**THAT'S IT! RANT!! Draft, Player Development, Minor Leagues...WHY CAN'T I CRACK THE CODE?!**

[pcarpe41]

ALRIGHT! I've had ENOUGH! For the past three years, I've bought this game...and have had it running in the background all year long. No matter what I do...I can't get a consistent result. About the only way I can secure good prospects is by getting international free agents. I've done everything. I did a specific case study with a Pirate franchise. In ten years...I've invested massive funds into scouting and player development, drafted players with HIGH leadership & HIGH work ethic...impossible and giving them massive signing bonuses. By around year five, if my team is good and picking in high twenties, starting ratings is 20 or 21, and total crap shoot. About the only people with decent rankings are the above mentioned international free agents or the very rare scouting discovery. I've got Friedman as my scouting director and Epstein as my assistant GM. In a prior Yankee franchise, I even simmed draft and international free agent signing to my assistant GM (Epstein) to see if maybe the AI would give me the same fantastic results it seems to give the other teams...no dice. I just don't get it...how the hell do you get solid or good prospects without totally sucking and picking first ten years in a row?! I'm at my wits end...only settings I've changed is expanding the amount of foreign players so more folks in the pool.

Sorry, done with rant...any suggestions welcome.

Also, for OOTP 19, can we have one button "match offer" added to the International Free Agent screen so I don't have to click four pages in to match salary?! Sorry, that's it.

[TheMaus2]

TL;DR I'm not good at player development?

If you're team is in a lose now/rebuild mindset, obviously you fire sale expiring contracts + other talent in order to stock the farm + get higher draft picks + free up space for this year's free agency.

If you're in a win now mindset, of course the deck is stacked against you in the draft.

[ThePretender]

Spending money in player dev doesn't guarantee success. Nor does getting high intelligence or work ethic guys.

You must not be targeting the right players. Maybe show us a draft of some potential players you like and we can give you feedback.

[pcarpe41]

Originally Posted by ThePretender

Spending money in player dev doesn't guarantee success. Nor does getting high intelligence or work ethic guys.

You must not be targeting the right players. Maybe show us a draft of some potential players you like and we can give you feedback.

When all I see are 20 or 21 potential rankings, I usually draft any player that is 17-19 with High work ethic & High leadership. I base this off of google searches I've done that others have had luck with. When all these guys are gone, I try to get highest work ethic. I just don't know exactly what to draft when everyone is showing 20 or 21 and not showing much difference.

[ThePretender]

Don't search by ovr/pot. Look by specific ratings like contact or power or stuff/move/control. I often have many quality starting players I have who are 20-35 ovr/pot.

[pcarpe41]

Originally Posted by ThePretender

Don't search by ovr/pot. Look by specific ratings like contact or power or stuff/move/control. I often have many quality starting players I have who are 20-35 ovr/pot.

Ahhhhh...gotcha!! OK. I've read movement in pitching is best quality to look at? What do you look for in hitters? Eye? Avoid K's?

[NoOne]

Edit: yeah, you may need to hammer out what you are looking for, first... glossing over here, so don't be too literal in application:

obp guy -- high contact, high eye(really just overall obp main concern)

slugger - high contact high power... etc etc..

eye is good, don't get me wrong. but, a .350obp made of .350average is better than one made with some walks, objectively. also, they mean less to a slguger than a leadoff batter. every walk they take is one less chance at an XBH etc. question will be is their Con high enough to warrant such an aggressive plate approach. i'd avoid the very low eye guys unless they are superior in quality in most other aspects.

contact is made up of babip(unseen outside editor), avoid K's and Power. understanding how contact is calculated helps you use it in evaluation. all sorts of ways... e.g. dafting - if oyu can deduce that the players unseen BABIP rating is below 1/2 scale, i'm a bit wary... a few more ticks down and even with a high contact rating they can't hit for nothing.

pitchers are the pain. you should not have any problem figuring out batters, but do expect a slower learning curve with pitching. i've written enough to give an idea i hope... don't focus on 1 rating with pitchers. there's no magic bullet to sorting by any 1 of them. each rating influence results of various stats, use common sense just as i did with batters above.

you don't need the league's highest movemnt to be dominant, so don't require it. you don't need the league's highest control to be dominant, so don't require it. >scale stuff is highly correlated to success, so even if you don't sort by it, it's the *Main* factor i look at (goes without saying to consider age and potential increases in velo). Stuff and Contact are the primare ratings for each, but they alone guarantee nothing. (although a super high contact batter can at least be a good leadoff batter quite often, whereas a figurative ton of pitching prospects will have ~good-to-high stuff and "1"/200 move or control, likely, and completely non-mlb viable)

-----------------

some of the thresholds i use may not be perfect. but, if you find the demarcation line i speak of, it should make sense over time. settings and various other factors will impact them. only use root logic of what i say, not the specifics. only way due to complexities of ootp options.

@ Normal scouting with max budget and legend scout -- i will say specifically you should go by ratings, first. then go by intangibles when all the players 'look' the same quality. i'd stick with this mantra until you can see with editor that it's a complete crapshoot no matter what you do (ie very low accuracy, bad scout, no budget -- at some point toward that end)

i'd sort by potential until ~30* for batters and ~50* for pitchers. after that, i'd adjust how you sort... (*these thresholds are not precise/accurate).

the players at top really are the best...we cannot see through scouting inaccuracy. if not "normal" accuracy, you may want to test what puts the most viable choices near top of any sorted list. maybe, sorting by potential for your league is terrible from the start, for example. simply sort as you want, then go into editor with comissioner mode on scroll throught the top 20-50 names and see how many are MLB vs not MLB.. also peak quality etc. i cna tell you that with low accuracy, you don't want to sort by potential after first 10-30 picks or so, depending on depth of the draft. (asuming 30team league throughout)

batters after that point i'd sort by contact, but i won't choose them by that order... i look at the various options ~near top, though.. IE i won't take the 80con pot if he is terrible otherwise. after the 'better' players are gone, i find that sorting by Gap Pot then looking for high contact pot at top of list does well too -- i only tested that sort of "sorting" with low accuracy scouting. with normal+legend+$$$, may not be the better choice.

for batters, you could use filters on the other 2 primary batter's ratings and sort by the other. use comissioner mode to see what puts highest proportion of 'better' players at top of list. don't set those filters too high. leave some wiggle room for inaccuracy.

pitchers - i'd split these up into 2 categories (for both sp and rp). use a short list to get them "together" visibly... look at above age 21 and below age 21 differently.

your scout's skew on tools/ability may make this look different to you. i use neutral. if you skew to tools, it may improve what their stuff potential looks like?? not sure. one reason never to skew what you see -- outside mechanics of scouting inaccuracy being a good thing. more difficult to translate and work with it over time to learn.

i use potential at first, but only for top-tier SP/RP. i soon switch to sorting by Movement Pot with a filter on 55ish to 60 or greater stuff and 50 or greater movement. i leave it a bit below what i "want" to not miss the slightly mis-scouted players. That's for the under 21 crowd. for the over 21 crowd i sort by Stuff pot and use a filter on move/con pot.

< 21 is likely to increase velocity and therefore can make huge increases in Stuff potential that is unseen. So, i'd sort these younger players by Movement after ~50 potential and lower are available.

Everything is relative to Round/Pick and what's available etc. IE you don't need to find 10 viable options for every single pick... a few will clearly be better than the rest.

you may want to shortlist prospects to watch that you won't draft, but outside of that, only invest time evaluating players that are "good" choices at that point in draft.

use work ethic and intelligence as a straw that offsets 2 ~similar players. but, don't let the gap between the 2 be too great.

even though i may sort by various things after the obvious 'best' players are gone, i don't select them solely by who is at top... but 99% of the time it's very near the top... 10-20 names... further out in the draft the farther down the list i expect to find ~equivalent choices for teh round/pick. also, it starts to become a splitting hairs contest... who cares when the picks get that junky.

with normal accuracy you will reach that point by the 3rd-4th rounds most years.. on low or lower accuracy, more top-tier guys *can fall in the draft. in a lucky year you can find a sure-fire HoFer in round 9-10. (no Talent Change Randomness effect required.)

[TGH-Adfabre]

Turn off scouting or set it to 100% accuracy. Once you start mauling the AI turn it back on.
Once the first round or two of the draft are over I target players with one or two high ratings in the hopes that if I have 50 players with one or two high
ratings I will have better odds of a talent bump making them useful.
At this point I don't care much about defense unless they are 1B. Mediocre to poor 1B are a dime a dozen.

Batter priorities
Contact first, Eye second, Power third

Pitchers
Stuff, Control, Movement

Turn off scouting until you are winning.

[Westheim]

I can't draft for my life so bad, it's a bit of a running gag in my dynasty thread. My way is to wait for my current bid for glory to fall apart, then trade for all the good high-minors prospects I can shake off the AI. Then rinse-repeat until I have another winning product. Takes between one and ten years. My system is not very refined...

Of the guys that got their numbers retired in my signature, I drafted three, one was a #2 pick and one a #3 pick (so they were kinda obvious), and one a #293 in a 360-strong pool, a crap shot in the penultimate round. I traded for the other four. I can't even sign free agents.

While I can't draft even first-rounders that become All Stars, I can definitely confirm that the overall numeric value or the star ratings are complete BS in this game. The game will merrily give five stars to excellent defensive leftfielders even if they can't hit a barn from the inside, while... (see below)

Two stars, really? Really??

As everything on this team falls apart, I tried to trade him, too. He has no trade value. The AI wants no piece of him and considers him a vastly overpaid veteran (that salary in this league would amount to about $15m current MLB $). Probably better this way. Maybe I can squeeze him into the Hall of Fame by keeping him away from centerfield, which used to eat him alive.

And no, I didn't draft him. He was the main reward of a late-April type-A free agent-signing gamble turned into a July this-ain't-working-gimme-prospects deal - so in a way he was the equivalent of a first round pick... but not quite.

[Curve Ball Dave]

There's no code to crack when it comes to drafting.

One thing you must have though is patience. Developing prospects is not an exercise in instant gratification. I've seen five star prospects become two star guys, then back to three, then down to two as they make their way up the chain. Finally the guy is good enough to make the MLB squad as a bench player and after a season or two of being a bench player wouldn't you know it-he reaches his full potential and becomes an All Star after being a starter for a couple of seasons.

That's how player development goes in baseball. The game models this very well. Yeah, it be frustrating at times, but if you have a bad draft one year there will be another one the next year.

To the point about producing major leaguers, if you have a good team you probably don't have many actual open roster spots to fill going into Spring Training in the first place. If you have one opening for a back up infielder and your system has three legit guys to fill that spot, your system is producing what you need. If you have a bad team with five or six roster spots and no good prospects to fill them, that happens too. You have to take your lumps for a few years like real teams do before those high draft picks start paying off.

The multi year journey from rookie ball to the All Star game is just one more great facet of the game. Be patient, accept that not every guy will pan out, don't mourn the guys that didn't, be happy for the ones that did.

[r0nster]

i always trade for good talent on other teams to help boost my farm clubs then when I have them overstocked then I have an option to either keep them on 40 roster or trade them away for whatever I desire. every other 5 years I do that to keep my minors in good order it seems to work for me although anything below AA its weak admittedly but I am still working on coaching for those levels

[Cobby]

Just out of curiosity, I figured out the WAR contribution of all the players on my team for the latest season based on how they got on the team:

via Trade: 14 players, 52.7 WAR
via Free Agency: 10 players, 20.7 WAR
via International Scouting Discoveries: 2 players, 2.4 WAR
via Amateur Draft: 3 players, 2.2 WAR
via Rule 5 Draft: 2 players, 0.6 WAR

So as you can see, the bulk of my team is built via trade. Quite a few players also are acquired via free agency - mostly though, these are cheap relief pitchers and backups (although I did sign an ace starting pitcher last year accounting for 9.8 of that 20.7 WAR).

I have only 5 home-grown players on the team - three via the draft and 2 via international scouting discoveries.

Basically, if your team does consistently well you can't really hope to replenish your talent via the draft. One or two players might make it into the starting lineup eventually if you're lucky. I do still try to draft as well as possible, following some of the strategies mentioned in this thread. You can sometimes get lucky, more often I'll pick up players that aren't going to make the team but are good enough to add value as throw-ins to a trade. Most though are just going to be low minor-league fodder.

[r0nster]

I will NEVER base a trade off WAR.... to me that's the worst thing one can do as I am too old school for that non sense ... if it happens to be high so be it.

[Cobby]

Originally Posted by r0nster

I will NEVER base a trade off WAR.... to me that's the worst thing one can do as I am too old school for that non sense ... if it happens to be high so be it.

I was just using WAR here as a rough way to assess the contribution to the team of the players in the different categories.

As for trading, yep - there's a lot more to consider.

[r0nster]

Ok 10-4

[ThePretender]

Originally Posted by r0nster

I will NEVER base a trade off WAR.... to me that's the worst thing one can do as I am too old school for that non sense ... if it happens to be high so be it.

It's amusing to read posts like this. When you're making a trade, why would you ever turn down more information? I wouldn't want to just know a player's WAR, but I wouldn't, you know, ignore it either.

It's like going to buy a car and saying "I'm way too old school to care about gas mileage, if it's low, so be it! I just want 4 wheels!".

I dunno, it's just, not something to be proud of to say something like that.

[Rosco Peabody]

Originally Posted by ThePretender

It's like going to buy a car and saying "I'm way too old school to care about gas mileage, if it's low, so be it! I just want 4 wheels!".

[NoOne]

i definiteyl trade for more high end prospects, especially while drafting "30th".

i'd still prefer to draft them, if available. the less they spend in teh AI's hands the better. i spend more and have better coaches. every day not in my system is potential loss for the player.

i guarantee there is a 'best' way to sort/filter a draft for best results. it may be different at differnet times... but if it consistently provides are greater proporiton of good prospects, it is a better. this can be quantified and explored for those that really want to learna "best way" to draft.

i'm confidnet in this one: once all decent (where to draw the line can be learned) prospects are gone, you will find more SP in later rounds sorting by movement. click through till you see 3+ viable pitches.. find a few and go with best overall combo of ratings (not necesarily the top one of sorted list).

compared to sorting by potential or anything else, i promise there will be a higher proportion of decent choices vs bad ones... unfortunately this is later in the draft and really only impacts the quality of your MiL teams. my AAA managers have best reg season record 1/2 the time. my rookie league is .800-.900 each year. you will have more solid players from 5-10-15th round almost assuredly.

at top of draft... not much you can do differently... the obvious choices are easy to see. you can really increase # of ~okay mil prospects later in teh draft and therefore have greater TCR luck too. plus perrenial winning mil teams. that helps with development... quite a few small benefits to ancillary things do result.

Also, when looking at sub-21 year old pitching draftees at anytime. their stuff can explode with upticks in velocity. sorting by velo or potential doesn't do them justice. sort these SP by movement at all times when looking for a suitable choice for a round/pick.

[andyhdz]

another thing iv'e noticed is that even when good players develop into good or very solid players they can always regress and not just with age. I've seen my star players as 24 and 25 year olds become average to mediocre by 28 or 29 before even they are supposed to decline. It really makes me gun shy about locking them up for long term contracts unless they are really off the charts which i guess is exactly how real life works.

[Rosco Peabody]

Originally Posted by andyhdz

another thing iv'e noticed is that even when good players develop into good or very solid players they can always regress and not just with age. I've seen my star players as 24 and 25 year olds become average to mediocre by 28 or 29 before even they are supposed to decline. It really makes me gun shy about locking them up for long term contracts unless they are really off the charts which i guess is exactly how real life works.

Which is why this is such a good game