Too many pitching prospects?

[Cartopis84]

Anyone else noticing this? In the draft class there are always at least 20+ pitching prospects with 5 star potential, and as a result the top 100 prospects are crowded with pitchers mainly. Happening to anyone else? And what is a solution for this?

My latest draft 6 months after the draft there remained 28 5 star pitching prospects and only 2 5 star batting ones

Thanks

[Guthrien]

The last couple of years, the first couple draft classes have usually been pitcher heavy in comparison. I have no idea what causes that before the fictional classes begin to take over, but I don't think you're imagining it. As far as the ranking of actual prospects (not draft classes) I have not noticed pitchers dominating. The AI also tends to draft batters for high picks unless they are college gods.

[Sweed]

I'd say you should be more concerned that there are 30, 5* prospects period (28 pitchers and 2 batters). I would think five in real life would be on the high end of what one would normally see.

Unfortunately a few years ago when OOTP went to realistic rated draft classes some users complained it wasn't fun. There weren't enough 70+ Pot players to choose from, and too many normal 40-45's. The answer was to inflate potentials to have more "fun". I posted the numbers last year from my draft. I'm guessing nothing changed for v27.

Here is a link to the post with a screen shot of my draft class
https://forums.ootpdevelopments.com/...57&postcount=5

Here is a link to the thread
https://forums.ootpdevelopments.com/...d.php?t=366466

I use the 20-80 ratings and not stars. FWIW in the linked post/thread above I had eleven 80 overall pot players, IN ONE DRAFT. A normal draft IRL has zero 80 overall players. Then add eleven more 70+ overall pot players in my draft for a total of 22 legendary talents. If I went down to 65 I'd pick up 5 more players. Not sure in OOTP terms but I think a 65 would be a 5 IRL. That's 27 for me and 28 for you.

Two big problems come to mind to me straight away (though I'm sure there's more). First almost all of these guys have to have potential rating crash or you'll have a league full of legends. The needed crashes will lead to the "why do my highly rated players always crash?' complaints. Second when viewing your draft there is no excitement at all about seeing these highly rated players. The hype isn't and can't be real when you can expect most of these players to regress to "normal" players.

[snepp]

Good god Sweed, I think you channeled that post directly out of my head. Kind of creepy actually.

"Realistic" looking draft class = "Not fun" and players whine

Top prospects "always" decline = "Not fun" and players whine

It's a straight up lose/lose proposition, the devs simply can't win here.

[Sweed]

Originally Posted by snepp

Good god Sweed, I think you channeled that post directly out of my head. Kind of creepy actually.

"Realistic" looking draft class = "Not fun" and players whine

Top prospects "always" decline = "Not fun" and players whine

It's a straight up lose/lose proposition, the devs simply can't win here.

Yeah, the developers should have held their ground on "reality" for a simulation. I see as they try to tighten up the trade module we are also getting some "but it's not fun" feedback. I'm all for options but push come to shove? Reality should weigh heavy on the scale.

Another part of some user's complaints was "there's too many 45's and it's not fun sorting them.". The thing is with the expanded ratings scale going over 600 this problem went away. At least it did for me if I use 20-80 (and not by 5's). Players that are all in the 40's will separated quite nicely on the scale that goes 40-49 by 1's. It draws to the eye that player B is slightly better than player A in your scouts' eye. Now to get the "best" pick you still need to take individual skills into account. I'd say many times I will like a 42/80 better than the 44/80 player that is higher up the list. But the "fun" players didn't want to look at ratings anyway, they just wanted a quick "A's rating is higher than B's rating". 20/80 by 1's gives them that with the 600+ ratings scale.

[Guthrien]

It's vague to me now, but I remember part of the problem was they no longer had players of the college level who would make immediate impact. Development wasn't realistic with every 1-5 taking 4yrs to get to the bigs. Now, we definitely have inflation in it's stead where regression will be wild and wide. I'm ok with it as modern baseball culture now seems to more closely resemble other sports with absolute obsession around every draft prospect 1-100. Not that big prospects are new, but it's certainly changed in my lifetime.

I was a little bit more surprised when they added a button to stop potential from acting as current ability in the minors.

[Cartopis84]

My latest draft class, almost all top prospects are pitchers again


https://ibb.co/3mbzC6pD

[Highlander]

Yeah- that's a lot of pitchers and a lot of super high end prospects in general. Agree with the above posts that realism should be the guide here. If everyone is experiencing this, then it definitely seems off. To the OP, did you make any adjustments to the modifiers that might be influencing the number of high end guys you are getting?

[Cartopis84]

Originally Posted by Highlander

Yeah- that's a lot of pitchers and a lot of super high end prospects in general. Agree with the above posts that realism should be the guide here. If everyone is experiencing this, then it definitely seems off. To the OP, did you make any adjustments to the modifiers that might be influencing the number of high end guys you are getting?

Nope all default, just have TCR at 125. I went back to an OOTP 26 save and compared and that had a much better balance

[rwd59]

Originally Posted by Cartopis84

Anyone else noticing this? In the draft class there are always at least 20+ pitching prospects with 5 star potential, and as a result the top 100 prospects are crowded with pitchers mainly. Happening to anyone else? And what is a solution for this?

My latest draft 6 months after the draft there remained 28 5 star pitching prospects and only 2 5 star batting ones

Thanks

I am seeing this as well. 10-15 5 star pitchers in every class.

[Cartopis84]

Latest draft had 30 five star pitching prospects and 10 five star batting prospects. After development it seems fine as there arent too many overpowered pitchers, but in the drafts there definately are too many

[Cartopis84]

Another thing is, too many 5 star closer prospects.

I simmed 10 years and the balance of developed players seems to be fine, with about 15-16 5 and 4 star players. But there are almost no elite batters that develop from the drafts, only pitchers.
For example 10 years in, all 7 out of top 7 pitchers were drafter, while out of top 7 batters only 2 were drafted rest all were IFA

[CBLCardinals]

Originally Posted by Sweed

Yeah, the developers should have held their ground on "reality" for a simulation. I see as they try to tighten up the trade module we are also getting some "but it's not fun" feedback. I'm all for options but push come to shove? Reality should weigh heavy on the scale.

Another part of some user's complaints was "there's too many 45's and it's not fun sorting them.". The thing is with the expanded ratings scale going over 600 this problem went away. At least it did for me if I use 20-80 (and not by 5's). Players that are all in the 40's will separated quite nicely on the scale that goes 40-49 by 1's. It draws to the eye that player B is slightly better than player A in your scouts' eye. Now to get the "best" pick you still need to take individual skills into account. I'd say many times I will like a 42/80 better than the 44/80 player that is higher up the list. But the "fun" players didn't want to look at ratings anyway, they just wanted a quick "A's rating is higher than B's rating". 20/80 by 1's gives them that with the 600+ ratings scale.

Dead on.

In no reality should a draft have 15+ 80 grade prospects.

So Skubal/Skenes level potential x15 players in a draft?

What SHOULD happen is users understand that no one has a team full of 80’s. Teams are mostly 45-55, with some 60’s, 70, and rarely an 80 for the best of the best.

Even outlets like MLB Pipeline, Baseball America, Fan Graphs, et al never really put an 80 on a player. Konnor Griffin of Pittsburgh is a consensus #1 overall prospect in baseball, 5 tool potentially generational type talent and most sites have him as a 70.

[buckshot13]

I'm just starting my first draft and I'm picking number 6 and in the first round 17 of the top 19 prospects are pitchers (that's as far as I counted but it appears to be a heavy majority of pitchers thereafter as well).

[drrok]

Well, this confirms my decision to hold off buying this year’s version was correct.

[Rain King]

Didn't I see someone mention this was based on Scouting Accuracy? The lower accuracy, the more 80 grade prospects but at 100% accuracy it was realistic?

If that is the case, I would consider it an issue but not a major one. Hopefully it gets tweaked, but it doesn't seem to functionally hurt anything based on that description (and that everyone here has been saying the actual development works as expected).

[snepp]

Originally Posted by Rain King

Didn't I see someone mention this was based on Scouting Accuracy? The lower accuracy, the more 80 grade prospects but at 100% accuracy it was realistic?

If that is the case, I would consider it an issue but not a major one. Hopefully it gets tweaked, but it doesn't seem to functionally hurt anything based on that description (and that everyone here has been saying the actual development works as expected).

Well, we kind of melded two different discussions together here. One being the distribution of overall potentials (too pitcher-heavy) like the OP started with, and the other being overalls distributed higher compared to real life (a subjective preference).

It does appear that pitchers might be overly represented, but only from my cursory looks. I don't know whether it's due to being created with internal ratings that are generally higher than positional counterparts, or that their overall rating calculation needs a little fine-tuning.

Or it could simply be a matter of the small sample size that I've looked at and it's much ado about nothing.

[Lukas Berger]

Originally Posted by snepp

or that their overall rating calculation needs a little fine-tuning.

Basically I think what happened here is that we slightly adjusted the pitchers overall calculations, so that they are a little more generous this year than last year. So a typical MLB SP who was a 50 overall last year may be a 55 now, at least in some cases.

For a draft prospect who would've had a 45 potential last year, they might have a 50 or in some cases, even a 55 now with the same ratings.

So on one hand, nothing has really fundamentally changed as far as how pitchers and batters are rated in comparison to each other. There shouldn't actually be more good pitchers now than there were last year. Essentially, this is nothing more than a cosmetic thing.

On the other hand, obviously cosmetics for something like this are fairly important and for immersion at least, we don't want to have too, too overly inflated overalls or potentials.

So while this is not a front burner issue, it's something on our list to take a look at getting this smoothed out a little more.

[snepp]

Originally Posted by Lukas Berger

Basically I think what happened here is that we slightly adjusted the pitchers overall calculations, so that they are a little more generous this year than last year. So a typical MLB SP who was a 50 overall last year may be a 55 now, at least in some cases.

For a draft prospect who would've had a 45 potential last year, they might have a 50 or in some cases, even a 55 now with the same ratings.

Well that makes sense, it wouldn't take a lot of pitchers moving one rung up the ladder to shift the overall visual of a list when they're combined with position players.

[itsmb8]

Originally Posted by drrok

Well, this confirms my decision to hold off buying this year’s version was correct.

General rule of thumb is to wait half the year before starting a career mode on ANY game. I mean, Madden just finally got the Franchise Mode mod on PC and thats been out since September.

I'll pick this up in probably May or June and try to finally start a long term save.