Does OOTP Player Development Needs to Be Fixed?

[johnnybourbon]

meh, its just what I know. vb6, vb.net & c#. @ work I used to code in vb.net, now i just prefer c#.

[jarmenia]

Originally Posted by johnnybourbon

meh, its just what I know. vb6, vb.net & c#. @ work I used to code in vb.net, now i just prefer c#.

If performance is a concern C++ is much faster than .net anything. Not to mention I don't think the .Net framework runs on Macs.

[johnnybourbon]

well just throw me out of the car and run me over

[Markus Heinsohn]

Originally Posted by Le Grande Orange

Well, I was crazy enough to write a long and detailed proposal for customizable playoffs for OOTP, so it's possible someone might be crazy enough to learn your code.

That one is a thing of beauty...

[jarmenia]

Originally Posted by johnnybourbon

well just throw me out of the car and run me over

Nah, if I wanted to run you over I would have made some comment about being a MS fanboy

[jarmenia]

Originally Posted by Markus Heinsohn

That one is a thing of beauty...

Which means it will be in OOTP 9??????

[Matches]

Originally Posted by RonCo View Post
This is fun to watch.

BTW .. using stats to trigger talent changes has a certain sense of logic, but is, in the end, backwards and a flawed approach.

Carry on ...

This confused me as I read on an earlier page Markus said

Check his stats... that's what influences development.

And I figured this was just a mistyped sentence. A player's performance might have a moderate effect on development (confidence, reputation, etc) but RonCo is right on in saying it is backwards. Talent, ability, whatever you call it, is what drives performance. Unless we are talking about the cosmetic "reporting" of development, which I'm fine with and in fact I think should be even more prominent. It bugs me to see a young player performing successfully and take sudden major hits in his reported ratings - both current and potential.

Anecotally, a historically a good prospect entered the league and had three solid years. Hit around .276 with 30 HRs in his second and third years (age 25-26). Sometime in the second half of his third year I noted he had suddenly gone from a 60-70 overall player to a 21, with 21 potential as well. The player was, statistically, on a completely acceptable career path, when all of the sudden, every scout on my team doubted his ability to play the game of baseball at the major league level, and was convinced that this ability would never return, despite entering his prime years. Now, nothing beyond a major injury would cause such a drop in esteem. Even if he had hit .100 for the months of August and September, a reasonable scout would assume this is simply a very bad slump. One might revise one's opinion down a bit, but to call him a scrub and pronounce that his potential is gone as well (at age 26-27) irreconcilable in my imagination.

Anyway, this is a fun conversation.

[jarmenia]

Originally Posted by Matches

Anecotally, a historically a good prospect entered the league and had three solid years. Hit around .276 with 30 HRs in his second and third years (age 25-26). Sometime in the second half of his third year I noted he had suddenly gone from a 60-70 overall player to a 21, with 21 potential as well. The player was, statistically, on a completely acceptable career path, when all of the sudden, every scout on my team doubted his ability to play the game of baseball at the major league level, and was convinced that this ability would never return, despite entering his prime years. Now, nothing beyond a major injury would cause such a drop in esteem. Even if he had hit .100 for the months of August and September, a reasonable scout would assume this is simply a very bad slump. One might revise one's opinion down a bit, but to call him a scrub and pronounce that his potential is gone as well (at age 26-27) irreconcilable in my imagination.

Anyway, this is a fun conversation.

Back on topic, this is exactly the kind of thing I am talking about.

[mikev]

Like Sam Rigsby

Age 22-25, All Star caliber hitter, HOF type career path
Age 26 - hits .218 - contact talent has somehow dwindled away to nothing
Age 27 - has a negative VORP and is hitting .190 through June

That's... not normal

[jarmenia]

Originally Posted by mikev

Like Sam Rigsby

Age 22-25, All Star caliber hitter, HOF type career path
Age 26 - hits .218 - contact talent has somehow dwindled away to nothing
Age 27 - has a negative VORP and is hitting .190 through June

That's... not normal

But if its very rare it would be acceptable. Unfortunately in OOTP its closer to the normal development process.

[Markus Heinsohn]

Originally Posted by jarmenia

But if its very rare it would be acceptable. Unfortunately in OOTP its closer to the normal development process.

That's not true... the older a player gets, the less chance of a talent change.

[RonCo]

Originally Posted by Markus Heinsohn

I respectfully disagree

I respect your respectfully, and I agree you can always look at things from many directions. Unfortunately, some of those directions you can look at things from are just wrong. As someone else commented, (given the OOTP model):

ratings >>> performance

It makes no sense for it to go the other way. A drop in performance should not have any influence on whether ratings go up or down (which is the only purpose that OOTP Talent has ... OOTP Talent/Potential/Etc. is not a physical thing). The fact that a player with a .270 capability hits .250 does not mean he is not a .270 hitter at his core. In fact, a .270 hitter will hit .250 or less in 400 or so at bats quite often by random chance alone. Next year that same batter may well hit .280 or .290 without any change to his base ability. That's the beauty of skill assessment in baseball.

Ratings moving up and down should certainly affect performance. But the fact that a player was unlucky (or lucky) should not have anything to do with whether his skills change. The model is, respectfully, flawed.

[mikev]

Harry Revet

Best leadoff hitter in the GUBA, all of a sudden he's completely horrible. His ratings have dropped signifigantly (SISA hasn't updated) for no apparent reason.

[Markus Heinsohn]

Originally Posted by mikev

Harry Revet

Best leadoff hitter in the GUBA, all of a sudden he's completely horrible. His ratings have dropped signifigantly (SISA hasn't updated) for no apparent reason.

Some players just start aging very early... this guy is 31, so that's probably the case here.

[Markus Heinsohn]

Originally Posted by RonCo

I respect your respectfully, and I agree you can always look at things from many directions. Unfortunately, some of those directions you can look at things from are just wrong. As someone else commented, (given the OOTP model):

ratings >>> performance

It makes no sense for it to go the other way. A drop in performance should not have any influence on whether ratings go up or down (which is the only purpose that OOTP Talent has ... OOTP Talent/Potential/Etc. is not a physical thing). The fact that a player with a .270 capability hits .250 does not mean he is not a .270 hitter at his core. In fact, a .270 hitter will hit .250 or less in 400 or so at bats quite often by random chance alone. Next year that same batter may well hit .280 or .290 without any change to his base ability. That's the beauty of skill assessment in baseball.

Ratings moving up and down should certainly affect performance. But the fact that a player was unlucky (or lucky) should not have anything to do with whether his skills change. The model is, respectfully, flawed.

Well, but something has to influence the chance of a bump/increase of talent. If stats are not used, then people would complain that a guy hitting .220 suddenly gets a talent boost. Or a guy hitting .350 in 400 AB gets his talent lowered.

There needs to be change of talent, otherwise you'd never see a 1st round pick busting, or a Mike Piazza.

I know, you will say that Piazza always had the talent for a HoF Career, and that scouts simply missed big-time on him. Well, I think if players would have a fixed talent in OOTP, and the only question is if they reach the potential in the long run or not is not much fun. I prefer the OOTP way, and the results are basically the same. I like it when I see the talents of my players increase, and I hate it when they go down. But that's the fun part IMO.

[injury log]

Originally Posted by jarmenia

Sorry IL, but this statement looses all credibility with me. Find me one statistician that will say building a model on "imagination" is better than basing a model on real world data, even if its a small sample size, and I'll buy you a case of premium beer and pay to have it shipped to your house.

That's not quite what I said:

Originally Posted by injury log

Well, we're talking real world data about a very small subset of players, the absolute cream of the talent pool. If you're suggesting we extrapolate that down the talent spectrum, to the minor leaguers, no statistician would ever think it reasonable to do that. If you collect data about the top 5% of the population, the data only tells you about that top 5%, absent information about the distribution under study.

I didn't compare building a model on 'imagination' with anything; I didn't even mention 'imagination'. My only point was that no statistician would find it legitimate to extrapolate Tango data outside of the population Tango studied. The issue isn't sample size; Tango's samples are huge. The issue is sample bias, and in the case of Tango's studies, the bias is extreme. If I take a completely different example, say you look at income versus age, for people aged 25 to 45. If you look at the top 1%, most will probably start with good salaries, but at some point most will spike upwards massively; otherwise they'd never be in the top 1%. Averaging this group, you'll get a steeply increasing curve, probably concave up. That tells you nothing about the income versus age curve for the average person, which will, on average, presumably slope very gradually upwards. And the bottom 1%- well then you're probably looking at people who have been largely unemployed, often those with personal issues who lost jobs when young- very possibly a downwards sloping curve. Well, who knows, but my point is that you can't predict from that top 1% what the rest of the demographic should look like; it's a biased sample. Tango looks at that top 1%, the guys who established themselves in the bigs. Tango's studies say nothing about minor leaguers, and I see little reason to expect it to give good results when applied to minor league development.

Now, one wouldn't, in the absence of data proving otherwise, expect building a model on 'imagination' to produce good results either; I haven't said anything about that. We do have data about OOTP's results for Major Leaguers, though, and the results are reasonably good. For minor leaguers, well, I don't think so.

[Neags23]

Originally Posted by johnnybourbon

how about c# instead?

I'll second that. I didn't have the patience to learn c++ when I was younger and then was introduced to Java which was much easier and then c# which was much better.

Don't think I want to get into a coding contest however. That would be laughable...

[RonCo]

Originally Posted by Markus Heinsohn

Well, but something has to influence the chance of a bump/increase of talent. If stats are not used, then people would complain that a guy hitting .220 suddenly gets a talent boost. Or a guy hitting .350 in 400 AB gets his talent lowered.

There needs to be change of talent, otherwise you'd never see a 1st round pick busting, or a Mike Piazza.

I know, you will say that Piazza always had the talent for a HoF Career, and that scouts simply missed big-time on him. Well, I think if players would have a fixed talent in OOTP, and the only question is if they reach the potential in the long run or not is not much fun. I prefer the OOTP way, and the results are basically the same. I like it when I see the talents of my players increase, and I hate it when they go down. But that's the fun part IMO.

Given OOTP's ratings-follow-talent approach, talent changes are required. Tying them to injuries is probably a good thing. Providing a little spice by having random changes at a lowish-level makes for a good game, and is defensible with regard to real life so long as they aren't done with hog-wild frequency.

Tying them to stats is a problem and is flat-out wrong.

[Markus Heinsohn]

Originally Posted by RonCo

Tying them to stats is a problem and is flat-out wrong.

Not, it's not in my opinion. Look at it this way: A player changes his approach, has success with it (better stats), he thinks "cool, that works for me!", so his talent increases. That's what scouting woud do too, and I see the real talent ratings as 'gods' view what the player could become in the future.

[firstbigweekend]

Originally Posted by Markus Heinsohn

Well, but something has to influence the chance of a bump/increase of talent. If stats are not used, then people would complain that a guy hitting .220 suddenly gets a talent boost. Or a guy hitting .350 in 400 AB gets his talent lowered.

Shouldn't this be where minor league managers and coaches come in? Where a good manager and hitting coach can get a guy hitting .220 to change his stance or hold his hands higher or something and "make" him able to hit .280 instead of .220? A bad coach wouldn't have to make him worse, necessarily, but could keep him from doing the things and making the changes that help him reach his full potential.

I don't know how you'd show all that in the game (it might not be possible at all), but I think the coaching/managing staffs should be what influence the chance of a bump/increase of talent, not the stats.

Also, why should/would a guy hitting .350 in 400 AB have his talent lowered?!

(And yes, I realize that not everyone plays with managers/coaches on. I guess in those cases it should just be "regular" development for players, with some developing and some not.)