Pitcher BABIP is not set for generated fictional players... is this intended?

[uruguru]

According to League Settings, in my save the League BABIP is .283

All historical pitchers have various levels of Pitcher BABIP. The editor gives them a value of 1 to 250, presumably based on their real-world performance for the current season.

Conversely, pitchers created fictionally have no Pitcher BABIP value, setting them to the "default" value which purports to generate a default value of .312 --- almost 30 points worse than the league average.

Setting a Pitcher BABIP of about 135 (on a scale of 1-250) will change the pitcher's expected BABIP to the league average.

How should this work? Should fictional pitchers:

a) Have the current default (i.e. 30 pts worse than average)

b) Have the league average

c) Have some variable value

I tend to think b) because, for historical players, I assume the BABIP is recalculated based on each season's performance. Since pitchers can't historically control their BABIP, giving a pitcher a BABIP that will be permanently better or worse than the league average doesn't seem appropriate.

Or, which is also possible, am I completely misunderstanding something about how this rating works?

[Syd Thrift]

1. All of the ratings, not just pitcher BABIP, are on a scale where 1-200 covers nearly everyone and the top 50 points are outliers, so “average” would be 100, not 125.

2. A 0 rating is supposed to mean “no BABIP effect”, not “the worst of all BABIP”.

[uruguru]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

1. All of the ratings, not just pitcher BABIP, are on a scale where 1-200 covers nearly everyone and the top 50 points are outliers, so “average” would be 100, not 125.

2. A 0 rating is supposed to mean “no BABIP effect”, not “the worst of all BABIP”.

What I meant by "league average" is not average BABIP rating, but a BABIP rating that results in league average BABIP. For whatever reason, that seems to be about 135-136 on the 1-250 scale for the pitcher BABIP rating.

If you set the BABIP rating to 0, it will display something like "<Default> .348". While this is definitely not as bad as the worst BABIP rating possible (1), it's about the same result you'd get if you manually set his BABIP rating to about 35 (varies slightly by pitcher). So it's not the worst possible, but it's very clearly below league average.

A BABIP rating for a pitcher of around 135-136 seems to result in a BABIP at the league average.

[Syd Thrift]

Again, ratings are not 1-250, they’re 1-200 with extra room on top for outliers, so the game engine treats 100 as average. If it’s coming to something else, the game is doing something wrong and that might be a bug. I know 0 is supposed to be “figure it out based on all of the other stats”, at least according to the devs.

[Syd Thrift]

I will say that I imported my fictional league in and I’m seeing BABIPs were insanely high, so it could be a bug

[uruguru]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

Again, ratings are not 1-250, they’re 1-200 with extra room on top for outliers, so the game engine treats 100 as average.

No one is talking about setting ratings over 200. The issue is that fictional pitchers have no rating (its 0) and this seems to give them a Pitcher BABIP rating that is significantly worse than league average. And since these are not historical players, this means they will have a consistently bad BABIP rating every year. Which doesn't seem right.

So the question is was this intended?

Should fictional players have this terrible default value, should they have a BABIP rating that matches the league rating (a rating about 136), or should they have a variable value?

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by uruguru

No one is talking about setting ratings over 200. The issue is that fictional pitchers have no rating (its 0) and this seems to give them a Pitcher BABIP rating that is significantly worse than league average. And since these are not historical players, this means they will have a consistently bad BABIP rating every year. Which doesn't seem right.

So the question is was this intended?

Should fictional players have this terrible default value, should they have a BABIP rating that matches the league rating (a rating about 136), or should they have a variable value?

Yeah. The 0 resulting in terrible BABIPs is for sure a bug, and if it takes to like 135 for them to be “normal”, that’s almost certainly also a bug. I logged it in the bug reports forum fwiw.

[OutS|der]

For pitchers with BABIP of 0 this is was said "It can be left unset for players, though, in which case it will mildly have variety in current vs potential (and will also "age" as the other pitch ratings age). If it is set and you have the development engine on, it will vary with aging like other ratings, though"

[Syd Thrift]

Having run a little bit of simmed stuff of my own, this is what I'm seeing:

- 0 really does appear to work as a default number, and that number is (slightly) dynamic depending on pitch type and quality

- I *think* 100 is pretty close to average even though the calculator implies otherwise

- league-wide BABIPs are trending on the high side. My fictional league that I brought over midseason (yes, I know that's not a good thing), I wound up having to lower hits by something like 20% at the end of the day to make things align right. The fictional test league I ran had a leaguewide BABIP in the .310s, which is around 10-15 points higher than last year (and 20-25 points higher than what we've seen this year so far but that's another story)

- I haven't tried adding BABIP ratings to players in a fictional league, or rather I thought I'd added them but I did not

- BABIP, as always, is very, very luck-driven, even when you assign it a value.

- I *think* we're back to having tired players allowing much higher BABIP. ISTR that not being the case in 22 and 23, for better or for worse (IME in lower-K environments that means you can send relievers out for like 6 innings sometimes without seeing them completely blow up because even if they're dead tired, if they avoid walks then the fact that they aren't striking many people out sometimes doesn't add up to runs)

[quillenl]

As I understand it from previous dev comments on the new BABIP rating...

It is only being used for specific historical players, so 0 should result in an average result for fictional players and most historical players. Nolan Ryan, for example, should have a value of 0. Bob Feller will have a value there as a player who needed the new rating to better achieve their historical norms.

I would not get hung up on what the editor is saying. Regardless of what it is saying, having no added value should be resulting in average performance for your league regarding fictional leagues. They have mentioned visiting this for fictional players in the future, but right now it is just applied to specific historical players. Changing this value for fictional players will increase the performance of those players, but will have unintended consequences for the statistical output of the other players in that league.

[Lukas Berger]

Originally Posted by quillenl

As I understand it from previous dev comments on the new BABIP rating...

It is only being used for specific historical players, so 0 should result in an average result for fictional players and most historical players. Nolan Ryan, for example, should have a value of 0. Bob Feller will have a value there as a player who needed the new rating to better achieve their historical norms.

I would not get hung up on what the editor is saying. Regardless of what it is saying, having no added value should be resulting in average performance for your league regarding fictional leagues. They have mentioned visiting this for fictional players in the future, but right now it is just applied to specific historical players. Changing this value for fictional players will increase the performance of those players, but will have unintended consequences for the statistical output of the other players in that league.

Yes, this is all pretty much correct

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by quillenl

As I understand it from previous dev comments on the new BABIP rating...

It is only being used for specific historical players, so 0 should result in an average result for fictional players and most historical players. Nolan Ryan, for example, should have a value of 0. Bob Feller will have a value there as a player who needed the new rating to better achieve their historical norms.

I would not get hung up on what the editor is saying. Regardless of what it is saying, having no added value should be resulting in average performance for your league regarding fictional leagues. They have mentioned visiting this for fictional players in the future, but right now it is just applied to specific historical players. Changing this value for fictional players will increase the performance of those players, but will have unintended consequences for the statistical output of the other players in that league.

Has Nolan Ryan been tested in historical games? Because he seems like exactly a player the game would underrate and then assign a BABIP rating to to make up for it.

[uruguru]

Originally Posted by Lukas Berger

Yes, this is all pretty much correct

I don't understand. Literally every historical pitcher in my save has a Pitcher BABIP rating set.

Every single one has a value in the player editor for the "Pitcher BABIP" field.


Examples, just looking at the 1962 Reds:

Jim Brosnan - 27 rating, for (presumably) .355 BABIP

Moe Drabowsky - 138 rating for .281

Bill Henry - 49 rating for .341

Joey Jay - 126 for .289

Ken Johnson - 111 for .299

Jim Maloney - 159 for .267

Jim O'Toole - 144 for .277

Bob Purkey - 167 for .262

Dave Sisler - 111 for .299

John Tsitouris - 0 for <Default> .311 <-- WHOA I do stand corrected, not all of them are set

[quillenl]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

Has Nolan Ryan been tested in historical games? Because he seems like exactly a player the game would underrate and then assign a BABIP rating to to make up for it.

I have a very subjective list of Hall of Fame (or near Hall of Fame) pitchers that always aggravated for extreme underperformance but have not tested anything related to this new rating yet. Right now I am just playing through some Random Debut Historical recalc which gives some crazy results already so I wouldn't use it as a benchmark for any of this :P The last single season recalc I ran though... Nolan looked like Nolan.
(see image below)

I am not smart enough to understand why Ryan doesn't need a BABIP boost, but someone like Bob Gibson does... but I thought the results looked favorable for both last sim (Gibson has been less than Gibson-ish for me in the past so is one of my go to checks). It's just one sim through with pretty stringent settings... but it looks ok from a mile high view.

[quillenl]

Speaking of, Gibson has been straight up awful in my random debut leagues in the past. I'll be curious how he looks when he generates in the league I am currently playing.

[Matt Arnold]

Pretty much every historical player gets a rating assigned to them when doing historical replays, even if that value would end up the same as if we didn't assign them a rating. Generally speaking, anyone who pitched under the "adjust" limits tends to get it set to 0 (default) so we don't overreact to a small sample size.

The average is set as closer to 110 (I think 110 rating turns into a .300 BABIP). But keep in mind that a player set to 0 does not mean that they will strictly use that default - they will use their "natural" internal mechanism. There's some natural bonuses if you throw a knuckelball, or have high velocity, and stuff like that, that will shift them a little.

[uruguru]

Originally Posted by Matt Arnold

Pretty much every historical player gets a rating assigned to them when doing historical replays, even if that value would end up the same as if we didn't assign them a rating. Generally speaking, anyone who pitched under the "adjust" limits tends to get it set to 0 (default) so we don't overreact to a small sample size.

Thank you for that clarification! I was having trouble reconciling what I was seeing in the editor with what was being posted. So, in summary, is this correct?

* Most pitchers - their BABIP reflects what their performance would have normally been if BABIP was not a feature

* Infrequent pitchers - BABIP set to 0 to reflect small sample size

* Special pitchers - BABIP set to a custom value to reflect their real-world ability to over or under-perform what their BABIP would be if without this new feature

The average is set as closer to 110 (I think 110 rating turns into a .300 BABIP). But keep in mind that a player set to 0 does not mean that they will strictly use that default - they will use their "natural" internal mechanism. There's some natural bonuses if you throw a knuckelball, or have high velocity, and stuff like that, that will shift them a little.

Question: why would the average BABIP (i.e. .300 with a 110 rating) be different than what the league average BABIP is set at in the league settings?