Personnel

[PSUColonel]

Is it me, or are the AI teams not very aggressive in pursuing the best personnel? Seems like another unfair advantage for the human player. Just something I've noticed.

[EvilGenius]

Does anyone know how much of an effect this actually has on the game?

I've never tried experimenting with going the El Cheapo route and seeing how badly my players develop with poor quality personnel.

The longer I play this game, the less I spend on Scouting. I pay way more attention to stats as it is, so why throw away precious money (I'm in the lower third of my league budget-wise). It wasn't easy the first time I did it, I couldn't bring myself to believe I could go cheap on something as critical as scouting, but then I found I didn't really need it. Personnel might be the next thing I have to wean myself off of.

[RchW]

I don't use coaches and scouts anymore. The primary reason was that I couldn't find good ones. The AI seemed to have them all signed.

[The Game]

I have signed Tony La Russa set to legendary and lost 100 games and then signed Robin Ventura and won 90. Same squad both times. I have yet to see any direct result from having great coaches with a great team or bad coaches with a bad team.

[RchW]

Originally Posted by The Game

I have signed Tony La Russa set to legendary and lost 100 games and then signed Robin Ventura and won 90. Same squad both times. I have yet to see any direct result from having great coaches with a great team or bad coaches with a bad team.

This is the problem in a nutshell. There have been a lot of articles written that make the point that managers in baseball can rarely have a positive effect but can have significant negative effect on the team they manage.

Whatever data that may be available in real life, it is all post facto. To me it is impossible to accurately determine the direct effect a superior manager, coach or GM has on team success in any single year. After a substantial sample size ( a career, half a career, 10 years?) one may "claim" that success correlates with the individual in question. My question is how? Based on what attributes? Based on what definition of success?

Tony LaRussa is a perfect example. No one can look at his 33 years and not be impressed with the numbers. I'd like someone to explain the following:

• What is the definition of success? Is it the same for all personnel?
• What specific attributes of LaRussa led to his successes?
• What is the definition of unsuccessful?
• What specific attributes of LaRussa led to his lack of success?
• What contribution (say%) to either success or no success did LaRussa provide?
• How in the name of Syd Barrett do you apply these attributes to a construct (personnel in the game) such that they can properly influence the team they manage in both success and non-success. Never mind doing this each year in the correct direction.

Just my opinion of course. You can't answer any of the above in a meaningful way because it all happens after the fact. LaRussa's great career was built one year at a time and it's reasonable to say that in 2002 or earlier he could have been considered a underachiever by some observers based on a subjective definition of success.

To me the only way to construct coaches and other personnel is to create them all equal with attribute ratings at the mid-point of whatever scale is used. Then let them build a career where success and failure (defined how?) add to and subtract from the attributes (which attributes?) in question.

The current personnel construct is objectively bad because critical attributes are static. Tony LaRussa was not the same manager every year of his career. There is no evidence he was good when his teams were successful and bad when they were not. Some attributes like experience can be cumulative as in real life but some opposing attributes like flexibility, predictability and patience may decline with time or fluctuate within the season.

It's the prime reason I don't like or use personnel in the game.

[EvilGenius]

Originally Posted by RchW

• What is the definition of success? Is it the same for all personnel?
• What specific attributes of LaRussa led to his successes?
• What is the definition of unsuccessful?
• What specific attributes of LaRussa led to his lack of success?
• What contribution (say%) to either success or no success did LaRussa provide?
• How in the name of Syd Barrett do you apply these attributes to a construct (personnel in the game) such that they can properly influence the team they manage in both success and non-success. Never mind doing this each year in the correct direction.

Agreeing with this, judging effectiveness of Personnel is tricky to quantify. Limiting the scope of the thread to "how do you measure success of Personnel as it relates to the game" (the real world is a whole different mess of a question), I would answer it this way:

In the minor leagues: Get my players to actually reach their potential, and to do so as quickly as possible.

In the major leagues: Good managers should get the players to play up to their abilities with few bad years. Prevent players from earning that dreaded ice cold icon next to their names. Keeps morale up.

Personally, I don't care as much about in-game strategy as I do about how they handle my players.


I may not get around to doing this (just to busy), but here's how I would set up an experiment that can measure "success" or "failure":

• Set up a fictional major league with one level of minor leagues.
  
• Set one team with Personnel with stats maxed out. One team with Average. And a third with bottom of the barrel ratings.
  
• Hand-create an 18 year old prospect with uber-potential (that way there's always more development possible). Clone him repeatedly so that every player is the same.
  
• Set the Random Talent Change such that it becomes a non-issue.
  
• Track player development each year for 5 or so years.
  
• Reset Personnel ratings each year (to prevent coaches from gaining experience and getting better, and thus throwing off the results)

While I wouldn't expect every individual player to develop identically, since they're all clones of each other, averaging the results should show some definitive trends -- such as "the Legendary coach averaged 20 points of improvement in Contact over 5 years, but the Average coach only 15."

This should at least be enough to determine that either (1) spending big on top quality Personnel is worthwhile, or (2) it's effect is so small that you can safely get away with going cheap on them.

[BIG17EASY]

I've seen little to no effect out of coaches in OOTP, but that could be because I'm paying less and less attention to them. I probably should just turn them off.

From a real life standpoint, I agree with others who are saying its hard to pinpoint the full effects of a coach or manager. Joe Torre's career record before being hired by the Yankees was 894-1,003 in parts of 14 seasons with just one playoff appearance and only three seasons finishing in the top 2 in the division. Then he got hired by the Yankees and won four World Series titles in his first five years.

So how do you determine his level of influence on his teams when he went from managing mostly mediocre and bad teams to suddenly managing a dynasty?