Takes you out of the moment

[dcordash]

Originally Posted by BIG17EASY

If you want a game that mimics real life, play Strat-O-Matic. If you want a game that uses real players but creates fictional results, play OOTP. It's really as simple as that. Expecting OOTP to happen exactly as real life does (or as we think real life should) is going to lead to a lot of frustration.

For clarification, I'm not expecting OOTP to 100% mimic a typical MLB season.

I played Strat-o-Matic for years when it was a board game (software sports sims weren't even a concept yet). Both football and baseball. It never 100% matched actual stats. It would, for sure, be significantly closer to how a real-life season played out than OOTP. Every batter/pitcher was much more likely to replicate what they did that particular year within a differential of 5-10%. There were very rare outliers. Standings typically were within a couple placements of how the season actually ended.

But, there were injuries that occurred in the board game that didn't actually happen in the season. As mentioned, sometimes a player would tank or take off on that career year they never matched before or after. A lot of very plausible variances.

But Strat-o-Matic didn't get into the minutia details as I recall. Those items that, I suspect, are just so convoluted and arbitrary they kept them out of the mix.

What I would hope for with OOTP is the developers would only implement tools, stats, options, etc. that have been tested to death and actually offer the gist of what you see in real life. Either that or don't implement such options until they work. Fake it until you make it really can be disappointing to a customer.

I've had a lot of fun with the game over the years. But, I also get hung up on a lot of the "little things".

[andyhdz]

and that's why fictional is always much more fun because when the Elmira Twains trade Bobby Pitcher for Joey Batter no consternation is had.

[tcblcommish]

I dont get what the issue is about moving will smith to 3b and using a different catcher. Was their 3b not very good? Did their team get better overall making that deal and moving smith to 3b?

This is 100% why I play fictional leagues because I don't get hung up on this is player a and that would never happen in real life. Things happen every day that make you scratch your head in real baseball.

Sent from my SM-G998W using Tapatalk

[BIG17EASY]

Originally Posted by dcordash

What I would hope for with OOTP is the developers would only implement tools, stats, options, etc. that have been tested to death and actually offer the gist of what you see in real life. Either that or don't implement such options until they work. Fake it until you make it really can be disappointing to a customer.

This is not what OOTP does. As soon as you do one thing - make a trade, change a roster, advance a day - it becomes fictional and you can see things that you think would never happen in real life. OOTP has never marketed itself as anything other than that.

Six weeks ago, I don't think many people would've said that the Nats trading Juan Soto would be realistic. Now we are on the verge of seeing it happen, maybe in the next few days. So perhaps the notion of what's "realistic" should also be considered a little differently.

[BIG17EASY]

Originally Posted by tcblcommish

I dont get what the issue is about moving will smith to 3b and using a different catcher. Was their 3b not very good? Did their team get better overall making that deal and moving smith to 3b?

This is 100% why I play fictional leagues because I don't get hung up on this is player a and that would never happen in real life. Things happen every day that make you scratch your head in real baseball.

Sent from my SM-G998W using Tapatalk

Exactly. If the players were named Phil Smith and Bob Jones, there would be no complaint.

[md40022]

Originally Posted by BIG17EASY

Exactly. If the players were named Phil Smith and Bob Jones, there would be no complaint.

Phil Smith's hot headed personality would not allow him to change positions. We all know that.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by dcordash

For clarification, I'm not expecting OOTP to 100% mimic a typical MLB season.

I played Strat-o-Matic for years when it was a board game (software sports sims weren't even a concept yet). Both football and baseball. It never 100% matched actual stats. It would, for sure, be significantly closer to how a real-life season played out than OOTP. Every batter/pitcher was much more likely to replicate what they did that particular year within a differential of 5-10%. There were very rare outliers. Standings typically were within a couple placements of how the season actually ended.

But, there were injuries that occurred in the board game that didn't actually happen in the season. As mentioned, sometimes a player would tank or take off on that career year they never matched before or after. A lot of very plausible variances.

But Strat-o-Matic didn't get into the minutia details as I recall. Those items that, I suspect, are just so convoluted and arbitrary they kept them out of the mix.

What I would hope for with OOTP is the developers would only implement tools, stats, options, etc. that have been tested to death and actually offer the gist of what you see in real life. Either that or don't implement such options until they work. Fake it until you make it really can be disappointing to a customer.

I've had a lot of fun with the game over the years. But, I also get hung up on a lot of the "little things".

Just to note here a couple of things:

- If memory serves, a standard deviation for batting average over the course of one full season of at-bats is higher than a lot of people think, like 30 points. That means that if you have a team full of players who hit .260 in real life, most of them will hit between .230 and .290 but on average one guy on the team will hit above .320 or below .210. You may not have ever seen that play out because frankly, and I’m speaking as a person who played SOM for years as well, it takes forever to manually keep track of seasons like that, especially if you’re doing something crazy like playing through an entire season.

That said, SOM does have a computer version that makes such replays possible. Personally I don’t like SOM replays because of the way they treat outlier seasons. In SOM, Ted Williams is as likely to hit .436 as he is .376 in 1941 even though he never came close to hitting .436 in his life. OOTP ,see the design decision to flatten outlier years like this because they happen on their own in an environment where a Williams is pegged to hit, say, .370 over several years. This also makes way more sense for what OOTP is made for, which is more multi season GM stuff than doing one season captured in time and agnostic to what occurred before or afterwards.

- In terms of standings, some real life teams grossly over or underachieved their run differentials in terms of won-lost records, and those teams will (correctly) tend to achieve to “normal” levels because there’s no a lot that correlates with under or overachieving your Pythagorean won-lost record beyond luck.

Personally, I prefer playing fictional leagues precisely because of the lack of expectation. Also, OOTP just straight up is not SOM in any way and people who want it to be will be nothing but disappointed. In a real sense, starting a “replay” in OOTP really just means you begin a dynasty with the rosters more or less set as they were on Opening Day of that year and from that moment on it’s all fictional. There are lots of settings you can use to make the game act slightly more like SOM or DMB but at its base this is a game that treats baseball not as a series of enclosed individual seasons that have no relation to each other but one long and winding path that goes through the decades. Gorman Thomas might not fall apart in 1984 and then have a one season comeback in 1985. He might fall apart in 1982 instead or continue to produce until 1990. The Milwaukee Brewers, especially if you’re playing starting in, say, 1974, might never turn into Harvey’s Wallbangers in 1982, or they might get really good by the late 70s and become a true dynasty. It’s not just about not knowing, it’s the design philosophy that treats baseball seasons as interconnected.

OOTP also accounts for a lot of little things that SOM and DMB never did in part because SOM in particular was designed when people knew a lot less about how baseball worked than they do now, but also because a lot of mechanics that take no extra time in a computer game add unneeded and slowing complexity to a cards and dice game. Wanting to get rid of these because you think they’re “convoluted and arbitrary” is, well, counter to what OOTP is about.

[dcordash]

Originally Posted by tcblcommish

I dont get what the issue is about moving will smith to 3b and using a different catcher. Was their 3b not very good? Did their team get better overall making that deal and moving smith to 3b?

This is 100% why I play fictional leagues because I don't get hung up on this is player a and that would never happen in real life. Things happen every day that make you scratch your head in real baseball.

Sent from my SM-G998W using Tapatalk

I get your point about fictional. Creates anonymity and takes away any benchmark customers may have to criticize the game not paralleling real life as far as contracts/trades/free agency/etc. goes.

But, this game is touted as "the most accurate sports sim on the market" at times and from different outlets. So, if you can't use real-life as your benchmark to grade the accuracy of OOTP's sim engine..what do you have? Loyal blind trust the developer's got it right?

I mean, take for instance the Andrelton Simmons contract request by Ricketts. We know that would never happen because we know both parties. We know from cumulatively 1000's of years baseball experience by the fan base...that would never happen in the year 2022 from the Cubs organization as it stands at that moment in time. Practical and tacit sense /experience assures us that wouldn't happen.

Are you saying when we have fictional owners and players with different names these extremely unlikely scenarios won't happen? If Joe Blow is the SS for the Chicago BeerChuggers and is all glove, no bat, waning years of his career the BeerChugger's owner Ron Crickets won't make retaining Joe one of his primary goals to enhance the franchise?

So, using the excuse it's fictional and shouldn't be held to the same standard as real-life sucks the simulation air out of the game. Maybe I'm over thinking it.

[Sweed]

Originally Posted by dcordash

What I would hope for with OOTP is the developers would only implement tools, stats, options, etc. that have been tested to death and actually offer the gist of what you see in real life. Either that or don't implement such options until they work. Fake it until you make it really can be disappointing to a customer.

I think OOTP does do some of that. The question becomes how much can they do vs how much should they do? What passes your reality test may not pass mine and visa-versa. If they put in too many roadblocks some will complain. Too few, and complaints come.

Every option (not sure what they could do besides a massive check list?) provides another area that can break the game. They are wonderful but do come at a price.

In this case I'm not even sure what was implemented that didn't work? I mean you initiated the trade. The Dodgers didn't come calling you, right? Should OOTP have not allowed you to make that trade? Forced LA to turn it down? IDK in the era of the DH I would think it unrealistic to not have this possibly happen. Then add in the complaints that come because "I made a reasonable offer to LA but they wouldn't even talk!"

There are too many variables to make everyone happy. Too many ways to play. One size does not fit all. If you get hung up on it, you get hung up on it. It's how you feel. I live with the "little things" and actually embrace a lot of them as they add flavor to my game. Most aren't terrible, most are in the realm of reality, and I can usually follow the logic the AI used. It may or may not be realistic depending on who's doing the looking.

[md40022]

I think more so what they are saying is the way the entire sim plays out over time. The butterfly effect of it, so to speak.

Using this same example in OOTP where the Dodgers trade for Contreras, that is going to trigger a corresponding move of Will Smith to 3rd Base. Then, another coresponding move will come of that. Maybe whoever the Dodgers were using at 3B previously signs a contract with the Giants in the offseason as opposed to re-upping with LA since Smith is at 3B now. And that in turn makes their AAA 3rd base prospect a little more expendable and they have to decide whether to move the prospect to LF/RF or trade him and when they decide to move him to LF that leads to their AA LF getting traded in a package deal to Boston, but Boston only is making that deal because of an opening created by an injury and yah yah yah yah yah yah yah. So OOTP starts off similar to IRL on day 1, but by day 2 IRL no longer exists.

Yes, at the core good pitchers IRL should be good pitchers in the game and what not --- but as soon as roster adjustment, injuries, etc. starts to hit on the very 1st day of your sim then the game takes on its own shape.

(that was in response to dcordash -- I forgot to use the "quote" option in my reply)

[locuspc]

Originally Posted by tcblcommish

I dont get what the issue is about moving will smith to 3b and using a different catcher. Was their 3b not very good? Did their team get better overall making that deal and moving smith to 3b?

This is 100% why I play fictional leagues because I don't get hung up on this is player a and that would never happen in real life. Things happen every day that make you scratch your head in real baseball.

Sent from my SM-G998W using Tapatalk

The issue is that catcher is so much more a premium position, and good batting catchers so rare, that he is effectively being "wasted" playing a poor 3B instead of using his rare talents at catcher. Even if this were a fictional game I'd find it odd (but not unbelievable unless it were happening all the time, and in my experience it's actually not common at all).

[Pelican]

Picking up on Syd’s comparison of OOTP to Strat and other board games, I appreciate that OOTP is far more intricate I guess is the word. Yes, options beyond just playing out games from a given historical season. SOM and APBA in card form were remarkable for the similarities to IRL they achieved with limited tools, and dice. As said, laborious to keep stats long-term. I don’t think I ever got beyond half a season or so, with pen, paper, and a primitive calculator. The big downfall of those games, for me, call it cheesing, was too much reliance on marginal players who happened to have great stats in a small sample. (Both games tried to bury penalties in those marginal cards, like double play numbers, or make those guys awful fielders and slow; but a guy who hit .340 in 100 AB would probably hit very well in 600 AB.). Every year, we quickly identified those outliers, and they became our favorites.

Playing historical seasons using OOTP, as I do, presents a different goal from what i gather about fictional players and leagues. I have, in three years play, found recent and older seasons to replay with almost maddening accuracy, despite my best efforts to change history. However, there can be exciting “what if’s”, like if Lou Gehrig never got ALS, or Babe Ruth was signed by the Federal League, or nobody went off to Korea or WWII. Playing 1981 and 1994 and 2020 without strikes or lockouts. To me, that is mixing in a dose of fictional with the historical numbers. YMMV due to after-market alterations to the vehicles.

I’m also learning that historical can veer off toward fiction, if you turn off historical trades and injuries and retirements, and base ratings on OOTP performance, rather than actual stats. Combined with some decent TCR, the season replay begins to diverge from history, as more seasons go by. I still import the actual rookies when they are ready, but again, after that first year, they may depart from their actual performances.

Circling back, OOTP seems ideally suited to the way I play, which is undoubtedly why I appreciate the game engine more than some, who understandably have other goals and expectations. I like the fact that superstars are likely to continue to HOF careers, and “duds” are unlikely to shine, but attention to player development and enlightened managing and chance may create exceptions. A huge example of manipulating history is erasing the color line. Subject to properly rating Negro League stars, very much a work in progress, there is a whole alternative universe waiting, as far back before 1947 as you want.

[Sweed]

Originally Posted by locuspc

The issue is that catcher is so much more a premium position, and good batting catchers so rare, that he is effectively being "wasted" playing a poor 3B instead of using his rare talents at catcher. Even if this were a fictional game I'd find it odd (but not unbelievable unless it were happening all the time, and in my experience it's actually not common at all).

Except Contreras is now catching and he's... not to bad. At least I assume that is what is happening? If LA moved Smith to 3b, DH'd Contreras, and used a third guy to C? Yeah, that's a problem.

IRL they split the DH and both remain "fresh" to catch the games they are scheduled to catch. Smith is currently on pace to C 128 games. Contreras 102. That's a lot of extra rest for Contreras this year due mostly to Gomes.
Smith\Contreras combo with the DH would mean two pretty rested offensive players at the end of the year.

[dcordash]

Originally Posted by md40022

I think more so what they are saying is the way the entire sim plays out over time. The butterfly effect of it, so to speak.

Using this same example in OOTP where the Dodgers trade for Contreras, that is going to trigger a corresponding move of Will Smith to 3rd Base. Then, another coresponding move will come of that. Maybe whoever the Dodgers were using at 3B previously signs a contract with the Giants in the offseason as opposed to re-upping with LA since Smith is at 3B now. And that in turn makes their AAA 3rd base prospect a little more expendable and they have to decide whether to move the prospect to LF/RF or trade him and when they decide to move him to LF that leads to their AA LF getting traded in a package deal to Boston, but Boston only is making that deal because of an opening created by an injury and yah yah yah yah yah yah yah. So OOTP starts off similar to IRL on day 1, but by day 2 IRL no longer exists.

Yes, at the core good pitchers IRL should be good pitchers in the game and what not --- but as soon as roster adjustment, injuries, etc. starts to hit on the very 1st day of your sim then the game takes on its own shape.

(that was in response to dcordash -- I forgot to use the "quote" option in my reply)

Right on. A super sophisticated statistical engine with all the intricacies and overhead, above and beyond just crunching batting/fielding/pitching numbers, there is no doubt the slightest code change (thought contained and perfectly isolated from the rest) can cascade through that delicate engine and do some damage.

I would be the first to step in line to shake the hands of the genius behind what we have in our hands today. Marcus and Co. are truly heroes to me. Not joking or gushing. These cats are the real deal.

I was an IT guy for decades I completely understand the challenge. Not for the meek or thin of skin.

I was programmer for the majority, analyst, network, database..ended my career as an administrator of the S&P Shop. My foray was drivers license related. Pretty powerful stuff with a database of over 15 million and product carried by 10 million any given year.

When something went wrong State Police could suddenly stop differentiating between the good guys and bad guys. I remember the year 2000 when I made that calamity happen. Made a grown man cry.

Nothing as cool as what the OOTP guys do though. But, swimming in those waters for 30+ years made me a cynic and somewhat jaded when it comes to software.

But, I'm one of those kooks that feel compelled to start writing/sharing when I encounter features that don't flesh out, or outcomes that seem off the charts inconsistent.

Do apologize for even the slightest rudeness. Venting has become my post-retirement career. Ha.

[md40022]

Originally Posted by dcordash

Do apologize for even the slightest rudeness. Venting has become my post-retirement career. Ha.

I didn't take anything you said as rude. I think this has been good discussion here.

[billyray1984]

Originally Posted by locuspc

The issue is that catcher is so much more a premium position, and good batting catchers so rare, that he is effectively being "wasted" playing a poor 3B instead of using his rare talents at catcher. Even if this were a fictional game I'd find it odd (but not unbelievable unless it were happening all the time, and in my experience it's actually not common at all).

A good batting catcher is also being wasted by not being an every day position player. Not trying to defend the AI here, but there have been a good amount of examples over the years of good hitting catchers entering the league and then moving to other positions (DH/1B being more common) even before they reach their 30's to get their bat in the lineup more. Granted, this mainly applies to guys who were not very good defensively. For me, Will Smith would stay behind the plate, but the AI does make weird choices from time to time. Maybe fictional Will Smith requested the move, like Greinke requesting multiple times over the years to move at shortstop lol.

[LansdowneSt]

I think Matt noted the two things that probably could be looked at and the second one may have some art v. science in it (Will Smith's decent 3B rating still there at the start of the '22 season). A great point was also made in that these are just numbers wrapped in a name. As one that plays mostly historical games, it is easy to forget that.

I'm kinda hoping that in the OP's universe, this incarnation of the Dodgers wins the World Series riding a surge in offense from this move. The end justifies the means. Flags fly forever, etc. If they do, can't criticize the AI when all is said and done

[fuzzy_patters]

This reminds me of the White Sox in 2020. James McCann was an All Star, but being a catcher, he required a day or two off per week, so they brought in Yasmani Grandal, another All Star catcher. The two rotated between DH/1B/C, which meant that neither one needed as many days off. Having two All Star catchers where at least one can also play another position is a pretty good idea. The reason you don’t see it very often is because there aren’t very many catchers who are good hitters in the first place, and teams that have them don’t let them go very often.

[md40022]

Originally Posted by fuzzy_patters

This reminds me of the White Sox in 2020. James McCann was an All Star, but being a catcher, he required a day or two off per week, so they brought in Yasmani Grandal, another All Star catcher. The two rotated between DH/1B/C, which meant that neither one needed as many days off. Having two All Star catchers where at least one can also play another position is a pretty good idea. The reason you don’t see it very often is because there aren’t very many catchers who are good hitters in the first place, and teams that have them don’t let them go very often.

Another reason that you don't see teams use 1 catcher as a DH very often is mid-game injury


If your catcher gets hurt mid-game and you have to move your DH catcher into the actual catcher position,,, now your pitcher is in the batting order. Teams are normally a little better covered from a depth standpoint with IF and OF guys playing in the DH slot, where in the event of a mid-game injury they aren't forfeiting their DH.

[Sweed]

Originally Posted by md40022

Another reason that you don't see teams use 1 catcher as a DH very often is mid-game injury


If your catcher gets hurt mid-game and you have to move your DH catcher into the actual catcher position,,, now your pitcher is in the batting order. Teams are normally a little better covered from a depth standpoint with IF and OF guys playing in the DH slot, where in the event of a mid-game injury they aren't forfeiting their DH.

I tend to agree but think, at least some teams, are moving away from this. Cubs with Gomes and Contreras, DHing 30 of his 81 games, shows a shift in thinking. Yes, Higgins has been up and down some so at times they may have had 3 C's but, to my knowledge not often. I would think the plan, if injury occurs, would be to move Contreras to C, enter the P in the lineup, PH as necessary. Their second choice is Schwindel as the emergency C. I'll take the former over the later.