ootp park factors question

[snepp]

That's why I make sure that park factors in my leagues average out to 1.000. I may use "real" parks for my fictional teams or something and you can end up with some funky PF averages overall if they don't see a little manual TLC.

[Brad K]

Originally Posted by itsmb8

My understanding is the modifiers set the desired statistical output, ratings adjust the distribution, and park factors adjust stat output after the fact.

I wonder where manager's strategy falls in that list.

[Rain King]

Originally Posted by snepp

That's why I make sure that park factors in my leagues average out to 1.000. I may use "real" parks for my fictional teams or something and you can end up with some funky PF averages overall if they don't see a little manual TLC.

Yes, this is kind of the definition of park factors. They are how the stadium impacts output based on the league average. So, for that to truly work you need them to average out to 1.000 or else you are skewing your league totals.

Generally, it won't have a huge impact because most stadiums don't deviate that much from the average. However, if you have a number of funky parks that impact may grow.

[Rain King]

Originally Posted by Brad K

I wonder where manager's strategy falls in that list.

I would imagine they are on the same level as the park factors. They are impacting the results during actual game simulation.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by HonusWagner

If all PFs were set to 2.000 for HR would HR output double? If I understand this correctly it wouldn't since the factors designate relative output. Player HR output for the season would be near RL.

If you did this and then turned on recalc, the effect would be that there would be right around exactly the same HRs in every park but they'd be at the league average. The yearly recalc sims the season 3 times, applying global factors each time to get the league averages to line up with historical data.

I also think there's an upper limit to where HR park factors stop having an effect (somewhere north of 1.5 but I'm not sure) but if you set everything to a uniform 2, it's not going to do what you think it's going to do if you're also recalculating for the era.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by MathBandit

It would be weird if it did take park factors into account. If I take the current MLB teams/players and have them play in parks where its 275 down the line and 300 feet to straightaway centre, I'd be pretty upset if HR numbers didn't skyrocket.

I'm not following. For *historical* seasons, I'm saying the game should look at the *historical* park a player played half their games in and adjust the numbers based on that. The classic issue here is if you wanted to trade Joe Dimaggio for Ted Williams and see how both players would perform in parks that are better suited for their handedness. You would not of course adjust Joltin' Joe as though he played half his games in Fenway because his historical stats are based on playing half his game in Yankee Stadium; he should have higher ratings if anything (and Williams' might be lowered a little bit since Fenway during this time was murder to pitchers of all stripes).

For fictional/current-year seasons, of course there would be no change.

[MathBandit]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

I'm not following. For *historical* seasons, I'm saying the game should look at the *historical* park a player played half their games in and adjust the numbers based on that. The classic issue here is if you wanted to trade Joe Dimaggio for Ted Williams and see how both players would perform in parks that are better suited for their handedness. You would not of course adjust Joltin' Joe as though he played half his games in Fenway because his historical stats are based on playing half his game in Yankee Stadium; he should have higher ratings if anything (and Williams' might be lowered a little bit since Fenway during this time was murder to pitchers of all stripes).

For fictional/current-year seasons, of course there would be no change.

What I'm saying is that let's suppose I build a world where I take the 2023 MLB rosters/teams and relocate them all to local Little League diamonds where the field dimensions are 275 down the line and 300 to straightaway centre- instead of playing in major-league parks.

The way to achieve that (or one way to achieve it, I suppose) is to take all parks and change their HR park factors to 2.000. (Yes, it would also affect all the other factors, but for the sake of this lets assume HRs are either the only thing that changes or the only change we care about). If I moved them all to those tiny parks with HR 2.000 in all of them, I would not be happy with the simulation results if the game decided that since everyone is 2.000 then no one is 2.000 and that Judge and Ohtani are still only able to hit ~40-50 HRs/year even in those stadiums. My expectation would be (similar to the results) that power numbers go through the roof and the value of those HRs plummets accordingly (note that Judge has 95 HRs but less than 6 WAR).

[Syd Thrift]

If you don't recalc, this would basically be what happens (with the caveat that I think park HR rate tops out at some point and I think it's under 2). If you recalc... I guess I'm not sure what you'd expect to happen otherwise. The whole point of the recalc is to make the game stats output, given the park factors, talent levels, and everything else, to look like what happened in real life.

One thing I do think needs to get looked at a bit more is that it's hits and not singles that's factored for and I'm not sure how that hits... like, a stadium that's a 103 for hits or whatever but all the extra hits are caused by HRs should be internally like a 99 or whatever for singles. My guess is that there's *some* calculation that's done there but it's done against the modern breakdown of extra base hits and so it's probably way off in older leagues (although since everything still coalesces around 100, it's not noticed so much).

[RonCo]

Originally Posted by MathBandit

What I'm saying is that let's suppose I build a world where I take the 2023 MLB rosters/teams and relocate them all to local Little League diamonds where the field dimensions are 275 down the line and 300 to straightaway centre- instead of playing in major-league parks.

The way to achieve that (or one way to achieve it, I suppose) is to take all parks and change their HR park factors to 2.000. (Yes, it would also affect all the other factors, but for the sake of this lets assume HRs are either the only thing that changes or the only change we care about). If I moved them all to those tiny parks with HR 2.000 in all of them, I would not be happy with the simulation results if the game decided that since everyone is 2.000 then no one is 2.000 and that Judge and Ohtani are still only able to hit ~40-50 HRs/year even in those stadiums. My expectation would be (similar to the results) that power numbers go through the roof and the value of those HRs plummets accordingly (note that Judge has 95 HRs but less than 6 WAR).

If you change all the park factors to 2.0, then, yes, HR will inflate...and better players will hit more.

Unless, I think, as Syd says, the autocalc is run. I tend to forget about autocalc because I don't think I've ever used it. But its purpose is to force league-wide totals back toward the baseline stats output you list as "desired," so I can see that it would essentially rebaseline the "average" park factor.

Regardless, unless something changed in the last version and the OOTP manual just wasn't updated, dimensions are entered to make the cosmetics of play-by-play read well.

[RonCo]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

If you don't recalc, this would basically be what happens (with the caveat that I think park HR rate tops out at some point and I think it's under 2).

I haven't played with it in a long time, so my memory could be faulty, but I think HR adjustments continued to be influenced until 2.0. Maybe it was 1.8?

Regardless, the concept is all there, and it's helpful to understand this aspect of the game's dynamics if you are among those who are trying to set the game up to feel right.

[itsmb8]

Im saying this with zero evidence, but I REALLY dont believe it works how Syd was suggesting on if you hit recalc afterwards.

If so, wouldn't you have to up park factors every year if you run recalc every year? How I believe it runs is recalc sets the target EOY stat outputs with ratings setting the distribution, with park factors setting the ballpark's influence with 1 always being the baseline.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by itsmb8

Im saying this with zero evidence, but I REALLY dont believe it works how Syd was suggesting on if you hit recalc afterwards.

If so, wouldn't you have to up park factors every year if you run recalc every year? How I believe it runs is recalc sets the target EOY stat outputs with ratings setting the distribution, with park factors setting the ballpark's influence with 1 always being the baseline.

No, that's not the way the yearly autocalc works. What happens - and why it takes a couple minutes to do the job when you set it to go at the beginning of the season - is this basic workflow:

1. The entire season is played out with the rosters/lineups/rotations as currently set but with no injuries happening to the guys currently on the 25 man rosters.

2. The game takes a look at the league totals and then adjusts them up or down according to the "real life" year it's supposed to be based on. If HRs were 10% too low, the game bumps HR rate by 10%, and so on.

3. A second and third replay are run and the same modifiers are installed.

... By the third replay the modifiers are usually really, really close to what you'll need to get accurate-looking stats for the season as a whole.

There are of course a lot of ways this can theoretically go sideways, although all of this is headed off the larger the league you're running the autocalc on. If you're running a 4 team league with auto-calc and you have an ace pitcher or hitter get hurt, that will absolutely monkey with the stats. If you control every team in the league (hi me) and you don't set the 25 man rosters with the full-year rotation, lineups, and so on, that can have a pretty bizarre effect on the numbers. A lot of the time low-occurrence stats will be off just because they don't happen enough for the game to take their proper frequency into account with the "Monte Carlo" style simulations it does. And if for some reason you do stuff leaguewide that differs from how the game runs things, that could theoretically skew the stats as well (although if you've just, say, set all teams to steal a lot, the game will play with those settings and then adjust the modifiers accordingly).

And yeah, if you set all the parks to have 2.000 HR ratings and then run autocalc, it'll wind up dropping the LTMs by half or more and every team will essentially be playing in a 1.000 park (although if you copy and paste the LTMs into your minors, assuming your minor league parks all average a 1 HR rating, they'll all hit around half as many HRs as they "should").

Incidentally, too, the "preseason predictions" are the average per-year team and individual totals for that 3-year sim, which can also have some screwy stuff in it, like if you're moving from a big defense year to a big offense year, the predictions might skew a bit more pro-pitcher than what you'll actually see in the game. And of course, since injuries happen, you're bound to see predictions for 60+ HR seasons and the like pop up more often than they actually occur.

[itsmb8]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

No, that's not the way the yearly autocalc works. What happens - and why it takes a couple minutes to do the job when you set it to go at the beginning of the season - is this basic workflow:

1. The entire season is played out with the rosters/lineups/rotations as currently set but with no injuries happening to the guys currently on the 25 man rosters.

2. The game takes a look at the league totals and then adjusts them up or down according to the "real life" year it's supposed to be based on. If HRs were 10% too low, the game bumps HR rate by 10%, and so on.

3. A second and third replay are run and the same modifiers are installed.

... By the third replay the modifiers are usually really, really close to what you'll need to get accurate-looking stats for the season as a whole.

There are of course a lot of ways this can theoretically go sideways, although all of this is headed off the larger the league you're running the autocalc on. If you're running a 4 team league with auto-calc and you have an ace pitcher or hitter get hurt, that will absolutely monkey with the stats. If you control every team in the league (hi me) and you don't set the 25 man rosters with the full-year rotation, lineups, and so on, that can have a pretty bizarre effect on the numbers. A lot of the time low-occurrence stats will be off just because they don't happen enough for the game to take their proper frequency into account with the "Monte Carlo" style simulations it does. And if for some reason you do stuff leaguewide that differs from how the game runs things, that could theoretically skew the stats as well (although if you've just, say, set all teams to steal a lot, the game will play with those settings and then adjust the modifiers accordingly).

And yeah, if you set all the parks to have 2.000 HR ratings and then run autocalc, it'll wind up dropping the LTMs by half or more and every team will essentially be playing in a 1.000 park (although if you copy and paste the LTMs into your minors, assuming your minor league parks all average a 1 HR rating, they'll all hit around half as many HRs as they "should").

Incidentally, too, the "preseason predictions" are the average per-year team and individual totals for that 3-year sim, which can also have some screwy stuff in it, like if you're moving from a big defense year to a big offense year, the predictions might skew a bit more pro-pitcher than what you'll actually see in the game. And of course, since injuries happen, you're bound to see predictions for 60+ HR seasons and the like pop up more often than they actually occur.

Is this all for historical re-sims, or MLB/fictional not based on an IRL season?

How should you run this for MLB/fictional?

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by itsmb8

Is this all for historical re-sims, or MLB/fictional not based on an IRL season?

How should you run this for MLB/fictional?

If you assign a specific season and tell it to autocalc, it will autocalc based on that season. I do this with fictional leagues (my current league is set in 1972). For "current year" seasons you won't necessarily run autocalc; if you did, it might be against the last year where data are available, I don't know.