Negro League Players and Ratings

[swrathje]

I played a three year dynasty game set in the 1920's, and am currently playing a 1930's dynasty game. In both games I removed racial discrimination. I quickly noticed what seems to be a large discrepancy between OOTP ratings for Negro League superstars and the players' actual abilities. A prime example is Satchel Paige. By real time accounts, Paige was the greatest pitcher in Negro League history (at least in the top two) and certainly would have had an exceptional major league career. In OOTP, Paige's current and potential ratings maxed out at two stars. His ratings for control and individual pitches hardly rival the best white pitchers of Paige's time. Similar undervalued ratings are given to Cool Papa Bell's speed, base stealing and current/overall ratings (two stars), plus not being rated to play CF; Josh Gibson's, the "Black Babe Ruth," Contact and Home Run Power ratings; and Oscar Charleston's overall excellence. Charleston's ratings are very good, but still don't reflect the man who is generally considered the greatest all-around player of the Negro Leagues.

Has anyone else experienced this?

[mitchkenn]

yes. when the Negro Leagues were introduced to OOTP, they were created as a minor league. That choice was discussed long ago and it is what it is. Anyway, the players were thus created and evaluated as minor leaguers, and their stats all seem to be severely down tweaked. The only solution i ever found was to manually edit the numbers, first by cloning the player, then deleting the historical one, so the game won't resort to replacing the edits with "historical game levels" at the end of each season then editing the cloned players #s to what they were in The Negro Leagues. It's a long and tedious process.

[swrathje]

Thank you. I only started playing in January, so I appreciate the backstory.

[The Game]

For most of my leagues that i add Negro Leagues to i fgo to Seamheads.com and use their best overall season for potential and hand edit them. Gibson before he got injured this season was hitting .370 with 34 HR 98 RBI. Well on his way to his 1st MVP before the injury. Paige is a 3 time All Star and finished 2nd in cy Young voting while with the Rockies last season. He has a losing record this year, but is 165-112 lifetime approx. Peanut Johnson is a great young SP with Milwaukee but is injury prone. Martin Dihigo oddly is an all star CL with Seattle.

[mitchkenn]

Originally Posted by The Game

For most of my leagues that i add Negro Leagues to i fgo to Seamheads.com and use their best overall season for potential and hand edit them.

so i'm not the only one that does this?? Good to know!

[swrathje]

Much appreciated. Thanks.

[Lhorenzho]

The other option is to purchase ActionPC baseball. They do a great job with the Negro Leagues that does NOT entail convoluted work arounds. You do have to pay for the leagues but its a small price to pay for historical accuracy. This fact does NOT in any way diminish the excellence of the OOTP franchise. I love BOTH games and play them both daily.

[thehef]

Originally Posted by mitchkenn

yes. when the Negro Leagues were introduced to OOTP, they were created as a minor league. That choice was discussed long ago and it is what it is. Anyway, the players were thus created and evaluated as minor leaguers, and their stats all seem to be severely down tweaked. The only solution i ever found was to manually edit the numbers, first by cloning the player, then deleting the historical one, so the game won't resort to replacing the edits with "historical game levels" at the end of each season then editing the cloned players #s to what they were in The Negro Leagues. It's a long and tedious process.

Do we know to what degree the Negro Leaguers' stats were down-tweaked? Are they, for example, on par with stats accumulated by players in the highest minor-league levels (AA or AAA, depending upon the year), or lower than that? And how does the down-tweaking compare to that of Federal League stats?

Spritze would probably be the one to definitively answer these, but he has not posted in awhile.

Not sure what it would entail, but if anything I think we should at least have the option to bring in the many legendary Negro Leaguers rated as if their stats were accumulated near MLB levels. Whether that should be close to AAA, I dunno. But perhaps something that should be looked into if the consensus (?) is that Negro Leaguers are coming in as being rated too low. Maybe options like this:

Import Negro Leaguers...
a) as major-leaguers
b) as high-level minor-leaguers
c) as mid-level minor-leaguers

... with my assumption being that they are currently rated/imported as either c) above or somewhere in between b and c. (I have no idea.)

[mitchkenn]

i'd like the Negro Leaguers to be imported with the stats they had against Major Leagues. Seamheads has that data. At least then i would feel the stats reflect how they compared to MLB levels. and maybe then i'd be less inclined to feel the necessity of editing every NL player i have in the game.

[thehef]

Originally Posted by mitchkenn

i'd like the Negro Leaguers to be imported with the stats they had against Major Leagues. Seamheads has that data. At least then i would feel the stats reflect how they compared to MLB levels. and maybe then i'd be less inclined to feel the necessity of editing every NL player i have in the game.

Sounds reasonable. But is the data available comprehensive enough? Probably a lot of Negro Leaguers who only played a few years and only had a small number of at-bats or innings pitched, I'd think.

[joefromchicago]

Originally Posted by mitchkenn

i'd like the Negro Leaguers to be imported with the stats they had against Major Leagues. Seamheads has that data. At least then i would feel the stats reflect how they compared to MLB levels. and maybe then i'd be less inclined to feel the necessity of editing every NL player i have in the game.

That would yield very little usable information. If Negro Leaguers were playing major leaguers, it would have been in exhibition games against barnstorming teams. How seriously the players took those games is anybody's guess, but even if they were all deadly serious there still weren't enough of those games to make for a viable sample size. Landis cracked down on barnstorming in general and didn't want white players playing against black players in particular, so there's just not very much information out there regarding how black players performed against white major leaguers.

In any event, Negro League stats are, at best, guesstimates. The developers could have downgraded or upgraded NeL players and would have been justified in either case. I think the decision to treat the NeL as a minor league is historically accurate - the fact that, after the color barrier was broken, only a relative handful of black players made it into the majors was, in part, due to the fact that only a relative handful had the talent to make it to the majors.

[mitchkenn]

Originally Posted by joefromchicago

In any event, Negro League stats are, at best, guesstimates. The developers could have downgraded or upgraded NeL players and would have been justified in either case. I think the decision to treat the NeL as a minor league is historically accurate - the fact that, after the color barrier was broken, only a relative handful of black players made it into the majors was, in part, due to the fact that only a relative handful had the talent to make it to the majors.

i respectfully disagree. Recently there has been chatter about making the Negro Leagues officially a Major League - the same ranking as Players League, American Association and the Federal League. So if the "people in the know" (whomever they be) are starting to think the caliber of play was major league quality, maybe opinions are changing.


And as far as only a handful of players making it from the Negro Leagues to the majors -



http://www.cnlbr.org/Portals/0/RL/Ne...%20Leagues.pdf


47 players from the Negro Leagues from 1947-1954 made it to the majors. The link above (i hope it works) has a full list of all the players that played both in the Negro Leagues and the Majors.


i do agree the stats are sparse, at best, at times. But it's all we have and i think the history of barnstorming (even if Landis banned it officially) proves they were at least equals. Player interviews and talks (esp. Dizzy Dean i recall on the Saturday Game Of the Week, Johnny Mize's comments about Martin Dihigo and Ted Williams speech) leads me to think they should be entered into the game as Major Leaguers, not minors. But that's just my opinion, and obviously Markus and the makers of the game feel differently. So, i edit every Negro League player in the games i play - and it works for my game. i just wish (selfishly possibly) they were recognized for as good as they were. Maybe this talk of recognizing the Negro Leagues will help.



https://www.thedad.com/mlb-negro-leagues/


thanks for tolerating my rant! and Joe, can't disagree with your assessment of the numbers. Just i read them differently. Have a good one and thanks for the great work you do on the schedules pages.

[joefromchicago]

Originally Posted by mitchkenn

i respectfully disagree. Recently there has been chatter about making the Negro Leagues officially a Major League - the same ranking as Players League, American Association and the Federal League. So if the "people in the know" (whomever they be) are starting to think the caliber of play was major league quality, maybe opinions are changing.

I haven't heard anything about that, but it's quite possible that some recent events - quite distinct from baseball - may also be playing a role here.

The simple fact is that there are multiple problems with making the Negro Leagues a major league. The primary one is that the stats are a mess. Even the Union Association kept better stats than the Negro Leagues. I don't have any beef with making the Negro Leagues "honorary" majors, but if they're going to make Josh Gibson the major-league home-run leader with 900 or so HRs, even though most of those were hit against semi-pros in rinky-dink stadiums, then I have a problem with that. We'll never know how many HRs Gibson could have hit against major-league pitching, but then we'll also never know how many HRs Babe Ruth could have hit against the Acme Tool & Die All-Stars.

Originally Posted by mitchkenn

And as far as only a handful of players making it from the Negro Leagues to the majors -

http://www.cnlbr.org/Portals/0/RL/Ne...%20Leagues.pdf

47 players from the Negro Leagues from 1947-1954 made it to the majors. The link above (i hope it works) has a full list of all the players that played both in the Negro Leagues and the Majors.

Not surprised. How many AAA players made it to the majors during that same period?

Originally Posted by mitchkenn

i do agree the stats are sparse, at best, at times. But it's all we have and i think the history of barnstorming (even if Landis banned it officially) proves they were at least equals. Player interviews and talks (esp. Dizzy Dean i recall on the Saturday Game Of the Week, Johnny Mize's comments about Martin Dihigo and Ted Williams speech) leads me to think they should be entered into the game as Major Leaguers, not minors. But that's just my opinion, and obviously Markus and the makers of the game feel differently. So, i edit every Negro League player in the games i play - and it works for my game. i just wish (selfishly possibly) they were recognized for as good as they were. Maybe this talk of recognizing the Negro Leagues will help.

There's no question that the best Negro Leaguers could have played at a major-league level. As you note, the contemporary evidence is pretty conclusive that guys like Gibson, Paige, Oscar Charleston, and Cool Papa Bell, among many others, were considered to be the equals of the best white players. But they didn't play most of their games against major-league competition. That's why their stats would be practically useless even if we had reliable stats, which we don't.

I'm all in favor of making NeL players as good as their stats in OOTP. Why not? I think that's what gamers want and expect. Make Paige unhittable. Make Gibson a HR machine. They were great players, so they should be great players in OOTP. If that's "unrealistic," well, putting them in the majors before 1947 is unrealistic too. Nobody wants to go to the trouble of integrating the majors before 1947 only to see Josh Gibson bat .220 with 12 HRs.

Originally Posted by mitchkenn

thanks for tolerating my rant! and Joe, can't disagree with your assessment of the numbers. Just i read them differently. Have a good one and thanks for the great work you do on the schedules pages.

Thanks. In the end, we're all on the same team - we all want OOTP to be the best game it can possibly be.

[thehef]

Good stuff from both of you guys. I think that back-and-forth is a great example why the gamer should have the option of deciding how Negro League stats should be evaluated: as equal to MLB, or equal to triple-AAA, or AA, or something less than that. I mean, we know that stats accumulated in triple-A are, well, equal to triple-A stats. And double-A stats are double-A. But we don't know, even close to definitely, where Negro League stats should be. It is, and will always be, a matter of opinion. Thus, if OOTP wants gamers who are into Negro Leagues to be into OOTP, the option should be included. IMO.

[mitchkenn]

Originally Posted by thehef

Good stuff from both of you guys. I think that back-and-forth is a great example why the gamer should have the option of deciding how Negro League stats should be evaluated: as equal to MLB, or equal to triple-AAA, or AA, or something less than that. I mean, we know that stats accumulated in triple-A are, well, equal to triple-A stats. And double-A stats are double-A. But we don't know, even close to definitely, where Negro League stats should be. It is, and will always be, a matter of opinion. Thus, if OOTP wants gamers who are into Negro Leagues to be into OOTP, the option should be included. IMO.

i like that idea!!! i don't know how much work it would be, or how much traction there would be to have it implemented, but those of us who like using Negro League Players in our games (even if not the actual leagues) would love an option to have them imported at whatever level we want for our game. Great idea Sir. Now we just need to see it put into effect somehow ...

[fredbeene]

Originally Posted by mitchkenn

so i'm not the only one that does this?? Good to know!

i stopped playing because there is wayyyyyyyyyyy to much hand edits

[fredbeene]

just created a fictional league with the race you want to play and pump the stats however you want

[One Great Matrix]

It's just a guess.
With the politics...
Except maybe to "guess" that blacks and whites can play ball equally as well & go from there.