Hall of Fame or nah? - Follow-up

[Westheim]

I just posted over there in the original thread, but then noticed how dead the OOTP 19 Forums are at this point.

But Jonny Toner, the subject of this thread of old has appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot, and we'll find out whether he makes it in but brief a time. Depending on how the offseason continues for me (dead 94-losses team has lots of terrible players to sort through ), I might make it to the ballot reveal to-day ...!

[lencombs]

Looks like he had a couple injury years in his prime, innings pitched and Games Started were lower, or he would have got closer to 200 Wins. Still 183 wins and sub 3.00 ERA should be good enough to get in.

[UltimateAverageGuy]

As an avid follower of your dynasty thread for 2 years now there is no doubt Toner is a lock Hall Of Famer

[Westheim]

Didn't quite get there yesterday, but I'll now throw up why over in the dynasty thread. We might be victims, but we're not the worst victims!

[Cobby]

One thing to keep in mind when evaluating pitchers for the hall of fame is that the game calculates career ERA+ incorrectly.

Toner's career ERA+, calculated correctly, should be 140. Still excellent, but not over-the-top excellent like 152 would be.

[Westheim]

Mmm-mm-mm... …mmmww- -m-m-m-hh...h...ha-aappy …!!

[NoOne]

152 era+, if it was a struggle to get in, that's a shame.

why doesn't it calculate it correctly? 140 is still a sure-fire hoF in all but the tightest selection processes. if your hof is only the top 1-2 percentile of qualified players, that might get tight. it's not a standard distribution curve, so i don't really have a good feel for where some basic points lie.

[Cobby]

Originally Posted by NoOne

152 era+, if it was a struggle to get in, that's a shame.

why doesn't it calculate it correctly? 140 is still a sure-fire hoF in all but the tightest selection processes. if your hof is only the top 1-2 percentile of qualified players, that might get tight. it's not a standard distribution curve, so i don't really have a good feel for where some basic points lie.

The game calculates ERA+ by doing a weighted average by IP of yearly ERA+. This can lead to wildly inaccurate results. Here's an example:

Let's say that the league average ERA was exactly 4.00 for three years in a row. We would expect two pitchers who had exactly the same number of earned runs over those three years and pitched exactly the same number of innings would also have exactly the same career ERA+ for those three years. But that's not what you get by doing a weighted average of ERA+. Say our two pitchers both pitched 180 innings each year. Pitcher 1 was Mr. Consistency and had 80 earned runs each of those years. This works out to an ERA of 4.00 each year and an ERA+ of 100 each year. The weighted average comes out to 100 - as it should.

Now consider pitcher 2, who had exactly the same number of earned runs over those three years, but distributed like this: 120 the first year, for an ERA of 6.00 and an ERA+ of 67 (66.66667). 20 the second year for an ERA of 1.00 and an ERA+ of 400, then 100 the third year for an ERA of 5.00 and an ERA+ of 80. Exactly the same number of earned runs, but distributed differently. The weighted average method says this pitcher has a career ERA+ of 182!

The correct way to do the calculation is to average the inverse of ERA+ (100/ERA+ = ERA-). Then you do the weighted average as normal. This gives you a career ERA-. When you take the inverse of this, you get the correct value for career ERA+. Do that for the two pitchers above and you see that the both now have career ERA+ of 100. Clearly this is the correct result.

Are you listening developers?

(I did post this recently in the bug reports forum)