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Old 12-12-2013, 09:27 PM   #61
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Originally Posted by chucksabr View Post
I don't see why the athletic ability to play baseball should not be evenly distributed in a way that, say, height is.
I don't understand the particular relevance of the distribution of human heights. Human weights aren't normally distributed. All kinds of human attributes are not normally distributed. Why should we expect baseball skill to be?

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Originally Posted by chucksabr View Post
The data is not misleading at all. This is exactly the point. The vast majority of major league players are not even what you would call major league average. They don't end up playing very many games because they are not good enough to.
First I think you're arguing a straw man. I obviously don't think baseball skill is on a bell curve; I just said above I don't even find it likely baseball skill is normally distributed in the population at large, so why would I think it is in MLB? You'd naturally expect skill distribution at the MLB level to look like the tail of a distribution. I've said that all along.

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It's the best way to show that performance among major leaguers occurs on a steep hockey stick slope, and not on a Bell Curve.
As I showed above, you'll get the same kind of tail-distribution in any cumulative statistic any time luck determines survivorship, even when skill plays no role whatsoever in determining results. I just gave an example where the outcomes would be normally distributed if there were no survivorship effects, but where you get a tail of a distribution when there are. And there are obvious survivorship effects in baseball, since managers don't keep playing guys who seem to suck. So you'd expect to find a distribution that looks like yours even if skill played no role whatsoever in baseball, just as long as managers continued to play the guys who put up good stats and cut the guys who don't.

When your hypothesis is "baseball skill at the MLB level is distributed like the tail of a bell curve", and then you investigate that question using data that is guaranteed to look like the tail of a bell curve if baseball skill doesn't even exist, the methodology is obviously flawed. It is not "the best way" to investigate the question; you can't disprove your hypothesis.

But I don't really care about persuading you of that, just as long as no one reads anything into the percentile numbers you quote from your table. They're completely meaningless, and I just want to be sure no one has the impression OOTP ratings distribution should be in any way based on them.

Last edited by injury log; 12-12-2013 at 09:28 PM.
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Old 12-12-2013, 09:42 PM   #62
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You may be mischaracterizing my position. I'll readily grant (who wouldn't?) that a vanishingly small number of people have the ability to sustain a long career at the highest level of professional baseball. But you cannot make a chart of career WAR and assign any meaning to the percentiles that chart gives you, because you aren't comparing players on the same basis.

One major issue with any study like this is that players who put up good seasons (and therefore players who tend to have longer careers) have been, more often than not, lucky. This is why Tango, when working out the aging curves that OOTP uses in its player development model, has to regress performance to the mean.
I think this is a point worth contemplating. I myself have come around to taking seriously the hypothesis that just about any player in the major leagues could be an all-star, at least at some point, if he had the good luck of playing his formative years in a system with good coaching that's also a good fit for his personality.

A certain coach in another organization might see something in your play—a hitch in your swing, a flaw or missed opportunity in your fielding positioning, or whatever—that your coach in your current organization doesn't see. Plus, your personality might be such that you're less receptive to input from your current coach, because of his personality or the way he communicates, than some other coach in another system might be, and your progress might be stunted in that way.

We have all seen a player leave one organization as an OK player and go to another organization to become an all-world talent. David Ortiz leaps to mind as one example. Brett Favre is another. Writers call it "change of scenery", but obviously it's something more than just that. I think system and coaching has more to do with it than is generally given credit for. And who knows how many promising careers got derailed because those players had the bad luck of starting out in the wrong system? There's no way to know, at least by me. Maybe someone is studying that very thing as we speak.

That being said, I don't believe anything like the idea that every major leaguer is equally talented when they arrive and it's only a matter of coaching that makes the difference. Not at all. I don't think coaching is the difference between a Quadruple-A career and a 100 WAR career. I think the difference between a good system and a bad system is more marginal, maybe +10 to +20 WAR throughout a career. But I do acknowledge the vagaries of luck as you referred to them. I just don't think it changes the hockey stick/cliff representation of player talent/performance all that significantly, if at all.
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Old 12-12-2013, 09:44 PM   #63
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Originally Posted by injury log View Post
I don't understand the particular relevance of the distribution of human heights. Human weights aren't normally distributed. All kinds of human attributes are not normally distributed. Why should we expect baseball skill to be?



First I think you're arguing a straw man. I obviously don't think baseball skill is on a bell curve; I just said above I don't even find it likely baseball skill is normally distributed in the population at large, so why would I think it is in MLB? You'd naturally expect skill distribution at the MLB level to look like the tail of a distribution. I've said that all along.



As I showed above, you'll get the same kind of tail-distribution in any cumulative statistic any time luck determines survivorship, even when skill plays no role whatsoever in determining results. I just gave an example where the outcomes would be normally distributed if there were no survivorship effects, but where you get a tail of a distribution when there are. And there are obvious survivorship effects in baseball, since managers don't keep playing guys who seem to suck. So you'd expect to find a distribution that looks like yours even if skill played no role whatsoever in baseball, just as long as managers continued to play the guys who put up good stats and cut the guys who don't.

When your hypothesis is "baseball skill at the MLB level is distributed like the tail of a bell curve", and then you investigate that question using data that is guaranteed to look like the tail of a bell curve if baseball skill doesn't even exist, the methodology is obviously flawed. It is not "the best way" to investigate the question; you can't disprove your hypothesis.

But I don't really care about persuading you of that, just as long as no one reads anything into the percentile numbers you quote from your table. They're completely meaningless, and I just want to be sure no one has the impression OOTP ratings distribution should be in any way based on them.
Just because you don't understand them doesn't mean they're meaningless.

I'm providing you a reasonable hypothesis, one many people buy into including people who write baseball for a living, and you're basically saying, "it's possible it might not be true, so I don't believe you." You're not disproving it; you're just saying you don't believe it. And that's your right, but there's really nothing for me to say in response. So we'll just have to part friends on the question.

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Old 12-12-2013, 09:59 PM   #64
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Well, the average OOTP user...downloads the game, manages his favorite team and that's it.
According to OOTP itself, OOTP MLB play (modern and historical) outnumbers OOTP fictional play three to one.

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Old 12-12-2013, 11:20 PM   #65
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Originally Posted by chucksabr View Post
you're basically saying, "it's possible it might not be true, so I don't believe you."
It's hard to have a discussion about this if you keep interpreting my position as "I disagree with your hypothesis". I've never said any such thing; I've said the exact opposite:

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You'd naturally expect skill distribution at the MLB level to look like the tail of a distribution. I've said that all along.
What I disagree with is your methodology. I've explained why it's mathematically flawed twice, and why there's no hard numerical data you can take from it, at least if you're interested in determining how ratings ought to be distributed in OOTP.

If instead you're comparing actual statistical output from OOTP with statistical output from real life, then yes, you'd want a close match there. But that's not what we've been discussing.
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Old 12-13-2013, 01:00 AM   #66
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If instead you're comparing actual statistical output from OOTP with statistical output from real life, then yes, you'd want a close match there. But that's not what we've been discussing.
That's what you are discussing. Chucksabr and I are busily refuting the mistaken concept that talent at the MLB level is on a bell curve.
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Originally Posted by Markus Heinsohn View Post
Well, the average OOTP user...downloads the game, manages his favorite team and that's it.
According to OOTP itself, OOTP MLB play (modern and historical) outnumbers OOTP fictional play three to one.

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Old 12-13-2013, 01:31 AM   #67
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That's what you are discussing. Chucksabr and I are busily refuting the mistaken concept that talent at the MLB level is on a bell curve.
I'm fairly sure no one is defending that position.
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Old 12-13-2013, 02:47 AM   #68
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I'm fairly sure no one is defending that position.
They were. They've been overrun.
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Originally Posted by Markus Heinsohn View Post
Well, the average OOTP user...downloads the game, manages his favorite team and that's it.
According to OOTP itself, OOTP MLB play (modern and historical) outnumbers OOTP fictional play three to one.

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Old 12-13-2013, 10:04 AM   #69
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Originally Posted by injury log View Post
It's hard to have a discussion about this if you keep interpreting my position as "I disagree with your hypothesis". I've never said any such thing; I've said the exact opposite:



What I disagree with is your methodology. I've explained why it's mathematically flawed twice, and why there's no hard numerical data you can take from it, at least if you're interested in determining how ratings ought to be distributed in OOTP.

If instead you're comparing actual statistical output from OOTP with statistical output from real life, then yes, you'd want a close match there. But that's not what we've been discussing.
I see—we're on the same side, but you're arguing for argument's sake. OK, got it. Kurt, is that you?
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Old 12-13-2013, 01:06 PM   #70
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They were. They've been overrun.
Don't be so quick to mistake an unwillingness to engage in another pointless, sterile internet debate with agreement or surrender. My main interest here is that OOTP's player creation formulas account for the outliers at the high end of the talent spectrum. Whether that's a bell curve or a pyramid or a torus or a Moebius strip is a matter of no importance to me. Lukasberger seems to be someone who not only recognizes that point, but also appears to have some influence with the developers. You, on the other hand ... well, not so much. So go ahead, continue dreaming your dreams of a major league where the majority of hitters bat .175, the majority of pitchers throw 60 MPH fastballs, and you always get the last word.
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Old 04-20-2014, 06:36 PM   #71
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Great read
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Old 04-20-2014, 08:49 PM   #72
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I dunno about the WAR chart or curve.

Here is my thinking. On an average major league tea. There are what, 13, position players? 8 play on any given day. That makes about 5 just below average or 4 below average and one or two developing. Another 3 or 4 will be Johnny Peralta types. Despite the hype in St Louis he is just an average starting shortstop. The remaining 3 or 4 are your studs. Molina, Holliday, Craig, whoever. It just seems like an even distribution to me.

The lowest guys have a negative Wins Above Replacement level. The middle of the pack is average and Molina types are positive.

In my opinion any WAR talk without negative numbers is missing an element. If my fantasy team starts Adrian Chambers all year instead of searching the waiver wire for an AVERAGE outfielder we are throwing away points same as the Cardinals would be throwing away wins.
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Old 04-25-2014, 12:00 AM   #73
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It's like I've set the way back machine for 5-10 years ago.
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Old 04-25-2014, 12:41 AM   #74
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It's like I've set the way back machine for 5-10 years ago.
I remember reading some threads like this. You helped me put Ratings and Stats in context then . It was very useful and helped me enjoy the game when I first started playing. I always read a thread if I see you post in it.

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Old 04-25-2014, 10:25 AM   #75
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The problem with this argument is that there is no way to be "proven" 100% correct. I can draw bell curves over the "normal" population and hack off the right end of it and call that "baseball players," and that seems right...but then I could do a similar thing with a exponentially falling curve (presuming the whole of the human population acts like the "baseball players" curve. Either results in the same thing. But then someone comes along and says "but, not all possible players make it...so the falloff makes it look like a bell curve!" and they could be right. But they could be right and still be wrong. I mean, you could take only the far right part of the curve, and reduce the magnitude of the curve (which says that people who are really good at baseball are a little less likely to quit than those who are merely good). I think, in the end, this is probably the right way to look at it (and it actually fits bot sides of the argument as long as you don't degrade the "poor side" of the curve to the point that it actually resembles a bell curve).

At the end of the day, all you can really say with much certainty is that the eyeball test and basic statistical tests tell you that at any one time you have very few actual baseball players with outstanding ability, and a whole lot of actual baseball players with poor (below MLB replacement level) skills, and a relative few players who can do just fine. This "feel" based distribution certainly matches the "right side of the bell curve" far better than it matches the "full bell curve" to my sense of aesthetics.

But I also predict that ten years from now you'll still see fans arguing the subject.
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Old 04-25-2014, 10:30 AM   #76
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I dunno about the WAR chart or curve.

Here is my thinking. On an average major league tea. There are what, 13, position players? 8 play on any given day. That makes about 5 just below average or 4 below average and one or two developing. Another 3 or 4 will be Johnny Peralta types. Despite the hype in St Louis he is just an average starting shortstop. The remaining 3 or 4 are your studs. Molina, Holliday, Craig, whoever. It just seems like an even distribution to me.

The lowest guys have a negative Wins Above Replacement level. The middle of the pack is average and Molina types are positive.

In my opinion any WAR talk without negative numbers is missing an element. If my fantasy team starts Adrian Chambers all year instead of searching the waiver wire for an AVERAGE outfielder we are throwing away points same as the Cardinals would be throwing away wins.
Replacement level is across an entire league, not focused on one team. It is possible (and expected by most fans, I think ) to have every player on a single team have positive WAR.
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Old 04-25-2014, 10:34 AM   #77
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On a related note, I was driving through Miami a couple weeks ago and I came across a building that had a phrase painted on it that seems applicable to these kinds of arguments. It read: "I'll see it when I believe it!"
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Old 05-06-2014, 12:29 AM   #78
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Old 05-06-2014, 03:51 AM   #79
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and THIS is why these off topic threads in the OOTP general discussion forums are a BAD IDEA
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Old 05-12-2014, 04:50 PM   #80
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What the problem in my option (which could be useless to you) is that there are a very much lack of players like Johnny MacDonald who is 39 played 16 years only a full time Short stop for one year and shouldn't have been, he is not a good hitter but is (was) a top notch fielder who in OOTP terms 10 plus or Blue fielding ratings. There is always a wee bit better a hitter in OOTP with a little bit less defense or a SS with 8 range 8 error 5 arm should not be getting as many outs as a guy with a 5 range 8 error 8 arm on balls hit in the hold even tho he can get it doesn't mean he can throw it, there should be a bigger deal on Defense so the guy with better defense stays on the team in some cases.

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