BABIP now a rating on batter's page?

[Sweed]

Looking at the screenshot of Pete Alonso I see basic batter ratings being listed has changed. Contact has sub ratings of BABIP and Avoid K's. Gap has moved below Power with eye being last. The change of order will take a bit of getting used to, but not a big deal. I'm wondering about the batter having a BABIP rating?

My understanding of BABIP was it could be used as an indicator of why a batter was hitting above or below expectations based on his contact skill, but it wasn't a skill in itself. IE a batter with high contact would put more balls in play and then fielder's ability would come into play along with some "luck" (he hit the ball to a "good spot"). Of course a batter may try to hit the ball a certain way and find a spot "where the fielder ain't" so I wouldn't think it is all luck, but if that were accounted for in v24 and before it was under the hood.

I don't want to overthink this but..
Has something changed in how the game works? Are we just seeing a rating that was under the hood until now? Should it still be under the hood? Or.. Is it a new rating based on new data?

I also see on Corbin Burnes' screenshot that pitchers now have additional the sub-ratings or HRA and PBABIP under Movement. I know they added the PABIP last year as a way to make pitchers in historical games perform more to their real life self. Also that the PBABIP would/could also be used in current or fictional leagues (to make a more realistic pitcher model?). So I knew this rating was there, just not visible.

Are BABIP and PBABIP now measurable skills in the real world that make them something that should be visible in OOTP? I'm hoping for some insight from the developers, or thoughts from the stat guru users are also welcome, on these ratings now being visible.

Thanks.

[Rain King]

BABIP has always been a measurable skill for hitters...and it has been a rating (just hidden) within OOTP for some time.

Look within the editor and you will see it.

Within the last couple of years it was "unhidden" for PT to be more transparent...which makes sense since all other Ratings are 100% known in that mode.

It looks like they are now displaying it within the core game as well.


PBABIP has also been determined to be a measurable skill for pitchers in recent years also. It is essentially an addendum to DIPS. Pitchers have a small amount of control over this for the most part by getting batters to hit into poor launch angles. The larger factors are still the batter and defense, though.

[Sweed]

Originally Posted by Rain King

BABIP has always been a measurable skill for hitters...and it has been a rating (just hidden) within OOTP for some time.

Look within the editor and you will see it.

Within the last couple of years it was "unhidden" for PT to be more transparent...which makes sense since all other Ratings are 100% known in that mode.

It looks like they are now displaying it within the core game as well.


PBABIP has also been determined to be a measurable skill for pitchers in recent years also. It is essentially an addendum to DIPS. Pitchers have a small amount of control over this for the most part by getting batters to hit into poor launch angles. The larger factors are still the batter and defense, though.

I knew there was something under the hood for babip, but wasn't sure it if was only a game mechanic or based on real life data.

I like as much fog of war as possible so don't peak into the player editor other than to fix things that may be broke. IE my league had a glitch where players weren't being assigned birth places for the draft class, or any created players for that matter. IIRC I had to reimport the world database which fixed it for all new players but I was stuck with a lot of "world wanderers". For some of those players, as they reach MLB, I'll go into the editor and give them a city. Other than that issue I don't think I've ever opened it.

Thanks for clarifying the babip and pbabip.

[kq76]

I'm not sure if it should be said all pitchers have control over their pBABIP or not, but enough have enough control over theirs that if you look in the editor some pitchers have a pBABIP value. Many don't have a value so the default is used for them.

FanGraphs has a good page on BABIP.

IMO, BABIP should have been plainly visible in the game a long long time ago so I'm pleased it's finally visible on the non-editor screens. In the past, if you didn't look at the editor, you had to do some mental math to guess at a player's BABIP so it's great that we don't have to do that anymore.

[Syd Thrift]

I think the argument against showing BABIP, not that it's a fantastic one, is that BABIP isn't really a "tool" per se. The five tools (just saying to people who might be reading this as someone who is, perhaps, coming in from Football Manager) are contact, power, speed, range, and arm. As it is, of course, the game has more ratings than that and of course more that you can see, and if you're going to show the Avoid Ks "tool" you really should show BABIP as well. And of course the game shows the 6th "tool" which is eye...

Ideally you'd have lots of other little things like bat speed, pitch selection, aggressiveness, stance, and so on that would add up to Contact or Power or whatever; however, that would represent a very, very different direction than pretty much any baseball game has ever gone (I guess you could argue that FPS Baseball did something vaguely like that, although not really).

[MrDov]

I wonder if the issue/confusion is the names of the ratings themselves rather than what the ratings actually are or that they’re visible. Avoid Ks and BABIP seem to me to be ability to make contact and quality of contact, which are things often mentioned in scouting reports for players in real life. Granted those sub components of contact aren’t usually given their own rating in real life scouting reports like contact is, but they’re at least things scouts are actively evaluating and reporting on.

[Canary85]

well, babip was always a hidden rating using some formula of the player's other hit tools except for plate discipline. similar to how contact quality, launch angle, and exit velo are what you would use irl to try and guess a player's babip.

anyway it's my understanding that babip has a public rating now because of perfect team players who are looking for any kind of edge with the single digit rating system that PT uses. they want to know who has the high babip ratings so they can get good cards. i haven't touched PT since my first edition of OOTP because it is unfun. furthermore i am perfectly capable of using the 20-80 system to intuit what a player's likely babip is going to be in my offline and online leagues that i play in.

hopefully this is something you can toggle on and off in the league settings because i think it is stupid.

[PSUColonel]

Deleted

[PSUColonel]

Originally Posted by Canary85

well, babip was always a hidden rating using some formula of the player's other hit tools except for plate discipline. similar to how contact quality, launch angle, and exit velo are what you would use irl to try and guess a player's babip.

anyway it's my understanding that babip has a public rating now because of perfect team players who are looking for any kind of edge with the single digit rating system that PT uses. they want to know who has the high babip ratings so they can get good cards. i haven't touched PT since my first edition of OOTP because it is unfun. furthermore i am perfectly capable of using the 20-80 system to intuit what a player's likely babip is going to be in my offline and online leagues that i play in.

hopefully this is something you can toggle on and off in the league settings because i think it is stupid.

I don’t think I should comment, so I won’t. LOL

[KBLover]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

(I guess you could argue that FPS Baseball did something vaguely like that, although not really).

FPS Baseball came the closest from what I've experienced though it came through the pb (playbalance) config file.

PH = bat speed, since the game used a physics model, even when simulating games.

CH was strike zone judgement, contact rate (via a timing-simulated system and the ability to "adjust" due to re-identifying pitches and the likelihood of the batter to even do so) to plate patience.

The plate patience also had modifiers based on count (though that was for every player), so you could set the modifiers based on the league averages and use CH to create more or less aggressive hitters.

FA (fielding ability) was errors rate and reaction time and combined with the speed rating (feet-per-second speed of the player) to create range and fielders than might "outrun their mistakes" or weren't blazing but had such a good first step they could still cover ground.

Hit trajectory was a thing (GF rating, impacted swing angle), contact quality was a thing (what part of the bat contact was made), variance in pitch movement (what we now measure as spin rate and such).

I really wish Sierra didn't suck because I can only imagine what FPS could have been if it could have survived 25 years like OOTP.

Tinkering with the config file was something else. I wish I could get the game to run on Windows 10

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by KBLover

FPS Baseball came the closest from what I've experienced though it came through the pb (playbalance) config file.

PH = bat speed, since the game used a physics model, even when simulating games.

CH was strike zone judgement, contact rate (via a timing-simulated system and the ability to "adjust" due to re-identifying pitches and the likelihood of the batter to even do so) to plate patience.

The plate patience also had modifiers based on count (though that was for every player), so you could set the modifiers based on the league averages and use CH to create more or less aggressive hitters.

FA (fielding ability) was errors rate and reaction time and combined with the speed rating (feet-per-second speed of the player) to create range and fielders than might "outrun their mistakes" or weren't blazing but had such a good first step they could still cover ground.

Hit trajectory was a thing (GF rating, impacted swing angle), contact quality was a thing (what part of the bat contact was made), variance in pitch movement (what we now measure as spin rate and such).

I really wish Sierra didn't suck because I can only imagine what FPS could have been if it could have survived 25 years like OOTP.

Tinkering with the config file was something else. I wish I could get the game to run on Windows 10

Yeah, I specifically remember grabbing someone else's tuned-up config file to make the most realistic game possible. OOTP did some things that OOTP still doesn't do, like give slow pitchers a boost when they come on in relief of fast pitchers and vice versa (which, TBF, I'm not sure how much actual evidence there is for that being a thing; it's just a cool little add-in). it also had a whole lot of split ratings where there's not a huge amount of evidence that players have actual skills in, like turf/grass, splits by month, and so on.

It was still a really interesting game, way ahead of its time. I still boot up FPS Football Pro every few years because to this day there's not really a game that gets close to what it did for pro (American) football.

[Haiku]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

I still boot up FPS Football Pro every few years because to this day there's not really a game that gets close to what it did for pro (American) football.

Front Office Football 7/8/9?

[PSUColonel]

Originally Posted by Haiku

Front Office Football 7/8/9?

FOF is a great game, but it needs a serious shot in the arm. Jim is simply not capable of doing a lot of things.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by Haiku

Front Office Football 7/8/9?

It's just not the same kind of game that Football Pro is. I got Jim really mad at me once (in the OOTP fora no less) when I opined that after 20 years of it being a one-man show development-wise that maybe some of the code wasn't laid out super well and that could have been an issue with multiple people taking it on. He insisted that that wasn't the case and people remarked about how well-structured it was (which, if I'm being honest, rigid code that won't allow you to write in extra stuff into it easily is also an issue, especially when one of the things you'd be doing to update it is to lift and shift it into a new UI). I'll be honest, the inability to self-assess issues is a much, much bigger issue when it comes to software development than a little bit of spaghetti code.

I thought it was an interesting game circa 2005. I thought Football Pro scratched a different itch - Pro was much more about writing up plays and, even if you used a bunch of pre-set plays to ensure that the running game worked, etc. (this only due to the fact that the game was by then 6 years dead), you were still doing the coach's job of choosing a playbook and calling plays. FOF always did its best as a football GM simulator.

[snepp]

OOTP is the only game I've invested more hours into than FPS Football, shame it ended the way it did.

[Haiku]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

It's just not the same kind of game that Football Pro is. I got Jim really mad at me once (in the OOTP fora no less) when I opined that after 20 years of it being a one-man show development-wise that maybe some of the code wasn't laid out super well and that could have been an issue with multiple people taking it on. He insisted that that wasn't the case and people remarked about how well-structured it was (which, if I'm being honest, rigid code that won't allow you to write in extra stuff into it easily is also an issue, especially when one of the things you'd be doing to update it is to lift and shift it into a new UI). I'll be honest, the inability to self-assess issues is a much, much bigger issue when it comes to software development than a little bit of spaghetti code.

I thought it was an interesting game circa 2005. I thought Football Pro scratched a different itch - Pro was much more about writing up plays and, even if you used a bunch of pre-set plays to ensure that the running game worked, etc. (this only due to the fact that the game was by then 6 years dead), you were still doing the coach's job of choosing a playbook and calling plays. FOF always did its best as a football GM simulator.

I got the impression that Jim and OOTPD had the code rewritten between 2018 and 2020. Currently, FOF9 has a very similar navigation to OOTP and FHM, albeit with a very basic GUI. This change would not have been possible without the help of OOTPD and the rewritten code. It's a shame they backed out and left the project because I believe the core mechanics developed by Jim are incredible. The game lacks the graphical representation, customization and some quality of life functionality of OOTP and FHM. I haven't tried FPS Football, but I think FOF covers the coach's job very well by allowing you to create your own playbook from scratch as well as call every single play during a game.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by Haiku

I got the impression that Jim and OOTPD had the code rewritten between 2018 and 2020. Currently, FOF9 has a very similar navigation to OOTP and FHM, albeit with a very basic GUI. This change would not have been possible without the help of OOTPD and the rewritten code. It's a shame they backed out and left the project because I believe the core mechanics developed by Jim are incredible. The game lacks the graphical representation, customization and some quality of life functionality of OOTP and FHM. I haven't tried FPS Football, but I think FOF covers the coach's job very well by allowing you to create your own playbook from scratch as well as call every single play during a game.

Does it still do the thing where if you run one play a lot it's like "the defense is familiar with this play" and gives you a debuff? That was always a pet peeve and something that people included the developer wasn't an issue. To me, there are some plays you can and should just keep running over and over again until the defense actually figures out the opposite playcall or else, in the case of stuff like zone blocking, the league legislates it away. The late 90s Broncos rather famously ran 7 plays. Granted that was a long time ago and the league's gotten a lot more sophisticated but there's still effects of that: if you constantly call passes over the middle (which is kind of dangerous anyway but still) the defense doesn't "get familiar with the play" it starts running looks with a robber sitting in that location. If you run a lot of planned roll-outs with a good QB, the defense calls a spy. Both of those open up the defense to further exploitation: the spy bit is still something you see getting exploited a TON by teams like Baltimore and Buffalo because that guy who's sitting there spying on Lamar Jackson or whoever isn't covering other guys on the field and so there's another hole to exploit.

If there's any huge difference between now and the 90s in that regard it's that individual players are tasked with making those adjustments much more than they were in the past. That's still not "the defense is familar with this play"; a DB who is giving his guy a cushion because he got cooked on a couple of long passes isn't "familiar with this play"; he is susceptible to getting beat on passes in front of him now.

That to me is the real magic of coaching, not merely that you call your own plays but that teams and players adjust to what you're doing and you have to evolve. FB Pro of course didn't do that because it was a game built in the early 90s, but you could for sure do stuff adjacent to that by swapping in plays used in certain situations. Football Manager *does* do this, so it's not really the case that it's not done anywhere else.

[Haiku]

What you described would require a much smarter AI than what current sports management games have. I always felt that it is the player beating the AI (or failing to beat it), not the other way around. In OOTP the AI hardly adapts to the player, if at all. I've been playing FM since 2005 and it is so predictable, with players always finding ways to exploit the game's mechanics in each new version. It's not even a matter of finding effective tactics anymore because, in the last five versions at least, the best tactic has been the 'gegenpress' and its variations (high press + high d-line). It's simply the optimal tactic for every team in any situation. You stick with it regardless of whether you're winning or losing because no other tactic will yield better results. It's just a fact and the reason I stopped playing FM altogether. AI in FOF is definitely simpler, but at the same time more robust in producing believable results over extended period of time. Considering the current state of AI development across sports management games I'd say what you described is more like a poor choice of words rather than a real weakness. It's just a simple way to stop players from abusing the same winning plays over and over. It kind of forces you to come up with more creative ways to beat the AI. With all its limitations I think the FOF9 game engine is pretty solid. On the contrary I find the player's advantage in handling cap management much more significant, which in turn gives them a better chance to compete for the bowl.

[Cactusguy21]

I dont really love showing BABIP, because differences in BABIP can be inferred already from the pull tendencies, the GB/FB tendencies, speed, and power (particularly gap power). It's not a "tool", it's the outcome of tools.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by Cactusguy21

I dont really love showing BABIP, because differences in BABIP can be inferred already from the pull tendencies, the GB/FB tendencies, speed, and power (particularly gap power). It's not a "tool", it's the outcome of tools.

Not really. I'm sure there are correlations but if you open the editor you will see that BABIP is its own rating in the game.