erratic team performance

[adion]

I have noticed since playing PT for some time now that a team’s performance changes drastically from year to year with mostly the same players. One season the pitching and hitting good and I make the playoffs. The next season the era’s go way up and batting averages go way down. Does this have to do with algorithms in OOTP or something else. It would seem to me that that a players performance should be somewhere closed to his stats on his card.

[Tinkerman]

It's not so much the stats of your players, but how they compare to the stats of other players in your league. Say you've got a hitter with 85 power who has the most power of any batter in your league, he's gonna hit a lot of homers. If there were 100 batters with 86+ power in your league, he's not likely to hit anywhere near as many.

Apply that logic across your entire team and the output can vary wildly!

[bailey]

There is a hidden rating called BABIP. (Note: Not to be confused with the BABIP statistic.) It was disclosed in the card list released for PT20. The assumption was that this is a fixed rating. But, what if it fluctuates from week to week? That would account for a lot of the variance if it were not fixed.

[Tinkerman]

That's interesting. I have wondered if something like that might be at play in tournaments.

[adion]

Originally Posted by Tinkerman

It's not so much the stats of your players, but how they compare to the stats of other players in your league. Say you've got a hitter with 85 power who has the most power of any batter in your league, he's gonna hit a lot of homers. If there were 100 batters with 86+ power in your league, he's not likely to hit anywhere near as many.

Apply that logic across your entire team and the output can vary wildly!

I have players with power ratings in the high 90s and 100s and they still under perform. Also, why do all the pitchers with high rating also under perform. This is not realistic.

[chazzycat]

There's always going to be a lot of variance from week to week. For starters, that's just normal in baseball. But also, the effect Tinkerman mentioned can be quite strong. Everything is relative to the strength of the other cards in your league that week.

And then also, since they decided to hand out elite cards like candy in the form of live collection rewards, there has been a huge increase in general card strength this year compared to last year. Most non-casual FTP teams are full of strong diamond cards already, which is having a massive inflationary effect on overall ratings & stats.

[dkgo]

Originally Posted by adion

I have noticed since playing PT for some time now that a team’s performance changes drastically from year to year with mostly the same players. One season the pitching and hitting good and I make the playoffs. The next season the era’s go way up and batting averages go way down. Does this have to do with algorithms in OOTP or something else. It would seem to me that that a players performance should be somewhere closed to his stats on his card.

Aside from the fact that the competition in your league can change drastically week to week, there is a massive amount of variance in baseball. Expecting the same numbers year after year from a player is dumb.

[adion]

Originally Posted by chazzycat

There's always going to be a lot of variance from week to week. For starters, that's just normal in baseball. But also, the effect Tinkerman mentioned can be quite strong. Everything is relative to the strength of the other cards in your league that week.

And then also, since they decided to hand out elite cards like candy in the form of live collection rewards, there has been a huge increase in general card strength this year compared to last year. Most non-casual FTP teams are full of strong diamond cards already, which is having a massive inflationary effect on overall ratings & stats.

I am playing a league in which you can't buy cards. That means you can't "pay" to win. If OOTP wanted to level the playing field, they would have a version of PT in which you have to earn the cards, not buy them.

[daves]

Originally Posted by chazzycat

There's always going to be a lot of variance from week to week. For starters, that's just normal in baseball. But also, the effect Tinkerman mentioned can be quite strong. Everything is relative to the strength of the other cards in your league that week.

And then also, since they decided to hand out elite cards like candy in the form of live collection rewards, there has been a huge increase in general card strength this year compared to last year. Most non-casual FTP teams are full of strong diamond cards already, which is having a massive inflationary effect on overall ratings & stats.

Welcome to the game of Baseball!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[dkgo]

Originally Posted by adion

I am playing a league in which you can't buy cards. That means you can't "pay" to win. If OOTP wanted to level the playing field, they would have a version of PT in which you have to earn the cards, not buy them.

Seems like a bad business model to discourage people from spending money.

By the way, tons of people have built up elite teams over time without buying the cards. Maybe you just aren't that good at the game.

[chazzycat]

Originally Posted by adion

I am playing a league in which you can't buy cards. That means you can't "pay" to win. If OOTP wanted to level the playing field, they would have a version of PT in which you have to earn the cards, not buy them.

We can't spend money in my league either. But even with that restriction, the best teams are all diamond/perfect cards already. The point I was making that even completely FREE teams have received a huge influx of talent this year, from the live collection rewards, which are accessible to everyone. This has had a noticeable overall effect on the talent levels across the board.

[steamrollers]

Originally Posted by chazzycat

We can't spend money in my league either. But even with that restriction, the best teams are all diamond/perfect cards already. The point I was making that even completely FREE teams have received a huge influx of talent this year, from the live collection rewards, which are accessible to everyone. This has had a noticeable overall effect on the talent levels across the board.

Very well said. The difference between the talent level early on from 20 to 21 is so massive you can't even begin to compare it. I imagine next year they tone it down a bit at the beginning but certainly this season basically going all steroids era on cards there are just so many teams at any level that have highly skilled hitters. It is fairly amusing how many teams are more or less just the special edition cards this early on. I have purposely limited myself to only 1 or 2 max at any time just so I am not playing a carbon copy of my team every other series.

[Spieler]

Originally Posted by bailey

There is a hidden rating called BABIP. (Note: Not to be confused with the BABIP statistic.) It was disclosed in the card list released for PT20. The assumption was that this is a fixed rating. But, what if it fluctuates from week to week? That would account for a lot of the variance if it were not fixed.

It is fixed. Well, except for Live cards week-to-week obviously, once real stats start rolling in. It is the factor that balances out the 3 true outcomes (K, BB, HR) to get a expected BA. Park factors and opponents defense are then the variables here.

Face a lot of good/poor defenders and/or skewed parks, you get varying results but still all based around the BABIP rating. Seems a little bit more pronounced to the negative side this year at higher levels as PEAK cards' defense haven't been nerfed like in the past.

[2tango2]

It's still early in the year and moved from Rookie to Stone but my Murder's Row has been shut down for the most part by pretty shoddy pitching card wise.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by bailey

There is a hidden rating called BABIP. (Note: Not to be confused with the BABIP statistic.) It was disclosed in the card list released for PT20. The assumption was that this is a fixed rating. But, what if it fluctuates from week to week? That would account for a lot of the variance if it were not fixed.

That's been an OOTP rating for years, yes, and no, it's not going to vary if the other ratings don't vary. What *can* vary pretty intensely from one league to the next is the average Stuff rating of pitchers. If the league average stuff rating is low for the league, you're going to see the Avoid Ks portion of Contact mean less and the BABIP rating mean more. If it's high, you'll see the opposite effect.

I see this in regular OOTP kind of all the time when I play historical leagues where the leaguewide K/9 rate might be 4.0 or less. You can have guys who strike out a fair amount without a lot of power but who can still hit well enough to play, and on the flip side speed becomes a lot more important even though stolen base success rates are lower because BABIP is correlated with speed (it's not a 1:1 correlation though; guys like Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio still have pretty high BABIP ratings without being all that fast).

Likewise, if the league average Eye is low, pitchers with iffy control for the level won't be as disastrous as you'd might expect, and if Power levels are somehow low (which is almost never going to happen because POW is one of those ratings everyone gravitates towards), it is possible for low-Movement pitchers to not suck.

[JudP]

I find the same thing. It is frustrating to spend time building a team that towers over a competitor and see that team lose in a totally nonsensical fashion. Don't get me wrong... I do believe good teams sometimes lose to bad ones, but a pitcher with a losing record, an ERA over 5, and a low value number does not throw a shutout against a powerhouse lineup while his teamates score runs off a pitcher who has had a great season and has a much higher value number. If so.... what's the point of buying anyone good? If you've suffered through the losing seasons to build up your team by buying better players, getting rid of players that have not performed, and eventually getting to a place where your lineup is full of players that rank from 1st to 6th at their positions, they should not get creamed by beat still have have a number of players ranking in the 20's and pitchers with low value numbers. If so then you are wasting your time upgrading. I find this game to be very nonsensical and frustrating at times.

[Torgonius]

Originally Posted by JudP

I find this game to be very nonsensical and frustrating at times.

Jud, meet Variance. Variance, I see you've already met and had your way with Jud.

In math based games like OOTP and Poker, variance is the number 1 enemy. Pocket aces lose 15% of the time. Variance likes to save those times up for the handful of times she allows me to have pocket aces.

[Syd Thrift]

Yeah, I’m real life the worst teams in the league still win a third of the time and the beat ones still lose a third of the time. That generally (but not always) evens out over the course of a 162 game season but one thing about baseball is that the postseason - not just in OOTP but in real life - can be very random. Fans will construct myths after the fact to explain why Team X didn’t win the World Series after winning 116 games in the regular season, but those are just that, myths.

[bailey]

The variance in OOTP is not variance like happens in real baseball. At the end of the season, the league wide statistics MUST approximate the 2010 baseball season. So, if every team in a league conspired to use pitchers in the field and batters as pitchers, the league wide stats would like the same as leagues that play normally. So that makes me wonder if results are not pre-determined, then back-filled into a box score that looks "reasonable". I wonder this also because of my experience with Don Newcombe in iron league tournaments. I formerly used him as DH, and RP. When he comes in the game as a RP, the AI had the foresight to use someone else as DH for that game. How can the AI know in advance that Don Newcombe would be needed to be a RP late in that game?

[Syd Thrift]

I have no idea what you’re talking about. PT runs on the OOTP engine and if you don’t understand how it works I recommend playing it.

As for Don Newcombe, it’s really not that hard. If he rests as a DH, he’s still available as a pitcher. The AI is free to use him any time you rest him (and I don’t think playing DH even builds up pitching fatigue so why wouldn’t he be used?). The AI isn’t “pre-determining” anything. Again, I strongly recommend playing the actual game.