Too much pitching?

[Stealcompany]

I know they say you can never have too much pitching but I've created a fictional universe that has started in 1900. I've instituted an amateur draft rather than completely copy the reserve-clause era rules.

What I'm finding is that the prospects the game is generating are, overwhelming pitchers at the top end of every class and throughout the class. This is on the order of 20 or the top 25 players being starters. Having played the game ever since it came out on Macintosh, I've never seen draft classes with what strikes me as such imbalance, particularly since the league is still in the dead ball era (current year is 1908) and pitching staffs are still relatively small.

My questions are: Has anyone else observed this and is there a way to tweak how prospects are being generated or is it all left to chance?

[OutS|der]

You should be able to adjust the PCM's for pitchers and lower it so they don't produce as many prospects.

I wish we had the feature to generate more of a certain position or more talent at the top or bottom of the draft. Have more first round grades, or whatever we want. Rather then playing around with the PCM's.
Rather the having to set the talent level and just hope it's all correct. Same with league totals, we need more options to set the range rather then just a set total.

[kq76]

I've seen both, pitching-heavy drafts and batting-heavy drafts. And I'm cool with that, as long as it's not always one and never the other.

Historical players probably have some insight into this, but if you're playing a league in 1900 with largely 1900 settings, it might be the norm to see pitching-heavy drafts.

It might also have something to do with the change to ratings with OOTP25.

I just tested it (a fictional league set in 1901 with 30 teams). And of the top 30 prospects, in the first year only 6 were SPs (none were relievers). In year 2 it was 6/30 again and in year 3 it was 6/30 yet again. So my guess is your settings must somehow be different than the defaults I used.

But really, as long as the stats are in line with what you want/expect and the ratings largely make sense with respect to other pitchers, should it matter if we see drafts that look pitcher-heavy drafts? I'd be more concerned if your stats become out of whack with what you expect. Are your stats good? If they're not, then I'd recommend looking at your settings in detail.

[Syd Thrift]

I think that more than anything else, the biggest thing that affects the draft in 1900 especially but really throughout the early 1900s is the relatively small draft classes. If you're playing with just the major leagues and a reserve roster (which isn't super realistic but OOTP doesn't do a great job with how things actually worked back then because it's very, very far off from modern baseball) you might only have, say, 3-5 rounds for your draft. The game generates draftees more or less randomly so it's very easy to have a big chunk of those guys be pitchers one year (and hitters the next... or pitchers again, there's no balancing-out algorithm going on outside of random chance), and that's going to be exacerbated if you have a small draft class feeding in.

One way to fix this - "fix" this - is to have ahistorical minor leagues with, say, 3 levels and then run a 10-ish round draft (the rule of thumb is, 3-5 rounds per level of minors). That should bring in enough randomly generated players to sort of balance things out most years. It also allows players to progress normally though the minor leagues; the game doesn't really know how to operate independent minor league systems who aren't just trying to snap up any player available (and it especially doesn't know how to buy and sell good players to/from other independent teams and leagues).

Another factor here, although I think it's a small factor, is that if you set the game to create players using the PCMs, it's my experience that it'll create a lot of low-stuff, high-movement, good-control guys who might look really good to the 20-80/stars rating algorithm. As kq76 alluded to, that doesn't necessarily make them actually good pitchers though. The fact that the AI will covet a guy who's essentially, I don't know, Noodles Hahn (a good but not great deadball era pitcher whose stats look potentially eye-popping to an algo set to look at players from the lens of the modern era) is its own issue but in terms of the makeup of the league it's not necessarily game-breaking or anything.

[Stealcompany]

Thanks for the feedback. It's helpful and thought provoking.

Actually I'm playing with ahistorical minor leagues as well as the major leagues covering levels from Triple A to Short season A. My draft classes cover enough players for a 24 round draft.

I'm tempted to let things stay as they are and see if what I'm seeing is due more to a small sample size of draft classes rather than an ongoing bias toward pitchers.