Contact Rating

[Buane]

I posted this in the "Suggestions for OOTP 10" forum, but it's an issue that pops up a lot in the online leagues that I'm in so I wanted to also post it here. Maybe I can help educate some people and get a good discussion going at the same time.

Originally Posted by Buane

Suggestion

"Contact" rating should no longer be an amalgamation of Avoiding Strikeouts, Homerun Power, and BABIP ratings, but rather just a straight representation of the BABIP rating.


Reason

It makes more sense than the current system. I understand the thought process behind the way it is set up now, but it seems unnecessarily redundant. Currently, a player's Contact rating is made up of a hidden BABIP rating, the player's Avoid Strikeouts rating, and the player's Homerun Power rating. In other words, the game is predicting how the player will be affected by balls in play rather than just telling us straight up.

I know that's worded kind of strangely, so I'll make a longer example to try and make my point. Let's take a fictional player, Bob Jones. Bob Jones' potential talent ratings are 7/7/7/6/10 (C/GP/HR/BB/K format). Now in the current system, Bob Jones' Contact rating looks passable at 7. But if you know how the Contact rating works currently, Bob Jones' Contact rating is actually his weakness, because his other stats say it should be higher. Because his Homerun Power and Avoid Strikeouts ratings are so good, we can assume that his hidden BABIP rating is quite low.

But instead of giving us this hidden rating, the game predicts how Bob Jones is going to perform. It deceives us into thinking Jones is better than he is - yes, he's almost never going to strikeout and he has decent power, but he also has trouble hitting the ball squarely. I understand the need to have a BABIP rating - some players are just better line drive hitters than others - but I don't think the player rating system is entirely straightforward in these instances. If you change the system to one where Contact simply is the displayed BABIP rating, then Bob Jones ratings would look like this: 5/7/7/6/10. From this, it would be much easier to identify the kind of hitter Mr. Jones is going to be one day - a player who's almost never going to strikeout, a player with decent power when he gets ahold of one, but a player who also has a lot of trouble hitting the ball squarely.

You might argue that this kind of system sells Mr. Jones short. Who's going to want a player with a 5 in Contact? Well, under a new ratings display system, it would be our talent evaluating that would have to change.
Yes, Bob Jones' Contact is very low. That means he's likely going to have a lower than average BABIP for his career. But he'll be helped out by the fact that 1) he does have some homerun power so he can produce without having to worry about the ball in play, and 2) he has an extremely high avoid strikeouts rating, so his actual batting average will be helped out by the fact that despite his low BABIP compared to the league, he'll be putting more balls in play than the league (not striking out) and so in the long run he has a good chance to amass just as many hits as a player with a better BABIP rating but whom also strikeout more than Mr. Jones.

I imagine there are quite a few people out there who don't even understand how Contact is calculated. They probably know nothing about the BABIP stat, or why players who look like they should be doing very well are struggling to post a .260 average.

You also have to consider the different league totals that are out there. In a league where homeruns are scarce, Player A, with ratings of 8/7/4/7/5 will likely outperform or equal the performance of Player B, with ratings of 7/7/9/7/7. The system I'm arguing in favor of wouldn't change the results of a league, or the statistics of any player. In the new system, Player A would have ratings closer to 10/7/4/7/5, and Player B 5/7/9/7/7. Both players actual on-field production wouldn't change, just the way their talents are displayed. Now people would be able to accurately judge the relative performances of these two players better.

So to summarize, the current system takes liberties with the Contact rating that are confusing and sometimes misleading. The hidden BABIP rating is already there, and it should be shown to us. The players, the managers out there should have it left to themselves to make their own evaluations instead of the game making its own arbitrary ones. Honestly, if you're going to have a player's rating based on his other ratings, why doesn't having a high Eye/Discipline cause the rest of the player's ratings to go up? Having a good eye would help you make better contact, hit more homeruns, and strikeout less since you'd be swinging at the most hittable pitches. In the end, I think the simplest display would be best, and that's letting us see the player's true ratings and making our own assessments.

Thanks for reading.


Priority

Quite high for me!

I know it's a lot of text, but the premise is simple. The "Contact" rating in OOTP9 is actually based on three things: a player's Homerun Power, a player's Avoid Strikeout talent, and a player's "hidden" BABIP rating. A player's BABIP rating is basically what kind of line drive hitter he is. Instead of showing us, straight up, what kind of line drive hitter he is and whether he'll be able to sustain a higher than average BABIP (think Pudge Rodriguez in his prime) the game instead makes a prediction for us, and that prediction can be quite misleading sometimes.

Under the system I'm lobbying for, no stats would change, no player performances would suffer or be enhanced, it would be a purely cosmetic change. It would be simplifying the Contact rating and showing us something that's currently hidden away (you have to go into the Player Editor to see BABIP). While our talent evaluation would have to adjust to this new system, it would be much more straightforward while being simpler at the same time.

Thoughts, comments? Am I alone in this?

[bigdgp2]

I definitely agree with you here. I can say that you are not alone. This may be a bit off-topic, but I would love OOTP to track a hitter's line drive rate (same for fly balls, ground balls, etc)..

More advanced statistics are always a nice thing to have. I was very happy when Markus introduced VORP into OOTP. I believe someone else mentioned that IRS% should be tracked for relievers. These would be great additions to OOTP, giving players another dimension for player evaluation. I would love for OOTP10 to track BABIP for hitters as well.

I don't know how hard these additions would be to implement, but I would definitely buy OOTP10 if it had this.

[fhomess]

I've always thought the contact rating was supposed to give an indication of what the player's likely batting average would be, not his BABIP. I can understanding wanting it to show the BABIP, but I've always felt that batting average is the more traditional way to look at it so it doesn't bother me. OOTP does use the BABIP, K, and Power ratings to determine hits. Obviously, if player A and player B have the same BABIP, but player B strikes out more, player A will have a higher batting average than player B in the same amount of PA's.

[Buane]

Originally Posted by fhomess

I've always thought the contact rating was supposed to give an indication of what the player's likely batting average would be, not his BABIP. I can understanding wanting it to show the BABIP, but I've always felt that batting average is the more traditional way to look at it so it doesn't bother me. OOTP does use the BABIP, K, and Power ratings to determine hits. Obviously, if player A and player B have the same BABIP, but player B strikes out more, player A will have a higher batting average than player B in the same amount of PA's.

The issue, if you'd rather leave the display the way it is, is that "Contact" gives equal (or almost equal) weight to Avoiding Strikeouts and Homerun Power, and neither of these calculations seem to be weighted for the league's settings. In a league with lower or higher homerun/strikeout totals, the calculation for "Contact" is going to be inaccurate.

For example, a player with talents of 7/7/9/7/8 in a league with low home run totals is going to be deceptive because the game is boosting his contact rating based on his Homerun Power. In a league where homeruns are less prominent, he'll hit less, and his low BABIP rating (which his owner can't see) will hurt him.

I'm not sure which I have the bigger problem with: the fact that the game makes these behind-the-scene calculations for a player's Contact rating, or the fact that there's probably tons of people out there who don't know how "Contact" is calculated and keep incorrectly valuing players.

[injury log]

We've discussed this before:

http://www.ootpdevelopments.com/boar...ples-hr-2.html

OOTP ratings are intended to serve as stats predictors. Contact is intended to predict Batting Average. I've posted the formulas at the above link (essentially, Power predicts HRs, and AvoidK predicts Ks. BABIP then predicts the number of AB-HR-K that will become hits).

In any case, most users will find it very difficult to guess a player's likely AVG by looking at the player's AvoidK, Power and BABIP ratings, in particular because none of these ratings is completely linear (they are each piecewise linear only) and their interaction certainly is not linear. So I only really understand the value of displaying BABIP instead of Contact if you want player evaluation to become more difficult, a goal I can appreciate, but one not all OOTP users would want.

[injury log]

Originally Posted by Buane

I'm not sure which I have the bigger problem with: the fact that the game makes these behind-the-scene calculations for a player's Contact rating, or the fact that there's probably tons of people out there who don't know how "Contact" is calculated and keep incorrectly valuing players.

OOTP players are a well-informed group, overall; I'd expect that more people than you seem to think understand that Contact is a derived rating. Still, if it's true that the calculation of Contact does not take League Totals into account, that seems a good argument for modifying the calculation of Contact, adjusting the weight of Power or AvoidK as the adjusted totals dictate; I don't see it as a particularly compelling justification for displaying BABIP in Contact's stead. I'd add that, if it's true that League Totals do not influence the calculation of Contact (and I have no idea whether that's the case), then Contact is only 'deceptive' for those users who make fairly drastic adjustments to these totals. For most users, Contact is not at all deceptive.