Outliers and fictional leagues

[ConJarlo]

Hey everyone, how are yall doing? I have been trying to play a fictional league but I never stay interested because it seems like all the players hit the same or near the same amount of home runs. I have simulated the game from 1930 to 2010 and only two players have hit 62 and 63. I know hitting 60 is a marvelous feat but I feel like there should be a few more hitting 60 in that time frame and maybe a 70+ home run hitter. Well my question is, is there anyway to create more outliers? I would like to imagine more super stars in the league.

[bailey]

Yes. After your league is created, edit the ball park of one team for maximum home runs. The drawback of doing this is that the home run leader will always be from that team, so maybe rotate the home run friendly ball park throughout the league. You can do the same thing with contact, and create .400 hitters.

[Hrycaj]

Originally Posted by ConJarlo

Hey everyone, how are yall doing? I have been trying to play a fictional league but I never stay interested because it seems like all the players hit the same or near the same amount of home runs. I have simulated the game from 1930 to 2010 and only two players have hit 62 and 63. I know hitting 60 is a marvelous feat but I feel like there should be a few more hitting 60 in that time frame and maybe a 70+ home run hitter. Well my question is, is there anyway to create more outliers? I would like to imagine more super stars in the league.

Well in reality Maris was the only guy to eclipse 60 from 1930 forward until the juicers fully established themselves. So I feel like your league settings are working as designed. Even still, it only happened 6 more times after that. However, that is not what you asked so here are a few ways you could alter things.

You could always edit certain players in the power department to create some super sluggers. However, that may break immersion as you will know who these sluggers are. With that in mind under game settings you can visit the players tab and alter the batting power (or anything else) of newly created players that enter your world. You could also go to the stats & AI tab and alter the modifier for home runs. This would effect the entire universe in general.

In closing I should note that messing with either of the modifiers mentioned may cause an unbalance that you do not like in other areas of your game world. I would run a seperate test league experimenting with different modifiers until you find your sweet spot and importing them to your main game. Tread with caution and good luck!

[spleen1015]

How many teams does your fictional league have?

More teams = more players = more chances at outlier type players.

[oldfatbaldguy]

I've got a current-day 24-team fictional league and let the game generate it with no interference. Apparently at random, it made most of the parks small. We're 49 games into the first season and there are seven guys with either 19 or 20 home runs. My last-place team (21-28) has hit 102. It ain't outliers, it's the whole dang league.

So yes, it can be arranged.

[RchW]

Originally Posted by ConJarlo

Hey everyone, how are yall doing? I have been trying to play a fictional league but I never stay interested because it seems like all the players hit the same or near the same amount of home runs. I have simulated the game from 1930 to 2010 and only two players have hit 62 and 63. I know hitting 60 is a marvelous feat but I feel like there should be a few more hitting 60 in that time frame and maybe a 70+ home run hitter. Well my question is, is there anyway to create more outliers? I would like to imagine more super stars in the league.

If you want more outliers enhance individual players based on some formula at player creation and/or in early development. This is often done in online leagues so perhaps a commish can comment on a formula of rating boosts

FWIW I'm glad fictional leagues do not have more outliers. I want them to mimic the era I choose.

By definition outliers should be rare ie 1-2 in 50-100 seasons. Too many just means they are not outliers any more.

See the screenshot. This guy was a knuckleballer. I wouldn't want to see two more of them. Note he was game produced, no enhancements at all.

Having said all that it would be cool if the devs could have an optional "outlier module" for just what you want.

[joefromchicago]

Originally Posted by RchW

FWIW I'm glad fictional leagues do not have more outliers. I want them to mimic the era I choose.

Well, outliers are realistic. Every era has a few. Great players are great precisely because they're outliers.

My limited experience with fictional leagues is consistent with the OP's: lots of players hitting 20-30 HRs, nobody hitting 50-60. OOTP does a good job of creating players who are above average, but it's not as good at creating truly exceptional players.

Originally Posted by RchW

Having said all that it would be cool if the devs could have an optional "outlier module" for just what you want.

I agree.

[Bluenoser]

This is from a fictional league with 100 years of history. I use 1985 for stats settings all years.

A few outliers, but not overwhelming.

_

[oldfatbaldguy]

Elias Castro must have been corking his bat in 2029. He's nowhere near the consistency of Fowler or Bell. Norm Cash, 1961.

[Cobby]

What I always like to do is to create an alternate fictional universe that follows along with the RL baseball history.

My experience is that the game does just fine from about 1945 on and I get just about the right amount of exceptional players. But prior to that everything is a little flat. Using the standard player creation file (era_modifers.txt), I never seem to get anywhere close to the equivalent of a Ty Cobb or Babe Ruth.

I think the player creation part of the game is calibrated to work best in the modern era. It's a tricky thing to manage the change in eras, especially that transition between the dead ball and live ball era.. To get someone like Ty Cobb hitting close to .400 in the deadball era when the league average was around .240 or so, then you need someone with a contact rating way higher than the average for the league. But, the danger is: if you don't ramp up the league average contact rating fast when the liveball era, hits your ersatz Cobb could end up hitting over .500 when the league average rises to near .300.

So what I've been doing lately is: First, I use a custom era_modifiers.txt file. The custom file keeps contact and power rating very low during the deadball era, then ramps up contact very quickly going into the live ball era. Power ramps up also but a little bit later so there can be a possibility of a Ruthian figure in the early live ball era.

Then I sprinkle in a few exceptional players periodically. I don't like to do this directly since I don't want to know who they are. What I do is to use Scouting Discoveries. Since it's the early days of baseball, I set scouting discoveries to not be international necessarily, but to match the rest of the league. Then I find a period when these are the only players being created (after the draft pool has been announced and before any year-end free agents are created). Then for that period of time (usually May - July in my league) I temporarily increase the player creation modifiers. During this period, there is much higher than normally chance of an exceptional player being created as a scouting discovery. The good thing is that I have no idea who they are or what teams they go to. I do this roughly once every 10 game years (definitely don't want to do much more often than that or your exceptional players will not be so exceptional any more)

It's worked quite well so far in my league (currently in 1936). I like the uncertainty of it - all I ask is a chance of getting these exceptional players.

So far my league is comparing pretty well with real life history. I didn't get a Babe Ruth-like player at first, but I did get a guy that's looks like he might challenge the Babe, but he started a little bit later. I had one guy that was giving Ty Cobb a run for his money for awhile, but then he had injury trouble and ended up with a short but memorable career.

You just have to experiment with it. There's always a chance that you'll get someone so super-duper that it messes up the believability . I tend to err on the conservative side.

[ConJarlo]

Woah! Thanks everyone for the responses. I love to see the discussion, insight and help. It is greatly appreciated.

Originally Posted by RchW

Having said all that it would be cool if the devs could have an optional "outlier module" for just what you want.

I third this.

Originally Posted by Cobby

So what I've been doing lately is: First, I use a custom era_modifiers.txt file. The custom file keeps contact and power rating very low during the deadball era, then ramps up contact very quickly going into the live ball era. Power ramps up also but a little bit later so there can be a possibility of a Ruthian figure in the early live ball era.

Then I sprinkle in a few exceptional players periodically. I don't like to do this directly since I don't want to know who they are. What I do is to use Scouting Discoveries. Since it's the early days of baseball, I set scouting discoveries to not be international necessarily, but to match the rest of the league. Then I find a period when these are the only players being created (after the draft pool has been announced and before any year-end free agents are created). Then for that period of time (usually May - July in my league) I temporarily increase the player creation modifiers. During this period, there is much higher than normally chance of an exceptional player being created as a scouting discovery. The good thing is that I have no idea who they are or what teams they go to. I do this roughly once every 10 game years (definitely don't want to do much more often than that or your exceptional players will not be so exceptional any more)

Oh wow! This sounds interesting. Is there anyway you can share your era_modifiers.txt file? I would like to take a look at it. I love the idea of increasing the player creation modifiers every ten years, what do you set the modifiers to?


Also I was wondering if any of yall mess around with the Talent Change Randomness and what effect that has had in your worlds.
Thanks again for the help!

[mytreds]

Length of season also affects this.

[Eugene Church]

This is a fictional league using 1955 as base season... 154-game schedule... 64-team league... 8 teams each in 8 subleagues.

Have played 67 seasons.

I have occasionally adjusted the league modifiers to adjust league batting average...over a decade it would get off of the .260 BA I wanted... adjust strikeout-walks ratio... I think this affected the home-run output to some degree, but never drastically up or down.

I only created one player in this list... Jack Elliott... from the movie "Mr. Baseball"... OOTP created all the rest... Roy Hobbs from the movie "The Natural" was also created by me... he was a Hall-of-Famer, but did not make this list... he was good for 35-45 homers each year... hit 587 homers in 19 seasons... Jack Elliott hit 848 in 19 years.

OOTP does a remarkable job of recreating the stats for whatever season you want your results to be.

[Tiger Fan]

Originally Posted by Eugene Church

This is a fictional league using 1955 as base season... 154-game schedule... 64-team league... 8 teams each in 8 subleagues.

Have played 67 seasons.

I have occasionally adjusted the league modifiers to adjust league batting average...over a decade it would get off of the .260 BA I wanted... adjust strikeout-walks ratio... I think this affected the home-run output to some degree, but never drastically up or down.

OOTP does a remarkable job of recreating the stats for whatever season you want your results to be.

Culpepper must have been quite the player. How many career homers did he have?

[Eugene Church]

Originally Posted by Tiger Fan

Culpepper must have been quite the player. How many career homers did he have?

Culpepper is the all-time Islandian Pro Alliance home-run leader with 878 homers in 19 seasons... Elliott was #2.

Sadly and ironically, neither slugger ever made the playoffs as a player.

[jpeters1734]

Originally Posted by Eugene Church

This is a fictional league using 1955 as base season... 154-game schedule... 64-team league... 8 teams each in 8 subleagues.

Have played 67 seasons.

I have occasionally adjusted the league modifiers to adjust league batting average...over a decade it would get off of the .260 BA I wanted... adjust strikeout-walks ratio... I think this affected the home-run output to some degree, but never drastically up or down.

I only created one player in this list... Jack Elliott... from the movie "Mr. Baseball"... OOTP created all the rest... Roy Hobbs from the movie "The Natural" was also created by me... he was a Hall-of-Famer, but did not make this list... he was good for 35-45 homers each year... hit 587 homers in 19 seasons... Jack Elliott hit 848 in 19 years.

OOTP does a remarkable job of recreating the stats for whatever season you want your results to be.

Just curious, why 1955? Do you also auto-calc?

[Cobby]

Originally Posted by ConJarlo

Oh wow! This sounds interesting. Is there anyway you can share your era_modifiers.txt file? I would like to take a look at it. I love the idea of increasing the player creation modifiers every ten years, what do you set the modifiers to?

OK, I hope this works. Here's my modified file:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/n1k9bsd6lg...fiers.txt?dl=0

It's a work in progress. If you look closely you'll see that I occasionally bump up the pitching modifiers. I haven't focused much on pitchers yet. Eventually I'll probably do the same thing for them as I do for hitters. For now, this seems to work OK since in the early days of baseball not there weren't that many pitchers needed or created. I tried this for hitters and got too many good ones.

So. I have Scouting Discoveries set for default (3 per team per year). I usually have my enhanced modifiers in effect for 3 or 4 months so that should result in about 12-16 players. Out of those I seem to get 3 or 4 good ones (HOFers) each time. Here's what I used:

1896 for 4 months (Nap Lajoie? Honus Wagner?)
Contact: .920
Gap: .920
Power .120
Eye .978
Avoid K's 2.800
Speed: 5.800
Fielding: 1.41

I got 3 HOFers out of this batch, but no one as good as Lajoie or Wagner

1904 for 4 months (Ty Cobb? Eddie Collins? Tris Speaker?)

Contact: 1.050
Gap: .973
Power .131
Eye 1.120
Avoid K's 2.800
Speed 5.700
Fielding 1.330

I got two HOFers out of this batch. I had one intriguing player (Boileryard Cryer) who had a blazingly good seven-year peak, but fell off dramatically and ended up well short of Cobb in career statistics. But that peak was exciting.

1915 for 3 months (Babe Ruth? Rogers Hornsby?)

Contact: .950
Gap: 1.120
Power .570
Eye 1.780
Avoid K's 2.400
Speed 2.800
Fielding 1.140

The players for this batch are just finishing their careers. I'll likely have 3 HOFers but no one even close to Ruth. The two best of them will end up somewhere in the 300s for total HRs.

1922 for 4 months (Lou Gehrig? Jimmie Foxx?)

Contact: 1.050
Gap: 1.300
Power .700
Eye: 1.360
Avoid K's 2.400
Speed 2.2700
Fieldng 1.120

These players are now in mid-career and it looks like I'll get 3 or 4 HOFers out of this group. But there is one player, Gene Newhart, who might exceed Babe Ruth. He's only 30 and has had a spectacular career so far. He already has over 500 HR's, his career BA is .379 and he's got a Ruthian career 210 wRC+. His highest home run total is 56, but he's hit over 50 6 times.

1936 for 3 months (Ted Williams?)

This is my final batch, by the 1940's the game seems to do fine on it's own. These players are out there but I don't know who any of them are yet.

Contact: 1.370
Gap: 1.400
Power 1.100
Eye 1.960
Avoid K's: 2.230
Speed: 1.400
Fielding: 1.040

[Eugene Church]

Originally Posted by jpeters1734

Just curious, why 1955? Do you also auto-calc?

I grew up in the Golden Age of Baseball... the 40s and 50s.
Just 16 teams... only the league champions played in the World Series... no interleague play...no free agency.

Players stayed with their teams... it was easier to keep track of them... not like today, when it is wholesale musical chairs.

I knew the starting lineups of all 16 teams and all of the pitching rotations (4 starters, 3 relievers) for the American League and National League...also the Double A Southern Association... I lived in Mobile and New Orleans as a teenager and got to see a lot of the Bears and Pelicans games... even got to be a Mobile Bears ballboy in the right field bullpen for a couple of years in high school.

No, I don't auto-calculate... I use actionjackson's method of setting the modifiers... his system really works well... there are several great threads on this subject in the last two years or so.