I want to be clear at the beginning, though…I’m not advocating age limits. In fact, I think OOTP age limits are a little too confining. Minor league baseball has several kinds of limits, but none of them work particularly well for most OOTP environments. What I’m suggesting, though, is that at the end of the day the league is better off if us GMs do all kind of get together and say we’ll do our best to keep things in control.
INTRO:
Anyway, here’s the thing: I often hear people say “minor league stats don’t matter” in OOTP (and baseball for that matter). But this is not really right. Stats are like test scores for school. They are the results of a player’s ratings against his competition, modified by the random nature of the game. To read stats is to love stats. They always matter.
The question, however, is to use them for what they actually mean.
I say that because (in my opinion) when us fans say that minor league stats don’t matter, we do it because we want stats to mean something about the guy’s top end. We want to be able to look at a guy who rakes .450/.580/.753 at Rookie League to mean he’s the next Sawyer Silk. But that’s not what they mean. A kid who aces his algebra test isn’t guaranteed to be Alan Turing, after all. Einstein had shitty grades in the minors, and he did pretty well I think, relatively speaking, anyway.
SO, WHAT DO MINOR LEAGUE STATS MEAN?
So, yes, stats are test scores. They tell you where the kid stands right now, relative to their peers. You can use these tests to project where a kid will be a year and two and three down the line, but there’s no certainty. So, ultimately, in context of a baseball league like ours, when gathered with decent sample size, stats tell us whether a guy belongs in the league he’s in—or whether he doesn’t.
But it’s up to us to read the scores properly.
This is important in our little baseball universe of the BBA, or if not “important” it’s at least valuable in context of creating something akin to a reality that feels right. (Full Disclosure, I noted to Matt that we need to twiddle with Rball and SA league totals so our overall stats look more like real baseball…right now we suck).
Even now, though, the fact is that we can very much look at Rookie and Short A stats and make assessments of a guy’s preparedness for the next level—even if we don’t know that player’s ratings. This is the root that makes “stats only” leagues so damned great. If we pay attention, and if we arrange our players well, stats do a great job of indicating when guys are ready for the next level.
We have to make adjustments, though.
We have to look at the average stat outputs of a league and fiddle with them in our own mind as regards to our ballpark. And then, in the BBA we also have to realize that our kids are often still playing against competition that’s considerably older than them. Which is the root of the reason I was starting to make this response (which, if you’ve gotten this far and find you just don’t freaking care, I apologize for making you wade through it).
The BBA is not actually too bad here, relative to many OOTP leagues, anyway. If you do a stat sort on our Rookie League, we probably had 40 pitchers and 60 hitters who were 22 years old or higher gather IP and PA. That’s 100 players, or about four teams worth of our 30 team league who are really over-age.example wrote: If a 17-year-old kid that all the scouts say projects to be a stud plays in a league full of 22-24-year-old players, his stats will almost certainly suck. That’s because his ratings are not filled in, whereas the 22-24 year old players are essentially developed. If both the 17 year old and 24 year old have “4” contact, for example, I’ll always bet lunch that the 22-24 year old will out-perform the kid. This is because the 24-year-old is quite possibly a high 4 and the 17 year old is almost certainly a low one. That’s actually a pretty big performance gap in that stage of ratings curve. Similarly, the 22-24 year old pitcher will be fleshed out to whatever level he’s going to be fleshed out.
Put that same 17-year-old hitter in a league full of 17-18 year old pitchers (who will rarely be developed at all), and suddenly the kid rakes…which he does because he’s freaking miles better than your average 17 year old.
Yes, 22 is really just too old for all but a very few guys to show up here. Really, 21 is too old for Rookie League, too. But the Dude Abides, right?
Another positive is that those “overage guys” really didn’t often get big chunks of playing time. In reality, as far as the BBA goes, or ages per level (while they could be improved) are really not too egregious.
Aside: we often hear OOTP GMs complain there aren’t enough kid players in the BBA to staff up. At present, however, there are 219 players who are 22 and younger in the BBA free agent pool. Admittedly, most are crappy non-prospects. But, really, if you’ve got a 25 year old in A-ball, he’s not really a prospect either (or probably even a 23 or 24 year old for that matter). In addition, we all have International Complexes that are filled at various levels.
There is really nothing keeping us from being closer to age-proper except our own diligence
So, anyway, there you are.Aside 2: There are also GMs around who, understandably, just don’t want to deal with the amount of work it takes to manage their minor leagues. They don’t find it fun, and, for whatever reason, they feel like it’s not necessary. At the end of the day, they don’t care that minor league stats are warped.
My disagreement with these GMs is part aesthetics (I do like our numbers to look right), and part function (poorly staffed minor leagues that are filled (or not filled) with guys at the “right” level will almost certainly affect development of players in that organization).
In our world of OOTP, you rarely see the brilliant 17-year-old phenom pitcher striking our 13 guys per 9—which happens often enough in real life, and which means it’s time to promote the kid and see what he’s got at A-ball, or wherever.
There are two reasons for this: First, our League Totals really do need to be tweaked around a bit. And Two, our age profiles need to be shifted down further than they are. Which, again, is actually pretty good.
I said before, I’m not advocating for age limits. I’m just spouting into the wind though, in some hopes that we keep working to keep their players in reasonable line.