RNG and New Blood on your PT

usa_hank · 08-01-2026, 11:36 AM

Have you ever had a player that just sucks in a season? A stud with a 130+ BABIP and 100+ AvoidK, maybe even 100+ HR, but he hits .188? And you're like "hey I'm going to stick with him, gotta be just bad rolls, he can only improve" but by the end of the season he's maybe around .200?

I'm playing in PeL for the third straight season, and this season I literally had my studs in my lineup, but 3 of them were hitting an abysmal sub .210 in July, and 2 of my top starters were pitching 6+ ERAs. I was around 14 games under .500 ball at the all star break -- I was done. In PeL you just don't come back from that without a miracle.

So I did what any insane PT player does - I yanked the softball pitching "studs" and the Mendoza-like position "studs" off the roster and put in guys who should be worse, non-variant guys like Mickey Mantle, the new Cody Bellinger all-star card, Jesus Made, Phil Niekro, Satchel Paige. These are guys who play fine in LD and HD, but who should actually be pitching 6 ERAs or hitting at the Mendoza line in PeL. Surprise - every one of them have suddenly reinvigorated my team. Mantle is now one of my top-3 hitters. Bellinger (more recently added) is on a Ted William's like tear. Phil Niekro is pitching better than all but 3 of the Johan Santana's in the league. (Full disclosure: I did bring up Altuve and said eff-you to my 2B defense, and I added Texiera as well, who has been raking compared to what my Gehrig was doing)

I'm now at .500 ball a month and a half later.

So I have to bring this up. I know this has come up in previous seasons on here when I was more of a lurker. But there's a weirdness about certain players on your team ending up terrible in any given season, and some ending up great.

I'm convinced there's a player modifier, or a "streak variable" for every player that gets randomly assigned when that player plays in their first game in your PT season. I have a feeling this gets boosted or lowered based upon your player's performance in each game, and thusly you get "hot streaks" and "cold streaks" that affect your player's performance. Or, in this case, they start out hot.

I can't believe that a player who should be in the bottom 25% of players in the league could be a stud in the league over a series of 600+ plate appearances. If there wasn't some hidden factor, it would be an anomaly not to regress closer to expected performance levels. But here we are, every season we see quite a few players play pathetically bad, and some who FAR outperforming their ratings. Right now in PeL there are some nonvariants that are destroying - a Maikel Garcia hitting .303 with 15 HR (and he's on a cold streak!), a Dobie Moore hitting .260 with 15 HR, a Dave Winfield hitting .335, etc. Yes, this is 3 out of 380+ position players in the league, but I bet everyone can find examples like this in your current leagues, players who should have no business hitting or pitching like they are.

But now I'm seeing some pretty darn good performances with a couple of scrubs I put in. Am I getting lucky with some rolls? No doubt. But I'm also seeing first hand that new blood can instantly somehow become studs on your team. And I can only guess it's because of whatever "streak" factor gets set. Let's call it a come-out roll, for lack of a better term!

TL;DR-

If you've got some guys who should be studs on your team, but are playing like garbage, replace them, even if your replacements should be worse. You never know what kind of come-out roll they'll have.

cwhitman · 08-01-2026, 05:30 PM

this is funny, because the bigger theory is that "new players are bad" because of a rust factor that exists in the base game that might still exist in PT. i think it's still largely just variance in all cases (though the rust theory could potentially have legs)

LeeD · 08-01-2026, 08:22 PM

Rust theory certainly has legs. Can't count the number of times that a pitcher like Vida Blue got shelled after being added to the roster midseason. I'd say it's about a 50-50 chance. There's also this weird thing where the newly added hitter goes 0-3 with a walk first time out. I've seen this one literally hundreds of times.

For the rest, it's most likely RNG modified by the league totals algorithm. The "new player" penalty, if it exists, also lasts for only a few games. After that, he will usually recover and play in accordance with his ratings.

The question about whether superior players bounce back, and why they were sucking to begin with, is still a mystery to me. I've seen pitchers go 1-10, 5.50 in the first half and then finish 14-13, 3.20. I've also seen guys who were terrible remain terrible. My Ty Cobb had a 1.7 WAR season sandwiched by two 7 WAR seasons early in this cycle, hitting only .265, which was crazy considering how good that Contact was back in April. Second-worst WAR in his first ten seasons was 3.7, and that was toward the end of his time as the Contact King.

Is it just RNG, or is there something else under the hood like the OP suggested? We'll likely never know. Secret sauce is secret, and all we can do is react by replacing or hold tight and hope for a bounce back.

My two cents is that the better players are still highly likely to give the better performances going forward, despite what's happened previously.

cwhitman · 08-01-2026, 10:39 PM

yeah: i think it's MOSTLY variance, but the fact that rust does exist in the base game actually does lend to a possibility that it could exist in PT.

usa_hank · 08-01-2026, 11:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by LeeD

Rust theory certainly has legs. Can't count the number of times that a pitcher like Vida Blue got shelled after being added to the roster midseason. I'd say it's about a 50-50 chance. There's also this weird thing where the newly added hitter goes 0-3 with a walk first time out. I've seen this one literally hundreds of times.

For the rest, it's most likely RNG modified by the league totals algorithm. The "new player" penalty, if it exists, also lasts for only a few games. After that, he will usually recover and play in accordance with his ratings.

The question about whether superior players bounce back, and why they were sucking to begin with, is still a mystery to me. I've seen pitchers go 1-10, 5.50 in the first half and then finish 14-13, 3.20. I've also seen guys who were terrible remain terrible. My Ty Cobb had a 1.7 WAR season sandwiched by two 7 WAR seasons early in this cycle, hitting only .265, which was crazy considering how good that Contact was back in April. Second-worst WAR in his first ten seasons was 3.7, and that was toward the end of his time as the Contact King.

Is it just RNG, or is there something else under the hood like the OP suggested? We'll likely never know. Secret sauce is secret, and all we can do is react by replacing or hold tight and hope for a bounce back.

My two cents is that the better players are still highly likely to give the better performances going forward, despite what's happened previously.

I've often experienced the rust thing. Most of the time, it's guys I just pulled from packs or bought. This season was very surprising.

yanko · 08-03-2026, 12:18 AM

I wonder if this would still be an issue if the game wasn't trying to match the year end stat totals of the given RE.

atomzero · 08-03-2026, 08:00 AM

Johan Santana, Lefty O'Doul, and Mel Ott were all absolute trash after I added them, but I can't say that every new card plays out that way for me.

cwhitman · 08-03-2026, 08:22 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by yanko

I wonder if this would still be an issue if the game wasn't trying to match the year end stat totals of the given RE.

not as much: see tournaments, which don't use the normalization

but no normalization would also lead to the game being broken more often in league. see, a couple years ago, when hitters were far better than pitchers and we had moonball in the end cycle, where every game was 10-7 and bullpens broke. or even this year, where expected hitting numbers are worse than you'd expect from the environment. normalization keeps things in control, even if it causes some other issues in the league environmnet

Minus8isGreat · 08-03-2026, 02:09 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cwhitman

yeah: i think it's MOSTLY variance, but the fact that rust does exist in the base game actually does lend to a possibility that it could exist in PT.

My anecdotal experience leads me to believe that RNG can and will lead to a 'rust' factor in the form of an immediate slump if the player does not contribute early upon being assigned to the team. I think it is less of an issue at the start of the season with a new lineup, but I added a 99 ovr Mike Schmidt who immediately started playing well because I assume the randomness fell in his favor, and he turned hot at a point and probably led to the team recovering at least 20 additional wins over the course of the remainder of the season. On the other hand, I brought in a fresh 100 ovr Schlittler live card, and he got pummled in his first start (way underperforming compared to lesser pitchers in the line-up), got hit with a Slump indicator, and struggled through a few more starts before I put him in the pen., swapping in a 100 ovr Sale who had struggled in the rotation, but was in the pen and was contributing. Sale goes on to win 4 straight starts before the end of the season.

cwhitman · 08-03-2026, 02:44 PM

the hot/cold sign is all past looking: it is not forward looking.

the way rust exists in the base game is that if you don't play players in spring training, they will start slower, from what i read. the theory would be that every player would be "rusted" early in the season, and gain it back, but if you put a player in, they'd still have to work off the rust.

again, do not know if it exists, just connecting the dots between a potential base game mechanic and theories people have had. i have seen no real evidence of it existing statistically.

usa_hank · 08-03-2026, 08:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cwhitman

the hot/cold sign is all past looking: it is not forward looking.

the way rust exists in the base game is that if you don't play players in spring training, they will start slower, from what i read. the theory would be that every player would be "rusted" early in the season, and gain it back, but if you put a player in, they'd still have to work off the rust.

again, do not know if it exists, just connecting the dots between a potential base game mechanic and theories people have had. i have seen no real evidence of it existing statistically.

I'm still convinced there is a preliminary hidden "streak factor" (come out roll) that gets randomized for every player when they first are brought into a season. And maybe it's a more volatile roll or even weighted to be more negative if you bring in a player for the first time mid-season.

This factor is either increased or decreased based on player performance.

All just hypothesis, but I've played enough PT seasons to see that there almost has to be some random factor involved in year to year player performance. If there wasn't some "slow-changing" random factor involved, then 600 AB in a season should be plenty enough to start drifting back toward their expected average.

LeeD · 08-03-2026, 09:33 PM

It's possible, but we have to remember that the difference between hitting .300 and hitting .200 over the course of a 600 AB season is 60 hits, which isn't a huge number. It's about 0.4 hits per game played. Add together RNG, fatigue, park factors, opposing pitchers, batting ratings, defensive ratings, and league totals algorithms and it seems even smaller. It might just be that the massive underperformances (which are easily seen and remembered) are individual players who fell through a crack in the sim engine.

I've complained before that wild season-to-season variance, which is not uncommon in PT, is actually quite uncommon among elite players, especially if we account for age and injuries. So yes, a Silver-level player might have experienced a lot of volatility over the course of his career, but a Perfect almost certainly didn't (absent injuries). Ty Cobb hit .316 or better every year, with the exception of his rookie season (only 41 games). Even accounting for the high quality of opposition in PT, his spread ought to be somewhere around 50 points of batting average and not 100.

However, the PT card gurus have a habit of cherry-picking great seasons from mostly-ordinary players when creating Perfect and Diamond cards, so the volatility is offscreen, We see the season where Pitcher A went 25-10 with an ERA of 2. We don't see the season where he went 10-20 with an ERA of 4. To that extent, the volatility creeps in anyway, either by design or by accident.

TLDR: It's still a game and has to be played like one. Sometimes it's not at all straightforward, but usually it is. In most cases, the better players play better.

usa_hank · 08-03-2026, 11:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by LeeD

...In most cases, the better players play better.

I think the point of what I'm saying is that the better players DON'T play better a lot of times. Bad rolls are bad rolls, and if there truly is a "come out roll" (streak factor, etc) that gets set at a player's premier game each season, and is slow to change, and you've got a "better player" playing poorly then why would you keep playing them? Since it is a series of random numbers, maybe it's not so much a "video game" but more like a gambling game, and with a gambling game, the more information you know about the cards already dealt, the more you can refine your odds and make the best odds choices.

LeeD · 08-04-2026, 08:49 AM

The problem is that benching or banishing the better player rarely leads to a better outcome. The example above runs counter to what most of us see and expect, yourself included. If I've got Gehrig and McGriff as choices at first base, and Gehrig gets off to a terrible start, swapping in McGriff is unlikely to improve the situation. Even if McGriff turns out to be better over the remainder of the week, removing Gehrig also removes the chance that Gehrig will bounce back and put up the expected numbers (which are better than what we'd expect out of McGriff).

I agree that PT is a card game; but it isn't as straightforward as playing something like Blackjack or Hearts. It's akin to playing Hearts but finding out that your King sometimes loses to the Jack. Frustrating, but I don't think it's as widespread as you're making out. In any case, if the Jack beats the King 25% of the time, we should still choose to play the King.

cwhitman · 08-04-2026, 09:30 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by LeeD

The problem is that benching or banishing the better player rarely leads to a better outcome. The example above runs counter to what most of us see and expect, yourself included. If I've got Gehrig and McGriff as choices at first base, and Gehrig gets off to a terrible start, swapping in McGriff is unlikely to improve the situation. Even if McGriff turns out to be better over the remainder of the week, removing Gehrig also removes the chance that Gehrig will bounce back and put up the expected numbers (which are better than what we'd expect out of McGriff).

I agree that PT is a card game; but it isn't as straightforward as playing something like Blackjack or Hearts. It's akin to playing Hearts but finding out that your King sometimes loses to the Jack. Frustrating, but I don't think it's as widespread as you're making out. In any case, if the Jack beats the King 25% of the time, we should still choose to play the King.

exactly: it's a card game, it always had been a card game. the goal is to put your pieces in play to enhance your odds. but it'd be a bad game if the person with the best pieces always won.

i always tell people, once you stop thinking about PT as a baseball sim and more as a baseball skinned card game, you can let go of your predispositions about the game and will be able to get much better.

Substituted · 08-05-2026, 11:21 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by LeeD

The problem is that benching or banishing the better player rarely leads to a better outcome. The example above runs counter to what most of us see and expect, yourself included. If I've got Gehrig and McGriff as choices at first base, and Gehrig gets off to a terrible start, swapping in McGriff is unlikely to improve the situation. Even if McGriff turns out to be better over the remainder of the week, removing Gehrig also removes the chance that Gehrig will bounce back and put up the expected numbers (which are better than what we'd expect out of McGriff).

I agree that PT is a card game; but it isn't as straightforward as playing something like Blackjack or Hearts. It's akin to playing Hearts but finding out that your King sometimes loses to the Jack. Frustrating, but I don't think it's as widespread as you're making out. In any case, if the Jack beats the King 25% of the time, we should still choose to play the King.

Think of it like poker. Your Aces aren't going to win every time, but they will win much more often than they lose.

There's going to be variance involved, but if you continually put yourself in the best situations possible by playing the correct cards, it's going to work out for you in the long run.

usa_hank · 08-05-2026, 06:03 PM

I get it. I don't disagree that you want to put the best team out there with the best chance to win (that sounds like a Maddenism). You're right, it's been obvious that it's tougher to bring a player up mid-season and see him perform well. However, it can happen.

Here's the thing - what if there truly is this rolling modifier as stated above, and by day 2 or 3 you have 75% knowledge that your Aces are playing like 4s on the season. Why bet on them?

I'm simply offering up a hypothesis here that, if true, would most definitely affect how good players play PT. Do I have any statistical proof of this yet? No. Do what you want with that info.

LeeD · 08-05-2026, 08:04 PM

Well, your initial post offers some evidence that it's true. You're also in PeL, so you've been doing something right this year. It's counter-intuitive, but sometimes intuition is proven wrong by data. There's a lot of randomness in the performance of same cards on different teams. We also know that the devs make changes to the sim engine on occasion (fiddling with BABIP and PBABIP, for example). Those factors are in your favor.

On the other side is observation. Plenty of player cards go through rough patches, which are much more noticeable when they happen at the start of the season. The vast majority recover to put up numbers that are in line with their ratings. Some don't; but if you look at monthly splits, you'll often find that they played well later in the season but still ended up below expectations because of prior poor play. In effect, they dug themselves a hole and only managed to climb partway out.

Randomness in performance is difficult to measure because the playing field is not level. Different lineups and staffs, different parks, different strengths of division opponents (like getting placed in a division that has three of the four best teams, or none of the best teams).

As I said before, it's possible that the devs have hidden a seasonal or periodic variable in the cards. We'd have no way of knowing under normal circumstances. However, Occam's Razor says that the simplest explanation should always be preferred, and the simplest explanation is that some players just get beaten by a few handfuls of bad rolls.

yanko · 08-12-2026, 06:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cwhitman

not as much: see tournaments, which don't use the normalization

but no normalization would also lead to the game being broken more often in league. see, a couple years ago, when hitters were far better than pitchers and we had moonball in the end cycle, where every game was 10-7 and bullpens broke. or even this year, where expected hitting numbers are worse than you'd expect from the environment. normalization keeps things in control, even if it causes some other issues in the league environmnet

Doesn't that say more about how the game weighs hitter ratings vs pitcher ratings or that in a given time frame there are better hitter cards than pitcher cards (or vice versa) hence the results? The reason I mention the normalization is because the way i understand it, it's like a band-aid to "fix" the simulations that are based on ratings. I'd rather just see the ratings rule the day and if that means the cycle has periods where it's like the steroid era or the deadball era then all the better. I prefer that then rather having the same 2010 RE play out every week.

LeeD · 08-13-2026, 08:32 PM

This could create a Little Dutch Boy scenario for the devs, where they're spending valuable time plugging holes rather than developing the card sets they intended. A few years ago, before they decoupled home runs from BABIP, there was a stretch where the high BABIP hitters were dominating, even hitting more home runs than the sluggers. That wasn't directly related, but it shows what can happen game-wide when you make changes somewhere. Time is better spent trying to maintain a balance between pitching, hitting, and defense as part of overall card set development, and normalization tamps down on minor problems if leagues are flooded with too much pitching or hitting.

08-01-2026, 11:36 AM	#1
usa_hank Minors (Double A) Join Date: Jun 2025 Posts: 153	RNG and New Blood on your PT Have you ever had a player that just sucks in a season? A stud with a 130+ BABIP and 100+ AvoidK, maybe even 100+ HR, but he hits .188? And you're like "hey I'm going to stick with him, gotta be just bad rolls, he can only improve" but by the end of the season he's maybe around .200? I'm playing in PeL for the third straight season, and this season I literally had my studs in my lineup, but 3 of them were hitting an abysmal sub .210 in July, and 2 of my top starters were pitching 6+ ERAs. I was around 14 games under .500 ball at the all star break -- I was done. In PeL you just don't come back from that without a miracle. So I did what any insane PT player does - I yanked the softball pitching "studs" and the Mendoza-like position "studs" off the roster and put in guys who should be worse, non-variant guys like Mickey Mantle, the new Cody Bellinger all-star card, Jesus Made, Phil Niekro, Satchel Paige. These are guys who play fine in LD and HD, but who should actually be pitching 6 ERAs or hitting at the Mendoza line in PeL. Surprise - every one of them have suddenly reinvigorated my team. Mantle is now one of my top-3 hitters. Bellinger (more recently added) is on a Ted William's like tear. Phil Niekro is pitching better than all but 3 of the Johan Santana's in the league. (Full disclosure: I did bring up Altuve and said eff-you to my 2B defense, and I added Texiera as well, who has been raking compared to what my Gehrig was doing) I'm now at .500 ball a month and a half later. So I have to bring this up. I know this has come up in previous seasons on here when I was more of a lurker. But there's a weirdness about certain players on your team ending up terrible in any given season, and some ending up great. I'm convinced there's a player modifier, or a "streak variable" for every player that gets randomly assigned when that player plays in their first game in your PT season. I have a feeling this gets boosted or lowered based upon your player's performance in each game, and thusly you get "hot streaks" and "cold streaks" that affect your player's performance. Or, in this case, they start out hot. I can't believe that a player who should be in the bottom 25% of players in the league could be a stud in the league over a series of 600+ plate appearances. If there wasn't some hidden factor, it would be an anomaly not to regress closer to expected performance levels. But here we are, every season we see quite a few players play pathetically bad, and some who FAR outperforming their ratings. Right now in PeL there are some nonvariants that are destroying - a Maikel Garcia hitting .303 with 15 HR (and he's on a cold streak!), a Dobie Moore hitting .260 with 15 HR, a Dave Winfield hitting .335, etc. Yes, this is 3 out of 380+ position players in the league, but I bet everyone can find examples like this in your current leagues, players who should have no business hitting or pitching like they are. But now I'm seeing some pretty darn good performances with a couple of scrubs I put in. Am I getting lucky with some rolls? No doubt. But I'm also seeing first hand that new blood can instantly somehow become studs on your team. And I can only guess it's because of whatever "streak" factor gets set. Let's call it a come-out roll, for lack of a better term! TL;DR- If you've got some guys who should be studs on your team, but are playing like garbage, replace them, even if your replacements should be worse. You never know what kind of come-out roll they'll have. Last edited by usa_hank; 08-01-2026 at 05:32 PM.

08-01-2026, 05:30 PM	#2
cwhitman All Star Reserve Join Date: Mar 2017 Posts: 729	this is funny, because the bigger theory is that "new players are bad" because of a rust factor that exists in the base game that might still exist in PT. i think it's still largely just variance in all cases (though the rust theory could potentially have legs) __________________ OOTP affiliate streaming competitive content on www.twitch.tv/cwhitdcfc as well as strategy and tips content on https://www.youtube.com/@CWhitDCFC Free PT Data app: https://cwhitstats.com

08-01-2026, 10:39 PM	#4
cwhitman All Star Reserve Join Date: Mar 2017 Posts: 729	yeah: i think it's MOSTLY variance, but the fact that rust does exist in the base game actually does lend to a possibility that it could exist in PT. __________________ OOTP affiliate streaming competitive content on www.twitch.tv/cwhitdcfc as well as strategy and tips content on https://www.youtube.com/@CWhitDCFC Free PT Data app: https://cwhitstats.com

08-03-2026, 12:18 AM	#6
yanko Minors (Rookie Ball) Join Date: Sep 2015 Posts: 28	I wonder if this would still be an issue if the game wasn't trying to match the year end stat totals of the given RE. __________________

08-03-2026, 02:44 PM	#10
cwhitman All Star Reserve Join Date: Mar 2017 Posts: 729	the hot/cold sign is all past looking: it is not forward looking. the way rust exists in the base game is that if you don't play players in spring training, they will start slower, from what i read. the theory would be that every player would be "rusted" early in the season, and gain it back, but if you put a player in, they'd still have to work off the rust. again, do not know if it exists, just connecting the dots between a potential base game mechanic and theories people have had. i have seen no real evidence of it existing statistically. __________________ OOTP affiliate streaming competitive content on www.twitch.tv/cwhitdcfc as well as strategy and tips content on https://www.youtube.com/@CWhitDCFC Free PT Data app: https://cwhitstats.com

08-01-2026, 08:22 PM	#3
LeeD All Star Reserve Join Date: Jan 2022 Posts: 954	Rust theory certainly has legs. Can't count the number of times that a pitcher like Vida Blue got shelled after being added to the roster midseason. I'd say it's about a 50-50 chance. There's also this weird thing where the newly added hitter goes 0-3 with a walk first time out. I've seen this one literally hundreds of times. For the rest, it's most likely RNG modified by the league totals algorithm. The "new player" penalty, if it exists, also lasts for only a few games. After that, he will usually recover and play in accordance with his ratings. The question about whether superior players bounce back, and why they were sucking to begin with, is still a mystery to me. I've seen pitchers go 1-10, 5.50 in the first half and then finish 14-13, 3.20. I've also seen guys who were terrible remain terrible. My Ty Cobb had a 1.7 WAR season sandwiched by two 7 WAR seasons early in this cycle, hitting only .265, which was crazy considering how good that Contact was back in April. Second-worst WAR in his first ten seasons was 3.7, and that was toward the end of his time as the Contact King. Is it just RNG, or is there something else under the hood like the OP suggested? We'll likely never know. Secret sauce is secret, and all we can do is react by replacing or hold tight and hope for a bounce back. My two cents is that the better players are still highly likely to give the better performances going forward, despite what's happened previously.

08-03-2026, 08:00 AM	#7
atomzero Minors (Triple A) Join Date: Aug 2007 Posts: 204	Johan Santana, Lefty O'Doul, and Mel Ott were all absolute trash after I added them, but I can't say that every new card plays out that way for me.

08-03-2026, 09:33 PM	#12
LeeD All Star Reserve Join Date: Jan 2022 Posts: 954	It's possible, but we have to remember that the difference between hitting .300 and hitting .200 over the course of a 600 AB season is 60 hits, which isn't a huge number. It's about 0.4 hits per game played. Add together RNG, fatigue, park factors, opposing pitchers, batting ratings, defensive ratings, and league totals algorithms and it seems even smaller. It might just be that the massive underperformances (which are easily seen and remembered) are individual players who fell through a crack in the sim engine. I've complained before that wild season-to-season variance, which is not uncommon in PT, is actually quite uncommon among elite players, especially if we account for age and injuries. So yes, a Silver-level player might have experienced a lot of volatility over the course of his career, but a Perfect almost certainly didn't (absent injuries). Ty Cobb hit .316 or better every year, with the exception of his rookie season (only 41 games). Even accounting for the high quality of opposition in PT, his spread ought to be somewhere around 50 points of batting average and not 100. However, the PT card gurus have a habit of cherry-picking great seasons from mostly-ordinary players when creating Perfect and Diamond cards, so the volatility is offscreen, We see the season where Pitcher A went 25-10 with an ERA of 2. We don't see the season where he went 10-20 with an ERA of 4. To that extent, the volatility creeps in anyway, either by design or by accident. TLDR: It's still a game and has to be played like one. Sometimes it's not at all straightforward, but usually it is. In most cases, the better players play better.

08-04-2026, 08:49 AM	#14
LeeD All Star Reserve Join Date: Jan 2022 Posts: 954	The problem is that benching or banishing the better player rarely leads to a better outcome. The example above runs counter to what most of us see and expect, yourself included. If I've got Gehrig and McGriff as choices at first base, and Gehrig gets off to a terrible start, swapping in McGriff is unlikely to improve the situation. Even if McGriff turns out to be better over the remainder of the week, removing Gehrig also removes the chance that Gehrig will bounce back and put up the expected numbers (which are better than what we'd expect out of McGriff). I agree that PT is a card game; but it isn't as straightforward as playing something like Blackjack or Hearts. It's akin to playing Hearts but finding out that your King sometimes loses to the Jack. Frustrating, but I don't think it's as widespread as you're making out. In any case, if the Jack beats the King 25% of the time, we should still choose to play the King.

08-05-2026, 06:03 PM	#17
usa_hank Minors (Double A) Join Date: Jun 2025 Posts: 153	I get it. I don't disagree that you want to put the best team out there with the best chance to win (that sounds like a Maddenism). You're right, it's been obvious that it's tougher to bring a player up mid-season and see him perform well. However, it can happen. Here's the thing - what if there truly is this rolling modifier as stated above, and by day 2 or 3 you have 75% knowledge that your Aces are playing like 4s on the season. Why bet on them? I'm simply offering up a hypothesis here that, if true, would most definitely affect how good players play PT. Do I have any statistical proof of this yet? No. Do what you want with that info. Last edited by usa_hank; 08-05-2026 at 06:05 PM.

08-05-2026, 08:04 PM	#18
LeeD All Star Reserve Join Date: Jan 2022 Posts: 954	Well, your initial post offers some evidence that it's true. You're also in PeL, so you've been doing something right this year. It's counter-intuitive, but sometimes intuition is proven wrong by data. There's a lot of randomness in the performance of same cards on different teams. We also know that the devs make changes to the sim engine on occasion (fiddling with BABIP and PBABIP, for example). Those factors are in your favor. On the other side is observation. Plenty of player cards go through rough patches, which are much more noticeable when they happen at the start of the season. The vast majority recover to put up numbers that are in line with their ratings. Some don't; but if you look at monthly splits, you'll often find that they played well later in the season but still ended up below expectations because of prior poor play. In effect, they dug themselves a hole and only managed to climb partway out. Randomness in performance is difficult to measure because the playing field is not level. Different lineups and staffs, different parks, different strengths of division opponents (like getting placed in a division that has three of the four best teams, or none of the best teams). As I said before, it's possible that the devs have hidden a seasonal or periodic variable in the cards. We'd have no way of knowing under normal circumstances. However, Occam's Razor says that the simplest explanation should always be preferred, and the simplest explanation is that some players just get beaten by a few handfuls of bad rolls.

08-13-2026, 08:32 PM	#20
LeeD All Star Reserve Join Date: Jan 2022 Posts: 954	This could create a Little Dutch Boy scenario for the devs, where they're spending valuable time plugging holes rather than developing the card sets they intended. A few years ago, before they decoupled home runs from BABIP, there was a stretch where the high BABIP hitters were dominating, even hitting more home runs than the sluggers. That wasn't directly related, but it shows what can happen game-wide when you make changes somewhere. Time is better spent trying to maintain a balance between pitching, hitting, and defense as part of overall card set development, and normalization tamps down on minor problems if leagues are flooded with too much pitching or hitting.