As many know, Matt came out to Las Vegas this past week. So today we got a chance to sit down together and do some shared looking at the v25 conversion across the board, and specifically the Dev Lab. I think Matt’s still fiddling with a few ideas on the whole, so I’ll leave such things to him, but suffice to say 2059 is going to be a season of much change. I’m sure there will be some day-to-day problems that will annoy, but I think it will be a sea-shift positive in the end. Welcome to OOTP in the online world.
Anyway, the topic today is the Development Lab, which specifically is the brand new feature by which we can send players to skills development programs. While we’re all going to be starting off with essentially zero real knowledge of how things will resolve, I think it’s important to know what to expect when it comes to basic operations. Hence this guideline. To come up with it, Matt and I sat down with a test league and simmed through a full off-season, playing with the various assignments to make sure they work properly with our sim schedule, and to get an idea of how we might best use it.
Along the way, I took notes...
Here's what I came away with…
First a couple base concepts.
1) Each team will the same number of off-season lab billets.
2) Each billet runs all season, but some lab programs last several weeks (5-6 weeks), and others last all off-season (4-5 months). Theoretically, the more powerful/difficult the learning, the longer the billet is filled. [NOTE – I believe duration is league dependent, and get configured based on the off-season schedule available. The 5-6 weeks and 4-5 months were the listed times on the BBA test league that has our schedule in it.]
3) If there is time left in the off season when a program is finished, the billet can be filled with another player on another program. I’ll diagram that in a moment here. But this means one can choose to strategically stack multiple players in one billet if you’d rather do that instead of sending one player to a full program.
4) The Dev Lab runs from the end of the regular season through the end of Spring Training. It appears that a player can be attending Spring Training and still be filling a Dev Lab billet. All dev lab programs ended no later than Opening Day.
TYPES OF PROGRAMS:
As noted in #2 above, different lab programs have different levels of difficulty and different levels of time commitment. Here are a few examples:
- Baserunning Fundamentals (Easy): 4-5 weeks
- Improve Defense (Hard): 4-5 weeks
- Plate Discipline (Medium): 4-5 months
- Increase Pitch Movement (Medium): 4-5 months
- Add pitch to arsenal (Very Hard): 4-5 months
You can go through the curriculum yourself for the full set. But this gives you the idea. You will be able to focus effort on players. Results are not guaranteed, and time moves on. It’s worth noting that players can actually regress during this intense training, so it’s a +/- gamble. I am of the assumption that a player's make-up can influence results, but again, this is not supposed to be huge.
As each program goes along, you will get info on how well the player is doing, and then, when the program is finished (1) you should get an email, though we couldn't confirm that, and (2) the player’s history will be updated to note the success of lack thereof of the activity.
All right, then…what does this all mean when it comes to using the thing?
TIME AVAILABLE AND THE SIM SCHEDULE
Before going forward, it was helpful for me to think of it in relation to our sim schedule. In that light, the first thing that Matt and I did was review the points we use as sim stops. Here they are:
- Ends Nov 6 (variable): End of Season – v25 conversion (Dev Labs Open)
- Ends Nov 13th: Player Options/Pre-Arbitration Sim
- Ends Nov 15th: Team Options/Arbitration/FA Filing
- Ends Dec 1: FA Sim #1
- Ends Dec 15: FA Sim #2
- Ends Jan 1: FA Sim #3/Winter Meetings/Rule 5
- Ends Jan 26: FA Sim #4/IFA
- Ends 25-Feb: Pre-Season Sim
- Ends 6 Mar: Spring Training Sim #1
- Ends 18-Mar: Spring Training Sim #2
- Ends Apr 1: Spring Training Sim #3
- Apr 1: Opening Day
If I put this into a calendar format, it would look like this:
One we can see this flow, we then look at how the two types of programs fit into the flow, and begin to do some …
DEVELOPMENT LAB PLANNING
As luck would have it, the duration of these programs runs together pretty well. As long as we don’t miss a sim, we’ll be able to take several paths.
Let’s do the easy one first. With billet 1, I decide to send Samuel Nebraska, our star pitcher to increase pitch movement, which above says will take 4-5 months. We plan to start them right away, so it looks like:
Pretty straight-forward. They start right away, and while they might be done a little earlier, the plan shows the guy busy all off-season, including parts of spring training.
More interesting, from a planning standpoint, are the shorter programs. I’ll show you only one more billet, but the concept is the same for as many as we have. Let’s say we want to send a iron-gloved Napoleon Mellot off to improve his defense. It’s a short program, but has a high degree of difficulty. We’re going to send him right away. So the plan now looks like, um, below.
Note that Mellot’s program finished right before a sim starts (maybe a touch earlier). This means that billet #2 will then be open to use for another player. In this case, let’s say I then decide to send semi-prospect Bob Gentle to a program in billet #2. I no longer have time to get him through any long programs, but I decide to try to improve his defense at catcher…which is another 4-5 weeks (but Hard) program. (see the plan below, in a sec)
Note now that, billet #2 is again available in mid-January, but given the timing of sims I’ll not be able to use it for a week or so. But when I get a chance, let’s say I want to send my rookie shortstop to improve his base stealing, because, let’s face it, he’s speedy but gets tossed out a bunch. It’s a 4-5 week program that’s Very Easy. So, in total now, the plan looks like this:
By the time that last program finishes, we’re into Spring Training, and there’s not really any more time to send players to the lab with this billet. So, there I am, finished with my planning for billet #2.
NUMBER OF BILLETS
The game defaults to six billets. I suspect we’ll change that, but maybe go up or down over the first few seasons as we find what we think is the sweet spot. But the point here is that you’ll have that kind of decision across the span of billets.
If you miss a sim, then maybe your schedule will have to change. So, yeah, don’t miss a sim. [grin]
TO RESTATE: RESULTS
Again, to reiterate and restate and say again, the results that come from the lab will tend to be subtle. Perhaps only a few points. Often times not enough to see in out 1-10 bar ratings. But a few points can still be a fairly interesting value, and sometimes you’ll get a much bigger result.
And (gasp!) sometimes your guy will crumble under the pressure and regress.
So be prepared.
Bottom line, though, is that this tool lets us focus players where we want them to focus, and gives us something to do in the off-season besides wait for free agents to get off their duffs. I plan to go into it with a bit of a sense of wonder and curiosity. It seems like it should be fun. If nothing else, it’s great TN fodder, and we all know that even a crappy Dev Lab TN is worth two points!
I fully suspect this first off-season is going to be full of ... adventure.
So let's have fun, all right?
