Post v20 Conversion: A Look at Pitcher Ratings

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Post v20 Conversion: A Look at Pitcher Ratings

Post by RonCo » Sat Jun 08, 2019 2:29 pm

This is in tandem with the Hitter Ratings post I did earlier. (Note: I'll be counting this as one Feature for PPT count, but split it for what I think is easier reading)
### If one remembers, I did a cut at what our starting pitcher ratings looked like on Opening Day of last season. It’s helpful to know these things, I suppose, but mostly I wanted folks to understand how relative ratings were working because (particularly for pitchers) in my mind they were fairly heavily skewed. I think we’re still skewed in v20, but the bottom line seems to be that the work the OOTP Dev team did this year was a very large step in the right direction.

Follow along and see if you agree with me.

As in my look at hitter ratings, I took a similar view off the 2038 Statistics page, only this time (naturally) for pitchers.

Here is a break-out of current Overall and Potential ratings for all pitchers who registered stats in 2038, broken down by Starting Pitcher and Relief Pitcher:

2039-Pitchers-SP-RP-OVR-POT.PNG

Discussion:
Bottom line for me here is that while I still think OOTP is making too many 80s (which is probably testament to our PCMs rather than OOTP itself), the overall curve has become much, much cleaner. The distribution of either type is now centered lower (45-50 with starters, 45 with relievers), though the averages are still probably shifted up a bit due to distribution.

We still have some issues that come about in the fact the relievers are being graded on the full 20-80 scale, but that’s inherent in OOTP Dev’s viewpoints, and at this point we’ll just be pleased that the base concept seems much cleaner for us to use as GMs. 45-50 looks like a decent thing to keep in mind as “workable” regardless of pitcher type, which is easier to deal with that the sliding scales before. (Note, this data is still affected by Ted’s finding on platoon shifts not being really well dealt with in OOTP overall ratings—a really great LOOGY/ROOGY will score “too low” on this scale, but will perform well if you get them in the right roles).

It’s perhaps worth using the overall ratings for both SP and RP to highlight this issue. In other words, we have more highly rated relievers than we do highly rated starters—which just feels wrong in baseball speak, but which I think is by OOTP design right now. Here’s the breakdown presented more clearly:

2039-Pitchers-SP-RP-OVR-Hist.PNG
2039-Pitchers-SP-RP-OVR-Hist.PNG (8.54 KiB) Viewed 374 times

Finally, let’s talk components because, once again, it’s the actual skills that matter. Here is the breakdown of stuff, movement, and control broken down by starter and reliever.

2039-Pitchers-SP-RP-Comp.PNG

Discussion:
As with hitters, where overall ratings are centered on 45-50, the components drift rightward a bit. That said, I think this is illuminating. Just staring at the image for a few moments shows you how different your average starter looks from your average reliever. Control skews right for guys who started, and Movement, while fairly normally distributed among starters, is rarer in the bullpen. But look how Stuff skews between the two. Whereas starter’s stuff centers cleanly on “6” and reliever’s sits at “7” and still skews harder toward “8.”

If we were to use this chart to say what an average BBA pitcher was, we’d probably fall on:
  • Starter: 6/6/7 (though movement may be a shade under that “6”)
  • ]Reliever: 7/6/6 (Stuff maybe 7.5, movement maybe 5.5)

Summary:
So, yeah, I think overall the relative ratings are working in a direction that we wanted to see, and in places where we’re still seeing warps (the excess of 80) the issue is probably in our environment more than the OOTP Dev court. You can probably disagree in the big picture, but by “the way we want them to," I means that if we do nothing but say “45” overall is workable, and “50” is pretty okay, we’re horribly, horribly wrong too often.

We do still need to account for a not insubstantial platoon stuff and the reliever/starter breakdown. And we need to understand that starter and relievers are on their own, separate scales (and that they have different component profiles). But with only a little sword arm jogging we can say that a “6” is a workable component, and more than that gets into the territory of a more serious contributor.
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