Development curve issue?

[Murcer]

I've been running test leagues and am seeing an issue with hitter development. That is, I'm getting a lot of very young hitters putting up excellent stats in their first year in MLB.

I ran a few multi-season tests and looked at OPS by age and the development "curve" starts at the top and gradually slopes downward. There's an OPS plateau ages 21-25 and then it begins to steadily decline. It's not a bell shaped curve, rather, it's just a downward sloping line.

I'm using the default settings and, in fact, set Batter Dev Speed to .94 to try to create more realistic hitter development.

Is anyone else seeing this or is it a quirk due to my setup?

[luckymann]

Originally Posted by Murcer

I've been running test leagues and am seeing an issue with hitter development. That is, I'm getting a lot of very young hitters putting up excellent stats in their first year in MLB.

I ran a few multi-season tests and looked at OPS by age and the development "curve" starts at the top and gradually slopes downward. There's an OPS plateau ages 21-25 and then it begins to steadily decline. It's not a bell shaped curve, rather, it's just a downward sloping line.

I'm using the default settings and, in fact, set Batter Dev Speed to .94 to try to create more realistic hitter development.

Is anyone else seeing this or is it a quirk due to my setup?

It has been an issue for a few versions now that the devs seem unwilling or unable to address or even recognise.

I remain convinced it happens through the fake stat lines created upon creation (or import for historical players), a fact that continues to be frustratingly elusive to prove despite much effort on my part.

G

[locuspc]

I don't know exactly what methodology you used. If you're comparing all the age 21 players to all the age 26 players, you have an issue where only the best prospects are going to debut by age 21, and those will tend to be better hitters.

Are you comparing each player's age 21 season to the same player's age 26 season, or are you comparing all the age 21 players to all the age 26 players?

[Murcer]

Originally Posted by luckymann

It has been an issue for a few versions now that the devs seem unwilling or unable to address or even recognise.

I haven't seen it this pronounced before and I was able to tweak it using development modifiers. But this seems really odd in that nearly all my hitters start at or near their OPS high and then decline over time.

Originally Posted by locuspc

I don't know exactly what methodology you used. If you're comparing all the age 21 players to all the age 26 players, you have an issue where only the best prospects are going to debut by age 21, and those will tend to be better hitters.

To avoid this, I only looked at players with at least 4,000 career PAs. So while they're all good players, it is the same cohort throughout.

I'm going to change the Development Target Age despite the fact that that setting, along with Aging Target Age, totally baffle me.

[luckymann]

Originally Posted by Murcer

I haven't seen it this pronounced before and I was able to tweak it using development modifiers. But this seems really odd in that nearly all my hitters start at or near their OPS high and then decline over time.


To avoid this, I only looked at players with at least 4,000 career PAs. So while they're all good players, it is the same cohort throughout.

I'm going to change the Development Target Age despite the fact that that setting, along with Aging Target Age, totally baffle me.

For my long-term historical minors saves, I use aging at 1 / dev at 0.975 / TCR at 25. Mind you, none of these have been moved to 27 yet but those settings have served me well. Of course, recalc is the big decider of player performance and development in those saves, so I'm not sure this is even relevant.

I barely change dev and aging in fictional saves, or even in historical dev-only saves. I have found them really sensitive, so would recommend incrementality as the best policy.

G

[rwd59]

I don't see what you are seeing. I have aging set at .85 and development speed at 1.150 and still have a hard time developing players, especially hitters.

[Murcer]

My setup isn't that unusual (though I do have players graduate from the feeder league at age 22) so I'm surprised no one else is seeing anything like this. My feeder league Sabermetric PCMs are .55 for all five categories which I think is standard.

The attached graph shows OPS by age for about 625 players who had at least 4,000 MLB plate appearances so I'm measuring the same cohort of players over the course of multiple seasons. And these results are with Batter Dev Speed at .85 and Pitcher Dev Speed at 1.73, and Development Target Age at "Older"

I'm trying to get the hitters to peak closer to age 26-27.

[pfholden]

Originally Posted by Murcer

I've been running test leagues and am seeing an issue with hitter development. That is, I'm getting a lot of very young hitters putting up excellent stats in their first year in MLB.

I ran a few multi-season tests and looked at OPS by age and the development "curve" starts at the top and gradually slopes downward. There's an OPS plateau ages 21-25 and then it begins to steadily decline. It's not a bell shaped curve, rather, it's just a downward sloping line.

I'm using the default settings and, in fact, set Batter Dev Speed to .94 to try to create more realistic hitter development.

Is anyone else seeing this or is it a quirk due to my setup?

This is pretty close to real-life over the last decade or so. Rates and Barrels pod has talked several times over the last couple of seasons that hitters enter very close to their peak now, and maintain through age 27 or so and then a very gradual declines begins until age 32, and then you start to see a more noticeable decline y-o-y.

So, I don't really think this is an issue tbh.

[Joelman111]

I think you should change “development target age” and try “older” or “much older”. This should change where players reach their peak. You could also change “aging target age” to “older” if you want to see them maintain their peak performance for longer. The speed of development affects more how quickly they see change, rather than what ages they are when those changes occur.

[Murcer]

Shoot, I should have mentioned that those results were also with Development Target Age set to "Older"; I updated my post to note this.

Originally Posted by pfholden

This is pretty close to real-life over the last decade or so. Rates and Barrels pod has talked several times over the last couple of seasons that hitters enter very close to their peak now, and maintain through age 27 or so and then a very gradual declines begins until age 32, and then you start to see a more noticeable decline y-o-y.

So, I don't really think this is an issue tbh.

It doesn't look too bad now but I had to resort to some pretty aggressive modifiers to get to this point. Using default settings, I had players peaking at age 22-23 with no ramp up/development at all. I don't think that's how the development curve has ever looked.

I brought this up because I was surprised with the results I was getting and wanted to see if others were running into it. If it's just my setup causing janky results, I won't press it. But I do plan to continue tweaking settings until players are peaking later (26-27) as I believe that is far more realistic.