With the change in minor league age limits coming up, in addition to the importance of “developing” your prospects more than ever, it is very important that we consider the change to relative ratings again.
In relative mode, being able to select which league is the reference point makes managing your minor leagues much easier. Want to know if your single-A shortstop could handle double-A? Switch your ratings to be relative to the Eastern League and watch his “overall”. A 50 would theoretically be “around” average if relative ratings were turned on.
Furthermore, it's important to know which league your draftees should start off in. If you just dump them all to Rookie ball, the roster will be overcrowded. Realizing that your 5th-round reliever you drafted out of college can go straight to single-A will help you spread out the sudden influx of players and help them develop facing competition that is not too “tough” or “too easy”.
Although potential ratings are the most important for drafting, it also pays to find players whose current ratings aren't too shabby either. Your 20th round pick probably won't ever reach the majors, but you might be able to find a college senior who's ready to become a valuable minor league contributor right away.
A misunderstanding of relative ratings caused us to switch, when most of our talent was showing up as higher than “50” overall. The thing to consider on the 20-80 overall scale is that 50 means “average” and “average” should mean 2 WAR. Every guy on the team should not be a 50 overall. There should be a few guys starting who are under that. On a side note, knowing that our scale is 1-10, it forces us to depend on past performance instead of "64 is better than 56" throughout the various individual player ratings, which is a good thing. When we were looking at “contact” with an average higher than 5.7 or something and not understanding why, it was forgotten that a “5” means somewhere between 50 and 59 on the internal 1-100 scale. When we took the average of all the players in the league, it makes sense that we didn’t get a “5 average” because we didn’t know how many of those 5’s were high 5’s(see below for gif involving this) or low 5’s. Had we shown “true 1-100” contact ratings, we would have had an average of 50.
On a somewhat related note... It is very important to note that a switch to "relative ratings" would send some shockwaves, as those 50 pot prospects might look even a bit uglier when being compared to current BBA players in the league. Time to rip the band aid off though and make the switch now so that these prospects can develop properly.
