Thin Amateur Drafts

[BMW]

I've been consistanly the #30 team in the draft since moving to OOTP6. Scouting aside (I always pay top dollar to have Legendary/Legendary scouting anyhow), by the time the draft gets to the 30th pick there usually isn't a single player better than a 3-star prospect aside from the odd middle reliever.

Any comments on this?

BMW

[treedom]

don't look at the stars, look at the talents

[Da Cubs]

Originally posted by treedom
don't look at the stars, look at the talents

Ahh. But what if you don't have talent rating on? I just started a league where I have all rating off but the stars and misc. ( arm,defense etc.). I draft for 5 rounds and find that by the third round there's not a whole lot of talent left. Does increasing the number of rounds increase the talent available that much?

[Da Cubs]

OOps....I mean talent ratings off> Sorry.

[Mel_Ott]

By the middle of the third round I'd be shocked if there were any 3-star prospects left, myself. I think that's normal.

[Da Cubs]

Thanks Mel. But does that hold true if you had a 20 round draft?

[BMW]

Just to note, I was saying by the end of the <b>first</b> round that you're lucky to get a three-star non-reliever prospect.

[matskralc]

Originally posted by BMW
Just to note, I was saying by the end of the <b>first</b> round that you're lucky to get a three-star non-reliever prospect.

And a typical OOTP draft is about a 10th the size of the real MLB draft. I'd say that running out of studs before the end of the 1st sounds about right.

[BMW]

I was comparing it to OOTP5. My memory could be fuzzy, I admit. But my typical OOTP drafts are 20 rounds, which makes them about 1/2 the size, not 1/10 the size.

[BarryZito75]

I have had a similar problem. In the last draft I ran, there was one 5-star prospect and no 4.5 or 4-star prospects. Adjusting the player creating sliders will probably do the trick.

[Steve Kuffrey]

Ok, for one thing you DON'T want to have a 20 round draft, you'll end up with a TON a scrubs and have a clogged minor league system. Next, some of those "thin" picks in the later round are going to develop into good and some even great ballplayers. Some of the "5 star" gems in the first round or two are going to suck and never amount to anything. Most leagues do fine with the draft classes that the game creates, I don't think you are giving things enough time.

[Mel_Ott]

Another thing to think about is that the "blue star" prospect ratings are (IIRC) based on the population of prospects. If you already have good prospects in your league, it's going to take exceptional new guys to rate 4 or 5 stars. That might be causing your problem, too, or at least adding to it.

[metsgeek]

Originally posted by Mel_Ott
Another thing to think about is that the "blue star" prospect ratings are (IIRC) based on the population of prospects. If you already have good prospects in your league, it's going to take exceptional new guys to rate 4 or 5 stars. That might be causing your problem, too, or at least adding to it.

I believe that many people don't understand how the star system actually works.

Because I'm a teacher, I liken it to the difference between norm-referenced testing (like the Stanford 9's) and criterion referenced testing (like each state's individual tests).

OOTP's star system is similar to norm-referencing where the players are graded with respect to each other. The top prospect (in the entire league...not just the draft pool) gets rated as a 5 star prospect. However, a 5 star prospect is NOT the same from year to year. It simply depends on the quality of the players to whom they are being compared.

Many people see the star system as criterion-referenced, where each prospect is compared to a "standard". This leads people to believe that 5 star prospects are equivalent year-to-year.

One more thing that I feel people don't realize is that the gold star rating system compares each player within the pool of players at their designated primary position. This expalins why a hypothetical player can be rated as a 2 1/2 star player when his primary position is listed at CF, but changes to a 3 1/2 star player at SS, and a 5 star player at DH. Each pool has different players to be compared against.

Of course, I could be completely wrong

[sixfour210]

Originally posted by Steve Kuffrey
Ok, for one thing you DON'T want to have a 20 round draft, you'll end up with a TON a scrubs and have a clogged minor league system. Next, some of those "thin" picks in the later round are going to develop into good and some even great ballplayers. Some of the "5 star" gems in the first round or two are going to suck and never amount to anything. Most leagues do fine with the draft classes that the game creates, I don't think you are giving things enough time.

Never understood the "clogged minor leagues" concept either. Isn't that the way it is in real life? Aren't there a ton of players signed that are obviously not going to see any major league time but they just need to fill roster spots? I mean ideally, scouts sign guys that have a shot but ultimately they are just signed to fill spots.

I don't agree with having to avoid a full minor league system because the game doesn't handle it well. It should handle it well becasue that's the way it is in RL. I'm working on adjusting the player creation modifiers so the league's talent doesn't get too crowded but you can still maintain a full minor league system with a 20+ player draft.

[BMW]

Originally posted by Mel_Ott
Another thing to think about is that the "blue star" prospect ratings are (IIRC) based on the population of prospects. If you already have good prospects in your league, it's going to take exceptional new guys to rate 4 or 5 stars. That might be causing your problem, too, or at least adding to it.

Unless this has changed in OOTP6, that is incorrect. I do fully understand the system of the Gold Stars and how a glut of talent at a single position in a league will create a higher average talent and make it impossible to have a player that is 45% better than that level.

But you can read the OOTP5 post about the Star Ratings here:

http://www.ootpdevelopments.com/boar...threadid=35974

There, Markus is quoted by Steve as saying:
<b>"Prospects are rated differently, using a rather complex formula that does not use the league average, but solely the talent ratings + other ratings like speed, range, duration etc."</b>

So, unless there was a change between OOTP5 and OOTP6 that I do not know, the amount of good prospects in the league will not affect how many stars these guys have.

[Henry]

You guys are spending too much time worrying about the star ratings. They are only meant to give you a "current snapshot" of the talent level and they change as time goes on. With the new variations included in V6 having to do with the larger variances of success/failure, you can't take too much from what you see at the time of the draft. It's much more of a crapshoot than before. Time in the minors will tell you what you got.

And as far as the fill or don't fill minors, the issue is if the minors are "full" the AI has to move someone around for each and every add or subtract that happens. That requires the AI to be a ton smarter to do that correctly. The concept of leaving spots open and treating these as the "scrubs" means the AI has room to move players around without having to do a "domino process".

Henry

[HH20xx convert]

To get used to OOTP6 I have converted the same OOTP5 league about 10 times, stopping when I got to issues that I thought messed things up. In this process, I went through 8 separate January amateur drafts, and noticed a much greater variability in draft classes than I ever saw in OOTP5. One class literally had only 3 players with any realistic prospects (absent talent increases), none pitchers. The best draft class had about 2 1/2 rounds of good prospects. Generally, classes have been much thinner than OOTP5.

[BMW]

Originally posted by Steve Kuffrey
Ok, for one thing you DON'T want to have a 20 round draft, you'll end up with a TON a scrubs and have a clogged minor league system. Next, some of those "thin" picks in the later round are going to develop into good and some even great ballplayers. Some of the "5 star" gems in the first round or two are going to suck and never amount to anything. Most leagues do fine with the draft classes that the game creates, I don't think you are giving things enough time.

You're right, I'm not giving things enough time to see how these players pan out, but that's not really my point either.

Take any MLB draft. I have the 1998 Draft at hand here. Picks 31-50 (all after the first round) are:

• Chris George, lhp
  Ben Diggins, 1b-p
  Brad Wilkerson, of
  Nate Cornejo, rhp
  Aaron Rowand, of
  Choo Freeman, of
  Mike Nannini, rhp
  Chris Jones, lhp
  Mamon Tucker, of
  Jeff Winchester, c
  Jeff Urban, lhp
  Eric Valent, of
  Mark Prior, rhp
  Brad Baisley, rhp
  Gerald Laird, c
  David Kelton, ss
  Robbie Morrison, rhp
  Chad Hutchinson, rhp
  Marcus Sents, rhp
  Adam Dunn, of

Now I'm not looking at what these players would eventually become in the MLB. But at the time:

Gerald Laird, Ben Diggins, Jeff Winchester, Chris George and Mike Nannini were all 1st team All-American high school players.

Eric Valent and Brad Wilkerson were both 1st team All-American college players.

After just 40 games and 8 games respectively, Choo Freeman and Chad Hutchinson were ranked by BA in the top 100 prospects in baseball.

I suppose you could argue what each star means in OOTP, but between where they were drafted by the MLB teams, and the accolades they had before and immediatly after the draft, the <b>perception</b> of their future talent level would have been fairly high.

The Blue Stars in OOTP are meant to display the perception of their talent level. I'm not hoping that there should be more players later in the draft that become impact players, I'm just hoping to see more potential high-ceiling players after the first 10-15 picks.

Would adjusting those player generation sliders in the options menu help this?

BMW

[fluharty]

I agree with you BMW. There should be at least one round of solid picks, but this has never been the case with OOTP. There seems to be only a dozen or so good looking picks in any draft, regardless of the number of rounds you choose. Not all these guys will make it., but I want more good looking picks that fail.

As for clogging up the minors. If the development team implemented options years and minor league free agency then there should be no clogging problem. The real minors are six levels deep and can handle a 50 round draft with about 1/2 the guys signing. OOTP is three levels deep so should be able to handle 10 to 15 rounds without getting "clogged".

With 20 you may have to add things in like players not signing.

[Steve Kuffrey]

So what you are saying is that you want an "appearance" of one solid round of picks, atleast that is what I am understanding.