Historical positions

[Dyzalot]

Where does OOTP get the data for what positions players were skilled at for historical replays?

[David Watts]

Are you using historical minors? Is your fielding based on entire career? Trillo was signed as a catcher and converted to 3B by his first minor league manager.

[Dyzalot]

Originally Posted by David Watts

Are you using historical minors? Is your fielding based on entire career? Trillo was signed as a catcher and converted to 3B by his first minor league manager.

Fielding is based on entire career. I have "import & maintain real minor leagues" checked and I am having OOTP automatically import historical rookies. I could see Trillo having some minor ratings at catcher if he played a few games at the position in the minors in real life but it seems strange to see it as his best position.

[Orcin]

Manny Trillo played 29 games at catcher during his first two minor league seasons. It was not his primary position in either season, and he played more games at other positions in each of those two seasons. It is not unreasonable that he has some rating at catcher, but this dominant rating at catcher clearly seems wrong given the rest of his career.

[Syd Thrift]

I was going to come in all "what if", getting the Phillies and the Cardinals mixed up and thinking that the Phightins had a great catcher already on their roster when they snapped up Trillo in 1968. They didn't; they had a guy named Mike Ryan who hit .193 for his career and .179 the year they signed Manny (which, TBF, was the Year of the Pitcher). I took a look at their minor league affiliates and I don't really see any huge catching prospect down there at the time either, although they did have a couple of future major league managers in there (Stump Merrill was their backup in AA and Doc Edwards, who would go on to be one of the many crappy managers for the Indians in the 80s and early 90s, split catching duties at AAA). They did have Buck Martinez down in A ball but if he was a Phillies prospect he was a low-level enough one that they allowed him to get picked by the Royals the next year in the expansion draft.

It really does look like the story given in the BBRef Oracle, which says that scouts were impressed by his fielding ability (he'd played shortstop as a teenager) and shifted him to the infield is true and not some after-the-fact thing.

[Spritze]

This catcher rating is due mainly to the way BBREF stores its minor league data when a player is on multiple teams and in multiple leagues in the same season. There are thousands of these occurrences in the database.

Batting and pitching will have this same challenge as well.

[Dyzalot]

Originally Posted by Spritze

This catcher rating is due mainly to the way BBREF stores its minor league data when a player is on multiple teams and in multiple leagues in the same season. There are thousands of these occurrences in the database.

Batting and pitching will have this same challenge as well.

Manny Trillo wasn't playing in multiple leagues or multiple teams when he caught his few minor league games. The only time he ever played in multiple leagues in the same season was when he was bouncing between AAA and MLB.

[Orcin]

So, in other words, it is not working as intended because the data is not available to do it correctly?

[Spritze]

Fixed. The data in the BBref database as OOTP downloaded in 2014 has been updated to match what is out there now.

The BBref/OOTP issue with multiple teams and leagues still applies though.

[Spritze]

Originally Posted by Orcin

So, in other words, it is not working as intended because the data is not available to do it correctly?

The data is not formatted by BBref in a way that works in OOTP. It works for them but then they just display it, they don't try to use it in a game. We try to do our best with what we can get. Later years do not have this same challenge. As I disremember after 2008 or so the BBref data is compatible with OOTP.