Please take a good hard look at POWER vs CONTACT balance

[chazzycat]

Title pretty much says it all.

I love this game, but it's just a sad fact that the hitting ratings are not well balanced. Contact reigns supreme over all other ratings. If you want to win, basically just go for contact over everything else. And defensive range, since that is the flip-side counterpart skill to contact.

I'd very much like to see some thought put into improving this situation prior to next year's game. How precisely, I have no idea. But I am CERTAIN that something in the league normalization process is causing power hitters to lose their mojo.

At the highest levels no one even plays cards like Bonds & Ruth because they simply can't produce any WAR. Lest I remind you, those are the #1 and #2 best players in baseball history by career WAR. Having those cards be unplayably bad is REALLY not a good look for this game IMO.

I get that it's a difficult balance. But the good contact hitters through history still seem to put up strong batting averages at the high levels. Surely, there is some way to let the best home run hitters in history actually hit a homer once in a while.

[OMGPuppies]

Originally Posted by chazzycat

Title pretty much says it all.

I love this game, but it's just a sad fact that the hitting ratings are not well balanced. Contact reigns supreme over all other ratings. If you want to win, basically just go for contact over everything else. And defensive range, since that is the flip-side counterpart skill to contact.

I'd very much like to see some thought put into improving this situation prior to next year's game. How precisely, I have no idea. But I am CERTAIN that something in the league normalization process is causing power hitters to lose their mojo.

At the highest levels no one even plays cards like Bonds & Ruth because they simply can't produce any WAR. Lest I remind you, those are the #1 and #2 best players in baseball history by career WAR. Having those cards be unplayably bad is REALLY not a good look for this game IMO.

I get that it's a difficult balance. But the good contact hitters through history still seem to put up strong batting averages at the high levels. Surely, there is some way to let the best home run hitters in history actually hit a homer once in a while.

I totally agree. I also don't like how avoid k makes many players unusable.

[One Great Matrix]

Originally Posted by chazzycat

Title pretty much says it all.

I love this game, but it's just a sad fact that the hitting ratings are not well balanced. Contact reigns supreme over all other ratings. If you want to win, basically just go for contact over everything else. And defensive range, since that is the flip-side counterpart skill to contact.

I'd very much like to see some thought put into improving this situation prior to next year's game. How precisely, I have no idea. But I am CERTAIN that something in the league normalization process is causing power hitters to lose their mojo.

At the highest levels no one even plays cards like Bonds & Ruth because they simply can't produce any WAR. Lest I remind you, those are the #1 and #2 best players in baseball history by career WAR. Having those cards be unplayably bad is REALLY not a good look for this game IMO.

I get that it's a difficult balance. But the good contact hitters through history still seem to put up strong batting averages at the high levels. Surely, there is some way to let the best home run hitters in history actually hit a homer once in a while.

I hear ya...but it might honestly be a perfect Perfect Team problem. How well do sluggers really hit the best of pitching? Thought-provoking, actually... some better than others. But how many home runs do the highest level / best cards even give up, Tony Gwynn went & hit something like .300+ against anybody... I don't know of the examples of that with sluggers...

[dkgo]

Its not the lack of homers since every league will have the same number hit in a season and Ruth will always get his share, but the way the ratings work when two players have similar contact then one with very high power will hit in the toilet for average

[chazzycat]

Originally Posted by One Great Matrix

I hear ya...but it might honestly be a perfect Perfect Team problem. How well do sluggers really hit the best of pitching? Thought-provoking, actually... some better than others. But how many home runs do the highest level / best cards even give up, Tony Gwynn went & hit something like .300+ against anybody... I don't know of the examples of that with sluggers...

I'm not trying to wade into a philosophical debate about the relative merits of contact vs. power in real life baseball. Certainly, players of both varieties have left their mark on the game throughout history. So I strongly believe that both types of players should be viable options in PT.

It's just a matter of balancing the game properly. If one side is too obviously strong there's no tradeoff to consider, no interesting decision to make. Just take the contact & range every time. It's boring.

[OMGPuppies]

Yes. There has to be more than one way to win. Balanced games have trade offs. This one doesn’t.

[mlbrandomstats]

Agreed. There's no reason a guy with 90 contact and 50 power can contend for MVP in like bronze or silver while a player with 50 contact and 90 power hits .150 with 15 homers. Guys like LS Joey Gallo and Yasmani Grandal are consistently unplayable even at low levels

[chazzycat]

Originally Posted by dkgo

Its not the lack of homers since every league will have the same number hit in a season and Ruth will always get his share, but the way the ratings work when two players have similar contact then one with very high power will hit in the toilet for average

Well, I disagree that the lack of homers is not a problem. I understand how the league normalization works to ensure roughly the same number of HR per season, and why that is necessary in a game that spans historical eras. But that doesn't entirely justify the results. Maybe some further fine-tuning around the edges could produce better results. Maybe the randomness is too high so collectively the low power guys are stealing Babe's homers, or something like that. I don't know. I'm just asking to look at it.

I absolutely agree there is a second issue with respect to high power hitters producing low batting averages. That is very true. Whatever portion of the contact rating that was derived from the power rating, essentially becomes worthless at high levels. This prevents guys like Bonds & Ruth from being the OBP machines they were in real life.

But it is also the power.

[DonMattingly]

It may have something to do with the Movement rating and lots of pitchers having crazy high scores in the higher leagues.

I don't ever notice a problem when I play single player OOTP for example starting with the real MLB players as a base.

Gap power seems to work though, but home run power gets nerfed.

[chazzycat]

Originally Posted by DonMattingly

It may have something to do with the Movement rating and lots of pitchers having crazy high scores in the higher leagues.

This is a common misconception. With the way league normalization works, you should be more concerned about the other power hitters in the league, not the pitchers.

Don't get me wrong, MOV does prevent homers. So if for example you have a bunch of teams in your division with huge MOV ratings, it will hurt you.

But generally speaking, in your fight for the slice of the HR pie, it's the other power hitters in the league you're competing with. Not the pitchers.

[Orcin]

Originally Posted by chazzycat

This is a common misconception. With the way league normalization works, you should be more concerned about the other power hitters in the league, not the pitchers.

Doesn't league normalization affect contact hitters in the same way?

[DonMattingly]

Originally Posted by chazzycat

This is a common misconception. With the way league normalization works, you should be more concerned about the other power hitters in the league, not the pitchers.

Don't get me wrong, MOV does prevent homers. So if for example you have a bunch of teams in your division with huge MOV ratings, it will hurt you.

But generally speaking, in your fight for the slice of the HR pie, it's the other power hitters in the league you're competing with. Not the pitchers.

Well one of the leagues that are non-randomized (ie all the players know each other) should put that theory to the test.

Stack all the teams in one of the higher level leagues with all power hitters and crappy, low Movement pitchers and see what happens.

Make all the parks have a 1.1 modifier to home runs as well.

I think they'd fly out like crazy. Only one way to find out.

[zagtastic]

Originally Posted by Orcin

Doesn't league normalization affect contact hitters in the same way?

it does, and i think that's the problem. if i understand the basics of how this all works (and i may not), power determines what percentage of eligible in-play outcomes are homeruns. however, low contact (babip, hidden) and low avoid ks both work to reduce the number of homerun opportunities the player has, as does a high eye rating.

in other words, power has an effective maximum which is gated by a combination of in-play out rate (the inverse of babip), walk rate, and strikeout rate. of these, the contact stat on a player's card would be the strongest obvious indicator of how high that ceiling is-- even though it is indirect.

as you move through the levels, pitchers' stuff ratings and batters' contact ratings both inflate-- and squeeze out homerun opportunities from those who get left behind. the homeruns are still coming, they're just going to players like joe dimaggio... in the meantime, less well-rounded players see their babip plummet and k's soar when their skills are normalized against history's greatest hitters and they are batting against hall of famer pitchers every day... because just like the homeruns-- a full season's worth of strikeouts and lazy fly balls have to go somewhere.

[chazzycat]

Originally Posted by Orcin

Doesn't league normalization affect contact hitters in the same way?

Yes, it affects them. But not in the same way, precisely. I don't know the specifics of course, but however they are doing it seems to benefit the contact hitters and ruin the power guys.

My best guess has to do with the power rating being included in the CONTACT rating, to account for the fact that home runs are "hits" and so they must be represented in batting averages. So if the league normalization process "takes away" a homer, because the league is already at it's homer quota, it's not just turning the HR into a single. It's turning it into an out.

[chazzycat]

Originally Posted by DonMattingly

Well one of the leagues that are non-randomized (ie all the players know each other) should put that theory to the test.

Haha, funny you should mention that...I did this experiment last year in BFF. All the other teams went heavy on contact, because we all knew already from PT19 that it's the best rating. Knowing this, and attempting to use the league normalization to my benefit, I went the other way and focused on power/eye rating from the get-go. Thinking I could mop up that whole bucket of normalized HRs, since no one else was really going for it.

It did work, in terms of hitting a lot of homers. I'll grant you that. But my team was nowhere near competitive. I was losing all my singles to the better contact hitters on all the other teams who prioritized CONTACT, leaving my power hitters with god-awful OBPs, even though I did prioritize EYE very highly. There were just never enough runners on base to make the HR strategy work at all.

So that was basically the best possible situation to make power work, and I still could not pull it off.

[DonMattingly]

Originally Posted by chazzycat

Haha, funny you should mention that...I did this experiment last year in BFF. All the other teams went heavy on contact, because we all knew already from PT19 that it's the best rating. Knowing this, and attempting to use the league normalization to my benefit, I went the other way and focused on power/eye rating from the get-go. Thinking I could mop up that whole bucket of normalized HRs, since no one else was really going for it.

It did work, in terms of hitting a lot of homers. I'll grant you that. But my team was nowhere near competitive. I was losing all my singles to the better contact hitters on all the other teams who prioritized CONTACT, leaving my power hitters with god-awful OBPs, even though I did prioritize EYE very highly. There were just never enough runners on base to make the HR strategy work at all.

So that was basically the best possible situation to make power work, and I still could not pull it off.

Yeah but I think there would be a ton of home runs league wide if every team were stacked with beefy power hitters and also with crappy, low movement pitchers. Add in band box parks and you have a great test to see if the game limits home runs per league. That is the best possible situation in which to test whether or not normalization is a thing.

[chazzycat]

oh. We already know league normalization is real. That is not a theory except in the sense that gravity is a theory. What is unknown is the precise mechanism of how it happens or why it seems to hurt power hitters so much.

[dkgo]

Originally Posted by DonMattingly

Yeah but I think there would be a ton of home runs league wide if every team were stacked with beefy power hitters and also with crappy, low movement pitchers. Add in band box parks and you have a great test to see if the game limits home runs per league. That is the best possible situation in which to test whether or not normalization is a thing.

Everyone knows the league totals are pegged. It is not even up for debate, the developers have told us thats how it works and we have all seen it.

But by trying to counter the high contact low power meta you will end up with lots of empty homers and low obps

[eldur00]

Originally Posted by DonMattingly

Yeah but I think there would be a ton of home runs league wide if every team were stacked with beefy power hitters and also with crappy, low movement pitchers. Add in band box parks and you have a great test to see if the game limits home runs per league. That is the best possible situation in which to test whether or not normalization is a thing.

Yes, there is normalization of stats, it's as known as water is wet. If a full league could field only Otis Nixon at every single position, some of them would hit 20+ HRs just to fit a hard number coded in the backend of the game.
Thankfully that's not possible and that would make a mockery of the game. But there is a few select individuals (of which group I belong) that would just love to have the players "play" without getting limits.


Sadly it's impossible as the whole game is built around League Totals.

[2tango2]

Informative post guys....very interesting and I learned a thing or 2