Semi-Famous Baseball Geek Looking for Info on OOTP

[Voros McCracken]

Hello. I've recently started to catch the baseball bug again (after swearing off the sport for several years and watching mostly soccer) and was trying to find a management sim that I could stick with logn enough to warrant my interest. My problems so far:

a) Most of the games still seem to be stuck in pre-21st Century thinking of pitcher strikeouts as a glamour stat much like hitter strikeouts. Lost in the DIPS food fights is the fact that before DIPS, even mentioning strikeouts in a Cy Young debate was grounds for ridicule and dismissal. Whatever the final word on hits on balls in play, I think most knowledgeable folks now agree that the number one way any non-knuckleball pitcher has to prevent hits is by striking people out.

b) Some sims seem to have a mystery "AAAA Slugger" factor where some guys who hit .340 in 2000 AAA at bats hit .210 in 2000 MLB at bats, while others with the same AAA numbers are .300 hitters. I can't completely rule out some translation problems being greater for some players than others, but the differences should be muted and reasonable.

c) I'm not the smartest guy who ever lived and my tolerance for unnecessary minutiae in limited. I can understand why some folks would want to be able to set the preferred educational backgrounds of its peanut vendors, but at the very least I'd like to be able to let a lot of the stuff be put on an auto-pilot without badly crippling my franchise.

d) A difficult to overcome issue is the ease at which success can be achieved in some sims simply by trading away old expensive talent for young talents and watching as all of the young studs lead you to 120-49 records in five years. It's tough to overcome because there's a lot of truth to be had there, but the trick is getting the balance right so that perpetually winning with veterans is as easy as winning with cheap youngsters.

e) A near impossible one to find are reasonable approaches to left/right splits. The instances of players with reverse splits long term is abnormally rare, and the vast majority of major league caliber players have a somewhat similar split range to everyone else who bats from the same side. Pitchers tend to be a bit more funky in that regard. What I'm talking about is having all left handed hitters have more trouble with lefties than righties, and just have the troubles be greater for some players than others.

f) Team chemistry effects need to be muted or at least such an option needs to be available. The Oakland A's in the early 70s had clubhouse brawls as weekly occurrences in route to their dominance of the AL during that time. I've never ever worked anywhere where everybody there liked everybody else, and yet none of the places ever went bankrupt. Gary Sheffield has played on several winning teams and he's a complete ninny.

g) For the most part I've only found two types of sim AIs (and this goes for soccer management sims like Championship/Football Manager too). Ones I crush, and ones that crush me; stalemates are exceedingly rare. So if there's an active useable online community to match wits against somehow, that would be a nice bonus.

I guess that was kind of long. I was just wondering how OOTP measured up on these scores, as I'm a little low on cash and I'd rather not buy another baseball game blindly (MLB 07: The Show is a wonderful Arcade game but its management sim is easily conquered, I've been disappointed by other more sim intensive games).

Sorry for taking so much time, but I figured it was better to put it in one post than several different ones. Thanks in advance for any replies.

[Russ]

Hey! Welcome to the forum. I've always enjoyed your work. I'll let someone else answer your questions, but I wanted to say hello.

OOTP is awesome.

[RchW]

Welcome to the OOTP boards. I can't answer all your questions directly right now but will certainly chime in where I have knowledge.

There are several people (Ping RonCo! plus others) who should be able to give you some detailed answers if they read this.

I also enjoyed your work whenever I got to read it.

Edit.

OOTP is not the perfect management sim but it is the best Baseball sim/game/addictive obsession out there!

[battists]

Voros, welcome!

I sent you a private message as well. I'm going to go on the assumption that you actually are who you say you are. Sadly, it's not beyond some Internet denizens to fake this sort of thing. In fact, this very community has had issues in the past with people impersonating the game. Sad, but true.

Meanwhile, I'll do my best to answer your questions! I'll start out with fairly broad answers. Let me know if you'd like to know more!

Originally Posted by Voros McCracken

a) Most of the games still seem to be stuck in pre-21st Century thinking of pitcher strikeouts as a glamour stat much like hitter strikeouts. Lost in the DIPS food fights is the fact that before DIPS, even mentioning strikeouts in a Cy Young debate was grounds for ridicule and dismissal. Whatever the final word on hits on balls in play, I think most knowledgeable folks now agree that the number one way any non-knuckleball pitcher has to prevent hits is by striking people out.

OOTP's simulation engine is based largely on DIPS theory, with pitchers being rated primarily in three characteristics: stuff, control, and movement. These broadly affect strikeouts, walks, and homeruns allowed.

b) Some sims seem to have a mystery "AAAA Slugger" factor where some guys who hit .340 in 2000 AAA at bats hit .210 in 2000 MLB at bats, while others with the same AAA numbers are .300 hitters. I can't completely rule out some translation problems being greater for some players than others, but the differences should be muted and reasonable.

I can't really say if this exists in OOTP. There are certainly cases where players who do well in the minors just can't quite make the leap to the majors, but I've never heard from the community that it's a common issue.

c) I'm not the smartest guy who ever lived and my tolerance for unnecessary minutiae in limited. I can understand why some folks would want to be able to set the preferred educational backgrounds of its peanut vendors, but at the very least I'd like to be able to let a lot of the stuff be put on an auto-pilot without badly crippling my franchise.

No question, OOTP definitely has minutiae, but there are a number of options that allow you to set that stuff on auto-pilot. There's a tradeoff, of course, in that handing off decisions to the AI leaves those decisions, well, in the hands of the computer. And we all know that computers just don't quite have the same way of deciding things as we do.

d) A difficult to overcome issue is the ease at which success can be achieved in some sims simply by trading away old expensive talent for young talents and watching as all of the young studs lead you to 120-49 records in five years. It's tough to overcome because there's a lot of truth to be had there, but the trick is getting the balance right so that perpetually winning with veterans is as easy as winning with cheap youngsters.

I've heard both ways with OOTP. There's a lot of configurability there. For example, if you're concerned with young players becoming all-stars too quickly, you can tone down the speed with which they develop, creating a preference for veteran players, etc.

e) A near impossible one to find are reasonable approaches to left/right splits. The instances of players with reverse splits long term is abnormally rare, and the vast majority of major league caliber players have a somewhat similar split range to everyone else who bats from the same side. Pitchers tend to be a bit more funky in that regard. What I'm talking about is having all left handed hitters have more trouble with lefties than righties, and just have the troubles be greater for some players than others.

I'm not hugely into the statistical analysis aspect of the game, but I'm certain we can find people involved with OOTP who could provide you with interesting data about how OOTP "looks" in this regard.

f) Team chemistry effects need to be muted or at least such an option needs to be available. The Oakland A's in the early 70s had clubhouse brawls as weekly occurrences in route to their dominance of the AL during that time. I've never ever worked anywhere where everybody there liked everybody else, and yet none of the places ever went bankrupt. Gary Sheffield has played on several winning teams and he's a complete ninny.

Currently, team chemistry is not a factor in OOTP. Players in OOTP can have personalities, and these personalities can have a minor impact on the players' performance and on the rest of the team. However, the impact is very muted, and can be disabled entirely.

g) For the most part I've only found two types of sim AIs (and this goes for soccer management sims like Championship/Football Manager too). Ones I crush, and ones that crush me; stalemates are exceedingly rare. So if there's an active useable online community to match wits against somehow, that would be a nice bonus.

OOTP has a very active online league community. There are no doubt plenty of leagues that would love to have you. There's even a separate forum where online leagues post their information.

Trust me, plenty of "n00bs" have asked more questions than you have, keep 'em coming! And check out my PM.

Steve

[RchW]

Originally Posted by Voros McCracken

Hello. I've recently started to catch the baseball bug again (after swearing off the sport for several years and watching mostly soccer) and was trying to find a management sim that I could stick with logn enough to warrant my interest. My problems so far:

a) Most of the games still seem to be stuck in pre-21st Century thinking of pitcher strikeouts as a glamour stat much like hitter strikeouts. Lost in the DIPS food fights is the fact that before DIPS, even mentioning strikeouts in a Cy Young debate was grounds for ridicule and dismissal. Whatever the final word on hits on balls in play, I think most knowledgeable folks now agree that the number one way any non-knuckleball pitcher has to prevent hits is by striking people out.

If I understand this correctly you would expect the career leaders in strikeout to also be among the career win leaders. I did a quick check on my current fictional solo league and that is indeed the case.

b) Some sims seem to have a mystery "AAAA Slugger" factor where some guys who hit .340 in 2000 AAA at bats hit .210 in 2000 MLB at bats, while others with the same AAA numbers are .300 hitters. I can't completely rule out some translation problems being greater for some players than others, but the differences should be muted and reasonable.

I don't get deep enough into the stats to know this. Others will know this for sure.

c) I'm not the smartest guy who ever lived and my tolerance for unnecessary minutiae in limited. I can understand why some folks would want to be able to set the preferred educational backgrounds of its peanut vendors, but at the very least I'd like to be able to let a lot of the stuff be put on an auto-pilot without badly crippling my franchise.

It depends on your tolerance for letting the AI run stuff. You can control everything or almost nothing in this game. I go crazy when the AI makes my backup catcher on each of my minor league teams the DH. So I control that part of the game.

Many people just want to GM, just as many want to control every facet of the franchise. The choice is yours.

d) A difficult to overcome issue is the ease at which success can be achieved in some sims simply by trading away old expensive talent for young talents and watching as all of the young studs lead you to 120-49 records in five years. It's tough to overcome because there's a lot of truth to be had there, but the trick is getting the balance right so that perpetually winning with veterans is as easy as winning with cheap youngsters.

If you go all out you can dominate the AI. Most people use various house rules, or just don't look for that bogus trade (the 20 year old future HoF for a 37 year old vet). With some reasonable precautions you can win often without totally dominating

I've never tried the all vet route. In OOTP you'd have to have a Yankee size payroll.

e) A near impossible one to find are reasonable approaches to left/right splits. The instances of players with reverse splits long term is abnormally rare, and the vast majority of major league caliber players have a somewhat similar split range to everyone else who bats from the same side. Pitchers tend to be a bit more funky in that regard. What I'm talking about is having all left handed hitters have more trouble with lefties than righties, and just have the troubles be greater for some players than others.

I'll leave this to the number guys.

f) Team chemistry effects need to be muted or at least such an option needs to be available. The Oakland A's in the early 70s had clubhouse brawls as weekly occurrences in route to their dominance of the AL during that time. I've never ever worked anywhere where everybody there liked everybody else, and yet none of the places ever went bankrupt. Gary Sheffield has played on several winning teams and he's a complete ninny.

There are a couple of threads discussing this. I personally think the "morale" system is a little too strong in the playoffs. Many others feel differently.

g) For the most part I've only found two types of sim AIs (and this goes for soccer management sims like Championship/Football Manager too). Ones I crush, and ones that crush me; stalemates are exceedingly rare. So if there's an active useable online community to match wits against somehow, that would be a nice bonus.

Online leagues are plentiful and very challenging in OOTP. Check out that forum!

Not exactly detailed answers, however many of your questions have been and are being discussed in more detail in the forums. Again, welcome aboard.

[battists]

Another thing I'd like to point out is that I feel that Markus and Andreas are extremely responsive to their customers, and as such OOTP offers a very real opportunity to participate in the community and help guide changes to the game.

Steve

[bababui]

Originally Posted by battists

I sent you a private message as well. I'm going to go on the assumption that you actually are who you say you are. Sadly, it's not beyond some Internet denizens to fake this sort of thing. In fact, this very community has had issues in the past with people impersonating the game. Sad, but true.

You say that you are battists..but how do we really know???

[battists]

Originally Posted by bababui

You say that you are battists..but how do we really know???

Anyone who is up for impersonating me to the tune of 10,000 posts on this forum is welcome to my identity. It ain't all it's cracked up to be anyway.

[injury log]

For the statistical realism of OOTP, there are several analyses available in these forums, e.g. here:

http://www.ootpdevelopments.com/boar...d.php?t=149034

I doubt any other game comes close. As for your questions:

a) Pitching performance in OOTP is determined primarily by three ratings- Stuff which primarily determines K-rate, Control which determines BB rate, and Movement which determines HR allowed. There's also a Ground Ball % which has an effect on GIDPs and BABIP, but it's clear the developers were aware of DIPS ideas when modeling pitching. Ks are certainly not just a glamour stat in-game;

b) Ratings drive performance in the game; as far as I'm aware, there are no hidden variables that might make someone a 'AAAA slugger'. A player's performance is driven by his ratings (which can be hidden from the gameplayer), and the evolution of his performance over time is influenced by randomness and the game's development engine, which, at least in the aggregate, models real-life development well (see thread above);

c) Customization is one of the strengths of the game. Many functions can be handed over to automatic control, and many features can be disabled if you don't want to deal with them. I find, for example, hiring coaches a tedious process, so turn them off. There are no peanut vendors in the game, fortunately;

d) This is still a bit of a problem in the game, but far less so than in past versions. Prospect development now seems very realistic, with a large number of busts, and the occasional surprise. Trading can be set from 'very easy' to 'very hard', and the AI can be instructed to 'heavily favour prospects'; on 'hard' and 'heavily favor prospects' I find the results most similar to modern-day MLB, but still find the AI teams too willing to give up young talent in trade (considering how real-life teams now value prospects). In this aspect the game could certainly be improved somewhat, but it still is not easy to build up a perpetual dynasty (except if you avail yourself of the international scouting feature, which can easily swing things heavily in your favour);

e) I'll let someone who's analysed this more carefully answer this one;

f) There are Player Personality ratings in-game, but they can be turned off. No one seems to know exactly how much effect they have (much hypothesizing, few conclusions), which seems like real life to me. As far as I know, the only 'chemistry' effect comes from players with good Leadership providing a small boost over time to the development of other players on the team; there is no chemistry effect that could alter the result of play-by-play in a single game;

g) Huge online community, and a forum here with lists of league openings. Some are better than others, I'm sure;

In any event, the best way to get a feel for the game is to download the free demo, which lets you play out seven months of game time (Jan 1 to Aug 1), fully functional. If you set up a 100 game season starting in February, you can see some of the offseason.

[Voros McCracken]

Originally Posted by battists

Voros, welcome!
I sent you a private message as well. I'm going to go on the assumption that you actually are who you say you are. Sadly, it's not beyond some Internet denizens to fake this sort of thing. In fact, this very community has had issues in the past with people impersonating the game. Sad, but true.

It's definitely me. I'm not aware of anyone ever impersonating me but I'm sure it's possible. Eat lots of tacos and you're well on your way.

Ben Flieger once said I wasn't who I said I was, but was actually Aaron Sele posting under a pseudonym. The Sele bit was in one of the articles (I think the original BP one), who originally said it wasn't (that's on usenet somewhere). That's about as close as I can come up with as a verification on short rest.

You'll have to take my word for it.

[battists]

Originally Posted by Voros McCracken

It's definitely me. I'm not aware of anyone ever impersonating me but I'm sure it's possible. Eat lots of tacos and you're well on your way.

Ben Flieger once said I wasn't who I said I was, but was actually Aaron Sele posting under a pseudonym. The Sele bit was in one of the articles (I think the original BP one), who originally said it wasn't (that's on usenet somewhere). That's about as close as I can come up with as a verification on short rest.

You'll have to take my word for it.

Good enough for me.

[Raidergoo]

Originally Posted by Voros McCracken

d) A difficult to overcome issue is the ease at which success can be achieved in some sims simply by trading away old expensive talent for young talents and watching as all of the young studs lead you to 120-49 records in five years. It's tough to overcome because there's a lot of truth to be had there, but the trick is getting the balance right so that perpetually winning with veterans is as easy as winning with cheap youngsters.

Set the AI to favor prospects when evaluating trades. It will guard them, and seem a bit paranoid doing so.

Originally Posted by Voros McCracken

e) A near impossible one to find are reasonable approaches to left/right splits. The instances of players with reverse splits long term is abnormally rare, and the vast majority of major league caliber players have a somewhat similar split range to everyone else who bats from the same side. Pitchers tend to be a bit more funky in that regard. What I'm talking about is having all left handed hitters have more trouble with lefties than righties, and just have the troubles be greater for some players than others.

Best way to highlight this is with stats.
http://www.emlb-baseball.com/clubhou..._100_home.html

Here is my online league's home page. There's about 800 players and their R/L splits. Of course, the season is in May, so sample size is an issue.

Originally Posted by Voros McCracken

f) Team chemistry effects need to be muted or at least such an option needs to be available.

There are some elements in OOTP so far, but it was considered far more important to get aging and player development right for 2007.

Originally Posted by Voros McCracken

g) For the most part I've only found two types of sim AIs (and this goes for soccer management sims like Championship/Football Manager too). Ones I crush, and ones that crush me; stalemates are exceedingly rare. So if there's an active useable online community to match wits against somehow, that would be a nice bonus.

Online is the ONLY way to play. I imagine I know a league where you could apply to take over the defending World Champions. League media is here. PM me if interested.

Of course, the Tigers are 6 games below .500, had two ace pitchers get shelved, are over budget by 6 million dollars, are up against the salary cap, and star Albert Pujols is 33 years old and putting on weight

Cubs and Marlins are available too. No one wants to run the Cubs after they lost 22 games straight in the 2013 pennant race, and Mayor Daley ordered a hit on ex-manager Dusty Baker.

Originally Posted by Voros McCracken

I guess that was kind of long. I was just wondering how OOTP measured up on these scores, as I'm a little low on cash and I'd rather not buy another baseball game blindly (MLB 07: The Show is a wonderful Arcade game but its management sim is easily conquered, I've been disappointed by other more sim intensive games).

It is ridiculously good, and I spend 20 hours on it a week, and I've done so for quite some time.

[Kelric]

Welcome to the forums, Voros.

Originally Posted by Voros McCracken

c) I'm not the smartest guy who ever lived and my tolerance for unnecessary minutiae in limited. I can understand why some folks would want to be able to set the preferred educational backgrounds of its peanut vendors, but at the very least I'd like to be able to let a lot of the stuff be put on an auto-pilot without badly crippling my franchise.

I just want to address this quickly. Luckily, there are no peanut vendors or merchandise pricing or anything that detailed. You can hire scouts, coaches and (I think) doctors. I find them slightly annoying to deal with, so I turn them off. That's maybe the best thing about OOTP - you can turn almost anything on or off, or change it to fit your needs. The customization aspects give you a virtually limitless expanse of baseball to explore if you want to play around with them enough. Want a league where anyone can hit 100 homers? You can do that. Recreate the dead ball era? You can do that. Move through the entire history of baseball? You can do that. Shut off all financials and trades? Allow one or the other? Create a league in every country (make sure you have the computer to handle it!)? And so on and so forth.

On the online league issue - I've been participating in the online league community for five years. It's been great fun. You may bounce around a little at first finding a league that really fits you, but it'll happen. And when it doesn't, I've founded two leagues as Commish in addition to being a founding member of a third in which I was involved for four years. It's a good time.

[magnet]

http://victory-league.com/tcba/news/...100_index.html

This is an online fictional league with 130+ years of history simmed. It'd be a great place to snoop around to see how long-term simming (with modifications as you approach different eras. For instance, this league actually went through WWII, has expansion/relocation, etc). For more information on the history, you can check out this forum: http://forums.simcentral.net/forumdisplay.php?f=200

[RonCo]

A couple pieces of platoon data from a test league at random. This one was an 8-team league that had been run for 5 seasons. I took every hitter who had seen at least 70 AB vs. RHP and compared batting average splits. Also took the same comparison for >120 AB vs. RHP (using RHP AB as a selection criteria isn't great, but it's the best I could come up with using the game's csv dumps in 30 mins this AM). The table below is the resulting data, and shows RHB have smaller splits than LHB. Those splits don't seem far out of line given some data posted on Retrosheet, iirc. At these AB rates, the random noise is high, though.

I then went to raw ratings of every hitter in the league and looked at expected long-term splits. The histograms show the rating delta between RHB/LHB and their rating splits (vs RHP - vs. LHP). I see no hitters who will be expected to be better against their handedness counterparts. I also see SHB that are scattered across the spectrum. All that's probably good. However, I also hoped to see the mean for each RHB/LHB split to be more in the 4-6 rating points range, but instead find them to be focused on the zero point.

So that's a hole we need to fix in v2008.

[bulldog55]

Originally Posted by magnet

http://victory-league.com/tcba/news/...100_index.html

This is an online fictional league with 130+ years of history simmed. It'd be a great place to snoop around to see how long-term simming (with modifications as you approach different eras. For instance, this league actually went through WWII, has expansion/relocation, etc). For more information on the history, you can check out this forum: http://forums.simcentral.net/forumdisplay.php?f=200

Woohoo! That's my league!

Sign my chest, Voros!

[eriqjaffe]

Staggeringly enough, nobody has yet pointed out that the game is available as try-n-buy demo version. IIRC, it's fully functional, but it won't let you play out a season past a certain date (I don't know what date that is) and it's time-limited so it will only work for a certain number of days after you install it - that being said, I've never tried using the demo, so I don't know what other restrictions may be in place (or if I'm 100% accurate in what I think the restrictions are).

http://www.ootpbaseball.net/downloads.php

That should give you a pretty good idea of what you're in for.

Oh, and there's also battists' 500+ page manual, which is as thrilling as "The DaVinci Code" and as hefty as the Yellow Pages.

[Kelric]

Originally Posted by magnet

http://victory-league.com/tcba/news/...100_index.html

This is an online fictional league with 130+ years of history simmed. It'd be a great place to snoop around to see how long-term simming (with modifications as you approach different eras. For instance, this league actually went through WWII, has expansion/relocation, etc). For more information on the history, you can check out this forum: http://forums.simcentral.net/forumdisplay.php?f=200

Wow, both Chicago and Sacramento have been in the league for 136 years and neither has a championship. Poor Chicago just can't catch a break!

[bulldog55]

Originally Posted by Kelric

Wow, both Chicago and Sacramento have been in the league for 136 years and neither has a championship. Poor Chicago just can't catch a break!

Compared to the Major Leagues, it's historically been a MASSIVE league, with at least 32 teams since the 1880s, peaking at 36 in 1894. It's made for even worse "curses" than Boston or Chicago, diluting everyone's chances of actually winning one. Something I hadn't even taken into account when creating the league, but an interesting effect.

We have teams available. FYI.

[Dagrims]

Originally Posted by eriqjaffe

Staggeringly enough, nobody has yet pointed out that the game is available as try-n-buy demo version.

Staggeringly enough, you didn't read all of post #9.



I think that the demo would provide a cracken' good time.