What is a "Neutral, Modern Major League Environment"

[Scruff]

I have been playing around in the editor a ton . . . man the early 1870s are tough to get right.

Question - has anyone from OOTP (or anyone else I guess) said exactly what a "neutral, modern Major League environment" is? Is it based on 2012 MLB averages? Something else?

I'm trying to convert stats from 1871 to give players realistic ratings, but I have no idea what I should be converting to (what an average player would have for H, 2B, 3B, HR, BB, HBP, K, given X number of AB).

Also are ratings like running speed, stealing ability, baserunning skills, sacrifice bunting and bunting for a hit relative to the year being played or all of baseball history.

Thanks for any help.

[khucke]

I'm not sure I understand your question.
When you import a historical season from any of the databases, the ratings are supposed to produce historically plausible stats. So you wouldn't have to change anything. Or do you want to have historical players play in today's run enviroment?

I vaguely remember "neutral, modern Major League environment" when exactly does it appear? Is it at league creation?

[Scruff]

That phrase appears in the editor. So you can put stats in from the 'neutral, modern, major league environment' and the editor will create ratings that match those stats.

There are issues with how the game imports from the Spritze HS DB for the NA players. I think it's because of how the stats were neutralized, especially for years before the player had major league stats. Say a guy who made him NA debut at 22 in 1875 but shows up at 18 in 1871 in the Spritze DB.

Check the pitchers for example, and look at the real life stats from the neutralized database. You can see them under a player's real life stats on his profile page.

Many of the pitchers have the same stats from age 18 through when they debuted in MLB, or stats that gradually improve until the debut, which makes sense.

The problem is that things were changing drastically back then, so copying back worse stats from say 1875 back to 1871 actually results in stats that were pretty good in 1871, even though those same stats would be terrible in 1875. So you end up with a guy like Dory Dean whose entire career was 30 starts in 1876 where he was 4-26 with a 58 ERA+; he comes in as an 55/80 when I import 1871.

Or Frank Abercrombie. His entire career was 0-for-4 with a strikeout in 1871. He made 2 errors in the only game he played at SS. He comes in as a 68/68.

Levi Meyerle - he didn't walk a lot, even for the NA . . . but modern equivalent, he would walk 22x in 550 AB based on 1871-75, the import treats him like a guy that will walk 1x in 550 AB. His eye rating is a 1 on a 1-200 scale.

I turned scouting off, to see if that was the issue, but that's not it. Maybe I'm just misreading some things?

[Spritze]

The neutered HS Spritze stats are based on a very few things

1) The players age
2) the level the player played at while that age
3) the players minor league stats for that year
4) the players major league stats for that year neutered to 750 runs per team per 154 game year

Basically that is it. There are a few other career things but they are pretty minor.

As there are many possible ways to score 750 runs that allows fairly small changes in the shape of a players career to get them to a 750 run environment.

As a simple example a Double A player who hits .365 in 1928 will generate very different batting ratings and stats if he does it at age 22 than he would at age 33. It would also be different if it happened in 1928 as opposed to 1938 as the run environments would be different. It is all always in flux.

[Scruff]

I think that might be part of why I was noticing some things that looked off . . . 750 is too high . . . Baseball-reference.com has dropped their neutralized stats to 716, because they saw a great majority of hitters stats being inflated when they used 750, which is what Bill James used in the NHBA. 716 is the historical average since 1900.

Neutralized and Converted Stats - Baseball-Reference.com

They also don't adjust at all for batter strikeouts, and only adjust walks as a percentage of hits, which is a mistake - those should be adjusted to league norms. Did you use baseball-references neutered stats or develop your own?

But even if everything were perfect, the 1870s are just tough to get right. Way too many moving parts, tons of fielding errors and things changed rapidly.

It's a great database and I definitely appreciate all of the work that went into it. I wish OOTPs engine was a little more advanced when importing, that's all. For those 5 AB type careers I'm seeing goofy things like actual BABIP for hitters of 1 with potential 70, while also seeing 200 avoid K with potential 50.

None of that would be a big deal if I were just doing an MLB sim, but since I want to do an independent minors world with relegation too, I need those short career guys to be a little more robust.

Is it possible for me to change the stats of certain players manually before importing them, or are those in the un-editable .odb file? I don't think I saw that in master.csv. Assuming I can't, the only way to tweak them is manually in the editor, right?

[Scruff]

The neutered HS Spritze stats are based on a very few things

1) The players age
2) the level the player played at while that age
3) the players minor league stats for that year
4) the players major league stats for that year neutered to 750 runs per team per 154 game year

Basically that is it. There are a few other career things but they are pretty minor.

So does this mean that the player's real future peak isn't taken into account? I'm still learning how OOTP imports players - that might be where my issue is.

Say you have two players who at 22 hit .280/.350/.450. One never has a better year the rest of his career. The other in real life got progressively better and peaked at age 29 hitting .340/.440/.575.

If we import both players at age 22, do they end up with the same peak? Or will be second player end up with much better potential?

Also, looking through the help I noticed there are no potentials for fielding, stealing, etc. So if I were creating a player from scratch, should I put in his fielding based on his actual level at the age he is, and the game will develop him naturally? Or do I put in his peak? How does the game know Ernie Banks moves to 1B when he gets older, but Derek Jeter doesn't - assuming I import them both at age 22?

Thanks for any help, would really appreciate any insight.

[Scruff]

One other question . . . if I do edit these players, is there a way to save them for future reuse, in say another league, or into a file or something? Or would I have to re-edit everyone for each new universe I start?

[Spritze]

Originally Posted by Scruff

Did you use baseball-references neutered stats or develop your own?

OOTP veteran Garlon developed the OOTP newt procedures years before BBref even had a glimmer of an idea.

Use of Recalc will update potentials and positions as the years go by.

[Scruff]

Awesome thanks.

There's a ton of grey area on neutering too. I mean 750 runs in a modern environment where there are very few fielding errors, requires a lot more 'offense' than 750 runs in 1871, for example.

In 1871 teams averaged 10.47 R/G (each). But they only hit .287/.312/.384. That's because an average team made 7.6 errors/game, now they make .6.

What I'm trying to do is to neuter based on offense without worrying about the fielding. I think that's most realistic, maybe Garlon did that.

So instead of going off league R/G, I'm going off league Base Runs per game, using modern 'weights' on the offensive events. That would suggest 4.65 R/G in 1871, the other 5.82 R/G were because of the errors.

I realize it's a ton of work but I have some time - if I were able to come up with my own neutering, is there a way to import that into the game automagically, or would I have to manually update every player?

Ideally, I think the best (aesthetically pleasing), most balanced baseball was from 1977-1992 (excluding 1987, which was a crazy year, more like 1997 than anything around it). You could have players hitting 40 HR, stealing 70/80 or more bases and winning batting titles hitting .350. Teams could win with power or speed. I think the perfect year (for me) to normalize to, would be 1983. Bill James said something similar to this about 1980s baseball at the time.

If I want to do that, is there a relatively easy way to do that, assuming I get the translations right?

I think what I'd have to do to get things into the editor correctly is this:

Import players from Spritze HS or Garlon DB. This will take care of fielding, baserunning, sb ratings etc.

Translate the players batting (AB, H, 2B, 3B, HR, HBP, BB, SO are what the editor lets you work with) to modern environment (whatever that is - but based on some test imports it looks like it's 2012), then set the league totals and strategy to 1983 levels?

I realize this is massive customization. Just trying to figure out the best way to do it.

[Scruff]

I should say the other thing is that I don't want everyone in 1871 to have 2 or 3 (on the 2-8 scale) for power and 7 for speed. I don't want the pitchers to all have 2-3 stuff and 6-8 control and movement. I'd rather the ratings be relative to each other in the league as best as possible.

Thanks again for any help/advice.

[Spritze]

You will need to update each player every year as the game will remove your ratings every off season
OR
delete the odb files and change the CSV files to your liking. The game will base its ratings on the csv files if there is no odb.

[Scruff]

OK thanks!

Will the game do that if I just set players to a current rating (based on age 18-20 performance or something else for when I want to import them) and a potential (based on their 3-year peak) on creation, set it to use the development system and let it go - would that mean that I would only have to 'touch' the players once?

Also, if there a list of what the headings should be for each column the master.csv file? I can figure some of them out, but many have me stumped.

[Spritze]

The development system will develop some players, de-develop some players and just generally mess around with them. The development system can turn a Luis Aparicio type into a 50+ home run hitter in a very short time. Not sure this is what you are trying to attain.

[Scruff]

Oh wow . . . I wouldn't mind seeing Aparicio sometimes have a 22 year (as opposed to 18 in real life) easy HoF career (as opposed to his actual borderline HoF career), other times have a 10-12 year decent player career. I would like to see his peak as a 4.5-6.0 WAR type player, but I don't care if he peaks early or later than real life, or sometimes peaks at 3 and sometimes peaks at 7 or 8 WAR.

But I would want him to generally be a singles hitting SS with a good glove who steals bases. He averaged 5 HR/162 G (700 PA) in real life. If he averaged 2 or 10 I wouldn't care in OOTP. If he averaged 20 that would be an issue.

Neutered to my 1983 environment, he would be a .265/.315/.350 type of hitter. If that ends up being .300/.355/.395 with some luck, no issue. Or with bad luck .240/.290/.325 same thing.

But I wouldn't want him to end up being Cal Ripken.

Would setting the historical talent randomness to 1 (on the 1-200 scale) achieve this? Or would that be too extreme, maybe set to 20 or 50? I have no idea what the numbers mean other than 100 is 'normal' for OOTP.

[Spritze]

No one (but Markus) has any idea what the numbers mean. You'd need to try them to find out what works for you.

[Charlie Hough]

From the OOTP 14 manual ...

The Talent Change Randomness option is a numeric value from 1 to 200 that controls how random player talent changes are. For example, a 200 here would mean that talent changes are highly random, making it more likely that players would experience significant changes in talent over the course of their career. Tweak this if necessary if you feel that player talent changes are either too drastic or too conservative. 100 is the default.

[Scruff]

I think I'm almost there. Thanks for all of the help. I simmed an 1871 that came out pretty solid stats wise using the default Spritze DB, without manual edits.

My question (hopefully the last one) - is it possible to get the scouting ratings to be on a scale of average for the league, as opposed to average for all time?

Right now, (using 2-8 scale) all of the pitchers are 2-3 for stuff, with bad pitches and 6-8 for movement and control. All of the hitters except for a few are 2-3 for power, the few that aren't 2-3 are 4. Almost everyone is 5-8 for contact, 7-8 for avoid K, and 2-3 with a few 4s for eye.

Is it possible to get the ratings to scale so the league spread for everything is 2-8?

The stats are coming out good, but the ratings being on an all-time instead of league wide scale are throwing me off.