You can blame this one totally on JWalk.
A few days back we were talking about development over on Slack, and he said he’d been looking at the last three months of data on his minor leaguers. We chatted about how much development could be due to coaches and whatnot. The bottom line is, like always, I don’t know and neither does he. But it’s fun to talk about.
Along the way I got to looking at my own team on StatsPlus, and as I did it, I got to thinking about how “easy” it would be to make a script that tabulated all this stuff. In this case “easy” wound up meaning a day and a half of work. But, yes, I now have a process that takes a simple csv/text file (that I can get by a simple select and copy off StatsPlus pages), and parse it all out. The only real issue I have is that I can’t immediately remove Stuff changes (potential or otherwise) due to role changes. All I can note is that a role change occurred.
Bottom line: I can now slice and dice development that has occurred for my team (or any team, for that matter) across the entire year by a whole bunch of parameters.
Want A-ball players vs. AA? I've got it.
Pitchers vs. hitters? Yep.
Contact, Gap, Power, Eye, AvK? Of course. And I see your Stuff, Movement, and Control, and raise you Hold, Stamina, and Velocity. Pitch types? Got’em. Changes in defensive ratings? Yeppers. If it’s on the YS9 StatsPlus page, I think I’ve got it. I mean, even height, weight, and popularity.
I can tell you, for example, that Lester Arundel (who we just called up this sim) has gained ten pounds over the season, acquiring it at a rate of about a pound a month except for May, when he added four pounds. Talk about your growing 24-year-olds, eh? I can also tell you that in addition to gaining 5 pounds, young Luis Manuel Velasquez down in my International complex jumped three inches this season—adding one inch in February, then two inches in August. He’s 6’4, 175 now.
Does any of that matter?
Who knows, right? But it’s fun nonetheless.
Enough Silliness, Show Us the Real Goods
Of course most of us just want the basics more than anything else. Using this file and playing a little filter/pivot table magic, I can take a look at my pitcher’s movement potentials across the year. Here, for example are pitchers at the BBA level and the changes they’ve had:
| Movement Potential | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | All |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BBA | ||||||||||
| Ángel Hernández | 1 | 1 | ||||||||
| Carlos Valle | -1 | 1 | -1 | -1 | ||||||
| Dave Lee | -1 | -1 | ||||||||
| Derrick Chaney | 1 | 1 | ||||||||
| Ernesto Ramos | -1 | 1 | -1 | -1 | ||||||
| Tomás Ramírez | -1 | -1 |
Looking for something a bit deeper in the organization? He’s my AA Santa Clara gang.
| Movement Potential | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | All |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AA | ||||||||||
| António Hernández | -1 | -1 | ||||||||
| Bartolo Bermúdez | -1 | -1 | ||||||||
| Clyde Garrison | 1 | 1 | ||||||||
| Felipe Barrón | 1 | 1 | ||||||||
| Gunawan Pakpahan | 1 | 1 | ||||||||
| Luis Cortés | 1 | -1 | 0 |
MY OFFER TO YOU
This is a perl script so, unless you run perl, I can’t just give it to you. What I will offer you, however, is that I will be happy to run your team if you’d like. The issue is that it takes some time to pull the information from StatsPlus and then format it properly. It’s maybe 10 minutes, which was fine as a 1-time deal, but adds up across the 40 teams in our league(s).
So there’s the deal. You format a file per the following requirements, send it to me, and I’ll return a file with every event listed so you can play around until your heart is content. If enough teams take advantage of this to create a decent set of data. I’ll offer to compile a bigger report later—assuming I’m still interested enough, [grin]
Instructions
1) Go to your StatsPlus development report page
2) For each level you want in the report, select he team, then select “Last Year” from the dropdown box.
3) Include Pit and Misc for pitchers, and Bat, Field and Misc for batters.
4) Select and copy the entire team’s data, starting with Pitchers and including batters (Include the words "Pitchers" and "Batters").
5) Paste the copied cells into Excel. It should paste into only a single column. (Note, I’ve tried pasting into a straight Notepad text file, but it doesn’t include the blanks that come when I use Excel. This process, as I’ll note later, needs the blanks).
6) For each subsequent team, past the data appended to the bottom of that column.
7) When you are done, check the transition places to ensure there is an empty space before each player. It should look something like this:
8) Also add A label at the break point for each league level as follows:
BBA (or UMEBA)
AAA League
AA League
A League
Short A League
Rookie League
International
- Dev-Reporter-levvels.PNG (14.81 KiB) Viewed 1963 times
10) Send it to me.
11) Receive your team file
You will get back a file that looks like this:
Where Do I send it, and Timing?
Feel free to update your input file and send it to me as often as you want--after every sim, or after the year, or whatever. I'd suggest mostly dropping it to me in Slack, but email works too. I'm not sure I'll do it more than once a season--probably at the end of the year going forward--but I can see some interest in having the information monthly, too. Whatever, you do you, all right? If the input file is well-formed, the process takes me about a minute to run, so don't get worried about taking up too much of my time. I'm a big boy, I can manage my own time.
A few things to look out for
1) If you use pivot tables to analyze things, players with the same name will get merged.
2) Also related to spreadsheets, in some studies data can combine in weird ways (for example, looking at a pitch’s rating progression through a year as it moves through multiple ratings … 3 > 4 > 5 … can sometimes get added up in ways that mess with the results.
3) As noted above, I cannot currently separate out Stuff changes due to role swaps. All I can do is note the role swap happened, and then rely upon you to make any adjustments from there. This affects only Stuff.
Is This Going To Be Useful?
I have no idea. Right now it's just a lot of information and very little data. But I'll say that I'm having great fun picking though the organization, and it's interesting to note things that changed and ask myself questions. Does physical growth portend anything? No idea, but I'll keep an eye out. It's fun to see popularity movement, too. I can almost make stories of them. And, to JWalk's conversation, if managers and coaches make a difference, maybe we could actually see it here. For example, I note that a lot of my AA pitchers had pretty good bumps in their repertoires and decent movement on some base ratings. Does that mean Jose Chavez is as good of a coach as he was a pitcher? No idea, but it's interesting to watch.
So, useful? Don't know.
Fun? Definitely.
