalization to a year where power was suppressed, the way normalization worked in general when you had a lot of high contact hitters, the desire to emphasize movement on your pitching staff, etc. I think if you took Babe Ruth and took his enormous power (219 overall) and took it to ZERO, he would likely produce a higher offensive WAR. That is obviously a problem.

I will say one interesting thing is the movement ratings in the beta on pitchers are through the roof. You have 92 overalls like Assenmacher with 109 movement which would have been the best in the game in PT22. This hasn't seemed to suppress HRs though. Clearly they've tinkered with the formula quite a bit. Maybe this is the year you can run a guy with relatively low contact and high power and make it work?

[hibees70]

Thanks for the explanations.

[Frostcrest]

Seems like a game changer to me. I'll be using BABIP exclusively now. I always thought contact in OOTP was like in MLB the Show - didn't realize it was a composite stat.

[thejojo]

Originally Posted by ncap99

I will say one interesting thing is the movement ratings in the beta on pitchers are through the roof. You have 92 overalls like Assenmacher with 109 movement which would have been the best in the game in PT22. This hasn't seemed to suppress HRs though. Clearly they've tinkered with the formula quite a bit. Maybe this is the year you can run a guy with relatively low contact and high power and make it work?

This is something I've been wondering too, they've said they've got a completely new engine, so some stuff will be probably be different.

[ncap99]

Originally Posted by thejojo

This is something I've been wondering too, they've said they've got a completely new engine, so some stuff will be probably be different.

It is really hard to tell from the beta, as I assume a normalization process is not run against a placement league. We actually have the benefit of a ton of games in the placement league because of the beta length (my team has played 215 games this "season") and I'm seeing a fairly small range of variance with all pitchers coming in between .1 and 1.1 HR/9. Sparky Lyle (103 mov) actually is tied with Max Scherzer (50 mov) at 1.1 HR/9. My bottom 4 are more expected, with Jason Isringhausen (107 mov) at .1 HR/9 in 62.2 IP, Tex Hughson (103 mov) at .3 HR/9 in 302 IP, Bill Gullickson (108 mov) at .3 HR/9 in 285.1 IP, and Robb Nen (109 mov) at .3 HR/9 in 81 IP.

So it is possible the range is expanded and the variance between bad movement and good movement is reduced, and it is also possible that because this is a placement league it is all sort of worthless to look at.

[thejojo]

Originally Posted by ncap99

It is really hard to tell from the beta, as I assume a normalization process is not run against a placement league. We actually have the benefit of a ton of games in the placement league because of the beta length (my team has played 215 games this "season") and I'm seeing a fairly small range of variance with all pitchers coming in between .1 and 1.1 HR/9. Sparky Lyle (103 mov) actually is tied with Max Scherzer (50 mov) at 1.1 HR/9. My bottom 4 are more expected, with Jason Isringhausen (107 mov) at .1 HR/9 in 62.2 IP, Tex Hughson (103 mov) at .3 HR/9 in 302 IP, Bill Gullickson (108 mov) at .3 HR/9 in 285.1 IP, and Robb Nen (109 mov) at .3 HR/9 in 81 IP.

So it is possible the range is expanded and the variance between bad movement and good movement is reduced, and it is also possible that because this is a placement league it is all sort of worthless to look at.

I agree, we'll probably be able to tell more once we're not playing iron players.

Speaking of babip though, I don't suppose there is a way to rearrange the ratings? It would be pretty helpful to have them the way the originally were like last year, and have the babip rating possibly being the top one (or the bottom one for that matter)