A question about scouting progression...

[ConStar]

I was wondering how this game handles -- if at all -- the subject of career years and their effect on how guys are rated.

I had a 31-year-old second baseman this year with offensive ratings (on a 1-20 scale) of 6-4-6. He ended up playing for most of the year due to various injuries and put up the following numbers:

131-for-397 (.330), 24 doubles, 4 triples, 14 HR (.516 SLG), with a .392 OBP, for an OPS of .909.

He's still rated 6-4-6. Now, if this were an actual player in real life, we'd obviously be talking about a breakout year, but none of the scouts are buying it. As such, the poor guy still rates 0.5 stars.

I've noticed a "create ratings based on stats" button in the player editor screen, but didn't want to push it unless I knew what it was doing, and I really can't find reference to it in the manual.

Do stats like this eventually get figured into the guy's ratings, or do we have to manually plug them in for him if we want him to get a bump?

[injury log]

The 'create ratings based on stats' button in the Editor is not going to do what you want; that button has nothing to do with the stats a player has actually put up while he's played. Instead it uses the stats from the stats line you see in the Editor, just to the left (I think? don't have the game open) of that button, and creates ratings from those. You'd normally use that button if you're creating a player from scratch, and you know what stats you want him to approximately put up, but don't know well enough how OOTP ratings work to input the ratings themselves correctly. Then you can just type 20 HR and a .310 AVG, etc, into the stats line, press that button, and the game will rate the player accordingly.

What you may want is to change your AI evaluation settings, under AI in Game Setup. There you can determine the extent to which the AI uses ratings to evaluate players, and the extent to which the AI uses stats to evaluate players. A bad or average player can have a good or very good year, and it sounds like that's the case with this guy. If your AI evaluation is set to 100% ratings, the AI won't care about his good year. If it's set to 100% last year's stats, the AI won't care about his ratings, and will just notice the amazing statistical performance; he'll be a 5-star player. You might want to shift the balance a bit towards stats if you'd prefer the AI to attach more value to players like this guy.

That said, in OOTP a player's abilities determine his performance. His statistical performance does not determine his abilities. So if a 31 year old guy with a 5/10 Contact rating by fluke luck hits .330 one year, his Contact rating isn't going to go up because of that.

[injury log]

Originally Posted by ConStar

I
I had a 31-year-old second baseman this year with offensive ratings (on a 1-20 scale) of 6-4-6.

And if your league has normal pitching and normal ballparks, someone rated 6/20 in Contact would be performing more than 7 standard deviations above expectation if he hit .330 over 400 AB. That's something that should happen about one in one trillion times; you're more likely to win an average weekly state lottery outright twice in one month buying one ticket each week. Are you sure you're not on the 1-10 or 2-8 scale?

[ConStar]

Originally Posted by injury log

And if your league has normal pitching and normal ballparks, someone rated 6/20 in Contact would be performing more than 7 standard deviations above expectation if he hit .330 over 400 AB. That's something that should happen about one in one trillion times; you're more likely to win an average weekly state lottery outright twice in one month buying one ticket each week. Are you sure you're not on the 1-10 or 2-8 scale?

Oh yes, very sure that I'm on the 1-20 scale.

I also had a pitcher on the same team with a movement rating of 7 post an ERA of 3.42 over 194.2 innings, giving up 194 hits and 22 home runs, walking just 34. I guess movement most affects the HR numbers but 22 isn't terribly much for nearly 200 innings.

For the most part, I got what you'd expect based on the ratings my players received, but there were some real doozies. This was my first year with this game, although I've been playing various baseball sims dating back to 1987 on an old Commodore 64. I'm quite pleased with it and I don't have a problem with statistical outliers; just interested to know what the game does about it after the fact, if anything.

[injury log]

Originally Posted by ConStar

Oh yes, very sure that I'm on the 1-20 scale.

If that's the case, some or all of the following really must be true, unless you've just witnessed a miracle on a biblical scale:

- your scouts are underestimating the player
- your pitchers, on the whole, have ratings lower than what would be normal in a long-running league. This does seem to happen in the very early seasons of new fictional leagues, though, so that may explain a lot
- the player's home park enhances batting average
- offense is being inflated for other reasons (league modifiers for example, which might be the case if you're running some kind of historical league)

Scouting error may be responsible; if he is truly a 6/20 contact hitter, that stats line in the Editor should project him to hit in the vicinity of .180. So if his projected average is higher than that, your scout is underestimating him, and if that's the case, at least some of the AI teams in your league with think he's a better player than your scout thinks he is.

But I gather your real question is about how this player will perform in the future, and how the AI will view the player. His future performance will be based on his ratings (which may be higher than your scout thinks), and ratings do change, though those changes are not driven by performance. The AI's view of the player will be determined by your AI evaluation settings.