Stats Engine Question

[Johnny Slick]

As we all know, increasing the hits per at-bat in the stat engine decreases hits in the game. This has been an "undocumented feature" of OOTP ever since it came out. Why it never got fixed is a mystery to me, but that's another matter. Anyway, what I am hearing is that BABIP actually does not work that way; if you want your BABIP to be 10 points lower, you actually set it 10 points lower. Is this true? And for others who manually figure out engine stats for their leagues, does this also give you a splitting headache just thinking about it?

[gmo]

Originally Posted by Johnny Slick

if you want your BABIP to be 10 points lower, you actually set it 10 points lower. Is this true?

Do not take it as gospel, but AFAIK that is true. And I believe that now with the V6 engine if you want to increase hits in your league you would not mess with the hits totals number at all but just with the BABIP number. Again though that could be wrong as well.

As someone pretty much content playing with modern numbers and seeing the confusion in the totals, I am amazed people get other eras to work well with any consistency. I understand the basic principals behind the totals and basically why the increase-to-decrease and vice versa work the way they do, and people like Henry/Big City do a pretty good job explaining stuff as best they can... But it seems any custom league you create has the modern totals as the default and the changes to the numbers to produce a deadball-like era are not possible to do mathematically. And all the ratios of the different numbers plus their interactions with each other seem to make the problem quite complicated and a precise result for the entire set of totals numbers nearly impossible.

Again, I do not fiddle with them much and other (though not all) people seem to have success with that. However, I think revamping how the system is adjusted by the user seems like something worth substantial effort for V7. People may be used to up-to-down & down-to-up, but if the thing was made easier I doubt there would be complaints. I can understand though if it would be difficult because I think the scheme works well for setting league baselines in the guts of the game. I am only advocating changing the interface aspect - things like being able to completely reset those totals numbers or ask for a 5% change up or down in something and have the game change the numbers behind the scenes.

[Gastric ReFlux]

I think that OOTP probably uses the principles as shown in the log5 method used by Bill James to project winning percentages by teams. Winning percentages between teams are fairly easy to derive, since the league average of winning percentage will always be .500. But it's possible to make this kind of projection work in a non .500 environment, and understanding how that works will make it easier to understand why league totals in OOTP work the way they do.

http://sbs-baseball.com/theory.txt

The link explains how to calculate what you could expect a hitter to hit against a pitcher based upon their numbers. Doing that, then plugging in the numbers, it becomes much easier to see why the numbers in OOTP work the way they do.

Although GMO has a good idea that the front end could be improved to let game players say, "Hey, I want to reduce homeruns by 10%" and have the game calculate the league totals. We could also keep the league totals open for those of us who are comfortable with their principle.

[Gastric ReFlux]

Here's another page which demonstrates the principle well, using real-life verification:

http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/...er_matchup.htm