Player Rating Adjustments and Prospects

[uptownupton]

First of all, I love the game. It's awesome.

That said, I'm an absolute baseball geek and would love to be able to give input on some player ratings. There are a few player rating edits I'd love to see, or else, I'd just love the ability to edit player ratings.

1. Bryce Harper's potential contact and power. Scouts have almost unanimously given Harper a true 80 grade for power. This almost never happens. He should have the best power potential on the game, at least on par with Stanton. His contact potential, however, is too high (70/80) and should be 60-65.

2. Desmond Jennings eye potential is too low (55/80). He has the same rating as Elvis Andrus. Andrus has a career walk rate of 8.5%. Jennings walked 11% as a rookie and was right about that mark in the minors. If anything, he will improve on that rate with more experience. His potential should be minimum 60/80, possibly 65/80.

3. Same as above for Jason Heyward. His potential is 60/80, but his advanced approach for such a young player should warrant a 65/80 at least. He walked at a 14.6% clip as a rookie, then regressed to 11.2% during his poor sophomore season. Based on his minor league track record, he should get back to that ~15% mark.

4. Joey Votto's contact rating/potential is too low at 65/80. A career .313 hitter should warrant a 70/80 grade.

5. Joe Mauer should have a 70/80 gap rating and a 40/80 power rating. His current ratings are 60/80 gap and 50/80 power. He won't hit 20+ and probably won't hit 15+ HRs again, but he will hit 40 doubles again.

6. Matt Kemp's contact rating is too high. He's a career .294 hitter who had a great .324 average last year. However, he also had the highest BABIP (.380) of his career. 28 points higher than his career average. He's more of a .294 hitter than a .320 hitter. Not good enough for a 70/80 grade.

Lastly, I've simmed through a few seasons with different teams and multiple times Jurickson Profar and Miguel Sano have absolutely bombed and become total bums. Not sure what's happening, but it's frustrating. Along those lines, I think Sano should get a power potential bump. I've seen him rated in the 70 range by multiple scouts.

[uptownupton]

I realize these may come off as nitpicky...and they kind of are. At the least, I would love the ability to edit player ratings. Overall, the player ratings on this game are great.

Also, I realize not every prospect pans out, but Profar and Sano seem to continually bomb, so not sure if there's an issue with them specifically.

[McGuiser]

The experience of having the same two players fail to meet expectations suggests that the gamer is not privy to all of the information about a player.

Somewhere in the code is the process by which the game decides when and how much a player's ratings change. Perhaps the computer assigns a random factor from the very beginning without the gamer knowing.

One 60/70 shortstop might if ths happens be "destined" to fail while another is "fated" to meet his potential. If this is in the code, it might be factored nto the AI's analysis of trades . . . A legitimate cheat to help make the AI competitive, IMHO, if it exists. . . . And this would explain while ib your simulations the same player always disappoints.

I first wondered about this when I realized that in evaluating trades one player or another was prized or avoided by several teams despite their different reactions to similar players at the same position (similar in age, ratings, salary, etc.). I think that the AI knows something that I do not. On the other hand, it is possible that the AI simply applies a calculation formula that differs from my own inconsistent analyis of player attributes.

One bit of information we do not have in iootp (but do in the full version) is the player's greed. We discover that In iootp only when we start negotiating. There might well be more hidden bits of information