Draft pool low quality of players?

[RonCo]

Originally Posted by jaysdailydose

Fun is always going to be subjective, though. What I consider fun you may consider a waste of oxygen.

This is the issue that Markus has always dealt with. I do think that in this specific issue, the "sweet spot" of OOTP players would be a system that is designed as I noted above ... enough differentiation to support a robust (non-dart-boarded) draft process deeper into the flow, and enough development movement in both ways to provide both good surprises without killing all dreams. I have no idea if -you- would consider that fun, but I think the majority of human users would...though maybe the majority is only 51% ???

Don't think I am attempting to disparage your opinion, just trying to provide counterpoint and maybe help others, too.

Feeder leagues are great, too...though they have some of the same issues because those players are still generated in the same basic fashion and their development is managed the same way. I understand what you're saying, though.

[RonCo]

Originally Posted by lukasberger

I guess I don't see how this would be much different than the current system. What you describe is pretty much how I feel about the guys I get in a given draft now.

Additionally, your description implies that there should be something like 2 stars and 5+ real players per team per draft. That's really unrealistic, if you compare it to what teams typically get out of the real draft. If a team got that out of a specific draft IRL it would be considered one of the greatest drafts ever, if not the greatest.

Depending on how you define "star" most teams don't even get one star per year out of the draft and many, many times a given team will only get a couple MLB bench or AAAA type guys out of their entire draft in a given year.

Part of the issue with my post may be that I used the word "star" in two different ways. Let me try it this way:

The ideal system has a collection of prospects rated at 2*-5* that run through the first 2-3 rounds of a draft (with some flavor of likelihood of achieving that cap), and is linked to a development system that BOTH "kills" 40-50% or so of the early picks and reaches down and creates a scattering of great finds in the lower parts of the draft. So you should leave draft day with 1-2 guys (projected at at 3*-5* cap) you're really excited about being players some day, 1-3 guys (projected at 2*-3* cap) you figure have a good chance to help you some day, and a handful of unknown lottery tickets. Of the first group, 1 should generally yield a real player (often a high quality player of 3*-5* actual peak once developed). Of the second group, 1 should yield a major leaguer of some value (2*-4*, and occasionally a 5*, actual peak once developed). Of the third group, several should wind up playing (1*-2*), a few should be real players(2*-3*), and a rare bird should be a superstar (4*-5* actual peak when developed).

[Lukas Berger]

Originally Posted by RonCo

Part of the issue with my post may be that I used the word "star" in two different ways. Let me try it this way:

Appreciate it, but I guess I still think you're looking for too many players to be too good out of a given draft.

Go on Baseball Ref, pick a random team, then go through each of their drafts for a 10-20 year period.

You'll find that many of their drafts yielded no genuine long-term MLB caliber players who ended up putting up more than 2-3 WAR in their entire careers.

You'll find a few drafts where there were a couple strong MLB players, a draft or two where a team gets a couple genuine stars. But those are more rare than the drafts where a team essentially gets nothing other than AAAA or MLB backup type players.

[RonCo]

Originally Posted by lukasberger

It seems to me that some of the draft pool looking flat has to do with the mindset of the player, and people not really understanding just how complex and versitile OOTP's ratings can be, rather than the reality of the rating system in OOTP.

I love OOTP and the development team. I've been a part of it before, so I get it. But part of the issue with this kind of thinking is that it places all 'blame' for issues in system clarity on the user. Yes, I agree, if ever person who played OOTP dedicated themselves to understanding the deep nuances of the rating system, and thought about things just right, then everyone would be happy. A part of it is also related to the fact that at a 1-5 "star' resolution, it's very hard to capture these nuances. But in reality, the game's design could be better at displaying this, and could be a lot better at player creation and its coupling with the development algorithms. This is the root of the problem, in reality...or at least it was two years ago. But fixing it will be a lot of work.

OOTP is not like Madden, where anyone with a rating below 60 or so is trash. Guys can have some low ratings and still be decent players.

So let the game's star ratings show that.

Heck right this minute I'm adding real Italian League minor leaguers into the db. Most of them have current ratings in the teens and potential ratings from 20-60 or so. There's plenty of difference in OOTP even among those kind of guys.

That 20-60ish ratings range takes players with the ability to play in leagues, either well or badly, all the way from the Italian minor leagues or Czech league or whatever all the way up to US class A ball at the high end of the scale.

So let the star system show this. On the other hand, that differentiation is really quite meaningless to most owners. All they see is a guy who won't make it out of A-ball, so yes, they are all 1-stars. To tell them they should get excited about this level of differentiation seems like a losing game to me.

There's a TON of difference between a guy with a 30/200 rating in OOTP and a guy with a 60/200 rating. That may only show up as a point or two in the draft screen, if you're using the 1-10 rating scale, but that point or two is the difference between a career Italian minor league player and a guy who's a genuine US minor league caliber player who's likely to make it to class A ball or even higher in the US minors.

Again, while the differentiation between an Italian minor league guy and a guy who makes it to single-A is interesting to a few of us, I'm willing to bet that at least 70% of Markus's customers (or really, probably 90%), couldn't really care less about that. Those are all busts to them. I could be wrong, though. You know your customers better than I.

On the other hand, if those differentiations are that valuable and able to be separated out, show them to me in the star ratings.

I dunno ... maybe the world would be okay with 10-star gradients rather than 5. Got me. *shurg*

[The Wolf]

Originally Posted by Walsh06

Nope not to me or you. The mistake would be by the programmers and they did it intentionally so therefore its not a mistake.

Don't even try to tell me what my opinion is. To me this will always be a huge mistake.

[jaysdailydose]

Originally Posted by lukasberger

Appreciate it, but I guess I still think you're looking for too many players to be too good out of a given draft.

Go on Baseball Ref, pick a random team, then go through each of their drafts for a 10-20 year period.

You'll find that the majority of their drafts yielded no genuine long-term MLB caliber players who ended up putting up more than 2-3 WAR in their entire careers.

You'll find a few drafts where there were a couple strong MLB players, a draft or two where a team gets a couple genuine stars. But those are much more rare than the drafts where a team essentially gets nothing other than AAAA players.

My hometown Tigers are one of the best examples of this. Look at how bad the Tigers were for years after say 1987. as I said earlier there are only 2 players since 1978 who could be considered MLB stars in Gibby and Verlander. (And only JV since 87) There was a few major league regulars in Tony Clark and Justin Thompson and Travis Fryman.

35 years and 2 stars and 6 productive players? What is being suggested almost makes that the expected haul of one, MAYBE two drafts.

I'm by no means suggesting it is perfect, just that people tend to overestimate how many stars there are in a given draft along with players with the talent to even make the majors.

[Lukas Berger]

Originally Posted by lukasberger

Go on Baseball Ref, pick a random team, then go through each of their drafts for a 10-20 year period.

You'll find that the majority of their drafts yielded no genuine long-term MLB caliber players who ended up putting up more than 2-3 WAR in their entire careers.

You'll find a few drafts where there were a couple strong MLB players, a draft or two where a team gets a couple genuine stars. But those are much more rare than the drafts where a team essentially gets nothing other than AAAA players.

I'll do this, just to make my point. Picking the Angels since they're first on B-R's list.

1994 - No genuine MLB players. Three AAAA type guys with the best putting up 3.2 career WAR.

1995 - Two strong MLB regulars and borderline stars, Erstad and Washburn. Nothing else.

1996 - One solid MLB RP in Scott Schoenweis, 3.3 career WAR. Nothing else.

1997 - One borderline superstar in Troy Glaus. One solid MLB average to slightly better pitcher in Scott Shields. A AAAA type guy in Watt Wise.

1998 - One decent MLB player in Bobby Crosby and his 5.4 career WAR. He didn't sign as a 38th round pick though. So the Angels got no one with positive career WAR from this draft.

1999 - One good MLB pitcher and in John Lackey. Also career backup Alfredo Amezaga and his 3.2 career WAR.

2000 - Two strong unsigned picks in Aaron Hill and David Murphy. Of signed players there's a strong MLB regular in Mike Napoli and a good closer in Bobby Jenks. Nothing else.

2001 - Two long lived MLB backup types in Casey Kotchman (7.5 WAR) and Jeff Mathis (2.1). Also AAAA pitcher Rich Hill who went unsigned.

2002 - Strong regulars Howie Kendrick (23.3 WAR) and Joe Saunders (9.6). Nothing else.

2003 - Solid utility guy Sean Rodriguez (8.0), all time bust Brandon Wood and unsigned Brandon Morrow.

2004 - Star Jared Weaver and solid regular Mark Trumbo. Nothing else.

2005 - Only Peter Bourjos though unsigned picks included Buster Posey and Chris Davis.

2006 - Nothing really. Hank Conger (2.0) and Jordan Walden (2.4).

2007 - Unsigned Matt Harvey and nothing else.

Obviously if you go ahead a couple years you get Trout, but I stopped at a point where most of the guys from a given draft have been fully developed.

Anyhow you get the idea from that. This was a solid team during nearly the whole covered time period and they never got more than two genuine MLB players in a given draft, though there were a couple drafts where those two guys were borderline stars. There were as many drafts that yielded no MLB caliber players as there were that yielded multiple star type players.

So to summarize, a 14 year period yields this:

Two genuine stars: Glaus and Weaver.

Five strong MLB regulars, stars in their best years: Erstad, Washburn, Kendrick, Saunders and Napoli.

Several decent MLB players though not regulars or if regulars not long lived: Bourjos, Trumbo, Rodriguez, Kotchman, Jenks, Shields, Mathis and Schoenweis.

So 14 years yields 13 genuine MLB players, this during a period that the Angels were considered to be premier drafters and developers of talent and regularly had highly ranked farm systems.

[Lukas Berger]

Originally Posted by RonCo

A part of it is also related to the fact that at a 1-5 "star' resolution, it's very hard to capture these nuances. But in reality, the game's design could be better at displaying this, and could be a lot better at player creation and its coupling with the development algorithms. This is the root of the problem, in reality...or at least it was two years ago. But fixing it will be a lot of work.



So let the game's star ratings show that.



So let the star system show this. On the other hand, that differentiation is really quite meaningless to most owners. All they see is a guy who won't make it out of A-ball, so yes, they are all 1-stars. To tell them they should get excited about this level of differentiation seems like a losing game to me.



Again, while the differentiation between an Italian minor league guy and a guy who makes it to single-A is interesting to a few of us, I'm willing to bet that at least 70% of Markus's customers (or really, probably 90%), couldn't really care less about that. Those are all busts to them. I could be wrong, though. You know your customers better than I.

On the other hand, if those differentiations are that valuable and able to be separated out, show them to me in the star ratings.

I dunno ... maybe the world would be okay with 10-star gradients rather than 5. Got me. *shurg*

I agree with all you've said here. The star ratings could be much, much better and I think that would really solve this problem, if only by changing perceptions.

[BIG17EASY]

Great discussion going on here. Enjoying it immensely.

However, two things are jumping out to me (and this is just my opinion). First, I think too much emphasis is being placed on the star ratings. To me, stars are nice to differentiate between someone with superstar potential and someone without superstar potential. But to get to the real differences between players, I think you need to look at specific ratings. That's where the nuances can be found that lukasberger speaks of.

Secondly, I think wanting to be able to draft two players who are three- to five-star potential is not realistic. In my experiences with OOTP -- I play mainly MLB quickstarts and have been doing so religiously for four years -- a three-star player is a borderline All-Star. In other words, if he has 10 years as a starter, he's probably going to make the All-Star Game three to five times. That's a draft stud. Asking for there to be approximately 60-65 of that type of prospect in each draft is too many. I understand some people are ok with a fairly high percentage of those 62 players being busts who don't reach that level of talent, but there has never been an MLB Draft in which the first two rounds were mostly filled with potential All-Stars.

Personally, I enjoyed the pre-OOTP14 drafts because of the large amount highly rated draft prospects, but quickly became annoyed when their ratings would tank halfway through their first minor league season. In the new system, it's disheartening to see all one-star potential players left after the first 20-25 picks, but I find the long-term results more rewarding. I feel like I'm getting a true prospect in the first round, not a "flip of the coin" prospect who could flame out immediately. And I get a big thrill out of a guy who's drafted after the fifth round and ends up contributing in the majors.

Just my (very long) two cents.

[RonCo]

Originally Posted by lukasberger

Appreciate it, but I guess I still think you're looking for too many players to be too good out of a given draft.

Go on Baseball Ref, pick a random team, then go through each of their drafts for a 10-20 year period.

You'll find that the majority of their drafts yielded no genuine long-term MLB caliber players who ended up putting up more than 2-3 WAR in their entire careers.

You'll find a few drafts where there were a couple strong MLB players, a draft or two where a team gets a couple genuine stars. But those are much more rare than the drafts where a team essentially gets nothing other than AAAA players.

Realize that a 2-3 WAR player is a good player--probably a 3*-4* kind of guy. 4-6 WAR are probably 4*-5* guys. 7+WAR are pure 5* territory (Just putting down some arbitrary boundaries there). Heck, a .5-2 WAR season is probably a 2*-3* expectation.

In my days as a beta I spent weeks and months digging through such draft lists. I did a crapton of the early work on looking at yield. I think you are mis-characterizing the yields of draft classes. Every year there are 30 teams that draft players. Last year 230 players made their debut in the majors (almost 8/team). This year (less than a month into the season), 41 players have made their debutes (already 1.3/team). These new players come from someplace. Not all of them stick, but all of them are deemed worthy enough to try.

137 guys posted 2+ WAR last year. That's only 4.5 per team. So, yes, a 2 WAR is pretty good. But that happens every year. With career lengths factored in, I don't think it's too far-fetched to say that an "average" team draft results in two guys every year who make a significantly positive contribution to a major league baseball team. Some are only 1.5 WAR, but that's a significant achievement...and if they can keep that up, they will have a nice little career as a utility guy or a lefty out of the pen or whatever.

You're telling OOTP users that they just need to look at the game more appropriately. Perhaps it would be just as useful if the team looked at player and performance quality more appropriately, also ... and the two meet in the middle.

[BIG17EASY]

Originally Posted by RonCo

Realize that a 2-3 WAR player is a good player--probably a 3*-4* kind of guy. 4-6 WAR are probably 4*-5* guys. 7+WAR are pure 5* territory (Just putting down some arbitrary boundaries there). Heck, a .5-2 WAR season is probably a 2*-3* expectation.

In my days as a beta I spent weeks and months digging through such draft lists. I did a crapton of the early work on looking at yield. I think you are mis-characterizing the yields of draft classes. Every year there are 30 teams that draft players. Last year 230 players made their debut in the majors (almost 8/team). This year (less than a month into the season), 41 players have made their debutes (already 1.3/team). These new players come from someplace. Not all of them stick, but all of them are deemed worthy enough to try.

137 guys posted 2+ WAR last year. That's only 4.5 per team. So, yes, a 2 WAR is pretty good. But that happens every year. With career lengths factored in, I don't think it's too far-fetched to say that an "average" team draft results in two guys every year who make a significantly positive contribution to a major league baseball team. Some are only 1.5 WAR, but that's a significant achievement...and if they can keep that up, they will have a nice little career as a utility guy or a lefty out of the pen or whatever.

You're telling OOTP users that they just need to look at the game more appropriately. Perhaps it would be just as useful if the team looked at player and performance quality more appropriately, also ... and the two meet in the middle.

I don't have the experience that you have with OOTP, but I absolutely would not count a guy with a 2-3 WAR season as a three- to four-star player. I could be wrong, and I'll check with my current league when I get the chance, but I would expect that type of player to be a two-star guy, at best, depending on how he achieved that WAR.

[Lukas Berger]

Originally Posted by RonCo

Realize that a 2-3 WAR player is a good player--probably a 3*-4* kind of guy. 4-6 WAR are probably 4*-5* guys. 7+WAR are pure 5* territory (Just putting down some arbitrary boundaries there). Heck, a .5-2 WAR season is probably a 2*-3* expectation.

A 2-3 WAR guy for a career is not a good player. I'm talking career, not a single season.

[Ruthian23]

Originally Posted by markprior22

My problem with the new draft system is, once you get past the first 10 or so players, there is really nothing that separates any of the remaining guys in the draft. You can look at some things such as work ethic, durability...stuff like that but all my eyes see are a bunch of equal (terrible potential) players. I feel like, after my first round pick, I might as well let the computer draft because I don't get any info from my scout that differentiates any of the players in a meaningful way. That's not "fun" for me.

I feel that IRL when it's time to make a 7th round selection, teams have their eyes on a few certain players for whatever reason. I've checked out long before that in OOTP.

Maybe the scouting module needs to be upgraded to allow us to scout high school and college players during the year while we play. We could then have more info on those players and have fun trying to figure out what chances to take. Some feedback from the scouts referencing the draft would be helpful..."wouldn't consider drafting him in first few rounds"..."maybe worth a shot in the later rounds"...you could go on and on. The draft pool isn't suddenly released to MLB a month before the draft...they have been following guys for a long time. I know OOTP is a game and can't follow everything exactly...I would just like more scout input into my draft day decision making rather than shots in the dark.

Speaking of AI drafting...does the AI take into consideration what your organizational strengths and weaknesses are when drafting? There are times when you want to take the best player available but there comes a point where, if your team is last in 3B in all the minors, the AI might want to consider drafting a decent 3B prospect before they are all gone.

Tremendous game that eats up far too much of my time. Great discussion on this topic.

I could have made this post, especially the bolded part. Very well said. I am fine with the potential levels for most players being low or uncertain (a vast majority of players don't make it anywhere, after all, and that's accurate), but with the way it is, I see little reason to participate in the draft after the first couple of rounds (at most) since all of the players look more or less the same to me. I think your solutions are constructive, too. I'd love to see additional information on prospects, maybe something like their boom/bust potential in different areas, things like that, to help make drafting decisions more meaningful and not completely random and luck based, which may be somewhat true of the MLB draft but isn't any fun in the game.

We know from books like Moneyball and whatnot that GMs take the draft very seriously and have deep draft boards and definitely have specific guys they want to take even deep in the draft, but I don't get that feeling in an OOTP draft. I feel completely powerless, like my decisions in that regard are meaningless and random.

[RonCo]

Originally Posted by jaysdailydose

My hometown Tigers are one of the best examples of this. Look at how bad the Tigers were for years after say 1987. as I said earlier there are only 2 players since 1978 who could be considered MLB stars in Gibby and Verlander. (And only JV since 87) There was a few major league regulars in Tony Clark and Justin Thompson and Travis Fryman.

35 years and 2 stars and 6 productive players? What is being suggested almost makes that the expected haul of one, MAYBE two drafts.

I'm by no means suggesting it is perfect, just that people tend to overestimate how many stars there are in a given draft along with players with the talent to even make the majors.

The problem with using any one club's draft as the barometer (even if what you say is true), is that the fact of the matter is that baseball as a collective _always_ has great players throughout it, and that those players come from somewhere. If Detroit has been a prospect desert, than someone _else_ is yielding twice as many stars as the average team.

I also suggest that you may only be looking at guys who actually yielded to Detroit's team. This would "miss" a guy like John Smoltz, who was moved from Detroit's system to Atlanta before he became a Hall of Famer. To get this design right, the game needs to look at the whole of baseball. Not one team.

[jaysdailydose]

To be honest, I haven't used star ratings in several versions. I use the 20-80 scale pretty much exclusively now, I think I have one league that I rarely play that uses the 2-8.

I will setup a test run possibly because pretty much every one of my tests but one large one on 15 has been with historicals or feeders. The leagues I had last year with generated draft classes (non-feeders) I was generally very pleased with.

The great thing is that we do have modifiers. As a base, I am very pleased with the system in general while also being very pleased that we have the functionality to change things!

[jaysdailydose]

Originally Posted by RonCo

The problem with using any one club's draft as the barometer (even if what you say is true), is that the fact of the matter is that baseball as a collective _always_ has great players throughout it, and that those players come from somewhere. If Detroit has been a prospect desert, than someone _else_ is yielding twice as many stars as the average team.

I also suggest that you may only be looking at guys who actually yielded to Detroit's team. This would "miss" a guy like John Smoltz, who was moved from Detroit's system to Atlanta before he became a Hall of Famer. To get this design right, the game needs to look at the whole of baseball. Not one team.

This was strictly just a quick look at the first round. I actually ran a fictional sim last night while I was sleeping that didn't use feeders now that I think of it, I'll take a look through it and see what it looks like on the leaderboards at least.

[Lukas Berger]

Originally Posted by RonCo

Not all of them stick, but all of them are deemed worthy enough to try.

Those guys who don't stick but are deemed worthy to try are one star players in game. So I'm not sure what you're arguing there.

Originally Posted by RonCo

I think you are mis-characterizing the yields of draft classes...

With career lengths factored in, I don't think it's too far-fetched to say that an "average" team draft results in two guys every year who make a significantly positive contribution to a major league baseball team. Some are only 1.5 WAR, but that's a significant achievement...and if they can keep that up, they will have a nice little career as a utility guy or a lefty out of the pen or whatever.

Not at all. You're highly overrating what teams get from a typical draft.

Look at the Angels list above, taken from a period when they were a top team and considered elite at drafting and development.

I could have cherry picked my Mets or the Tigers or Royals from that same time period and you'd see some really awful drafts, year after year.

The Angels were actually killing it in those years and they only got 13 MLB regulars in 14 years.

[BIG17EASY]

Originally Posted by RonCo

The problem with using any one club's draft as the barometer (even if what you say is true), is that the fact of the matter is that baseball as a collective _always_ has great players throughout it, and that those players come from somewhere. If Detroit has been a prospect desert, than someone _else_ is yielding twice as many stars as the average team.

I also suggest that you may only be looking at guys who actually yielded to Detroit's team. This would "miss" a guy like John Smoltz, who was moved from Detroit's system to Atlanta before he became a Hall of Famer. To get this design right, the game needs to look at the whole of baseball. Not one team.

Not all of those players come from the draft. Many are coming as international free agents or posted Japanese league players. Which is another reason why the draft pool should not be loaded with multi-star prospects.

[jaysdailydose]

Originally Posted by lukasberger

A 2-3 WAR guy for a career is not a good player. I'm talking career, not a single season.

I knew what you meant, they definitely got sidetracked. (No offense intended, of course, you guys just missed that he meant career.)

[Lukas Berger]

Originally Posted by BIG17EASY

Not all of those players come from the draft. Many are coming as international free agents or posted Japanese league players. Which is another reason why the draft pool should not be loaded with multi-star prospects.

Yes, thank you. Pretty darn nearly half the elite players in MLB come from the July 2nd IFA signings or other leagues.