2037-16: Talons RF Thad Meyer in Early JL MVP Conversation

[jiminyhopkins]

Phoenix, AZ--

Late last season, Talons 2033 first round pick Thad Meyer (8/10/7/5/9 Talents) moved from center field to right field to make room for fresh rookie call-up Weaver Ripley (6/6/10/7/3 Talents). Meyer quickly acclimated to his new position and, by this year's Spring Training, had garnered a higher position rating in RF than he ever had in center.

Going into 2037, Meyer was considered the leadoff hitter in front of big mashers such as Mario Deortez (8/9/9/6/7 Talents) and Bartolo Ortiz (8/9/10/6/8 Talents). However, in the early going, it is Meyer who is leading the team in most categories, and even appearing on the JL Leaderboards for batting average, on base percentage, WAR, stolen bases, zone rating, and more. The rest of the offense has been decidedly pedestrian so far, and most pundits agree that it is Meyer who if most responsible for the club's 1st place showing as of mid May.

Thad Meyer has been mostly known in Phoenix for being mild mannered and humble, the "nicest guy on the team," so to speak. He already has posted 14.4 career WAR, despite only playing full time for just over 3 seasons. Last year, he signed a team friendly contract that bought out his arbitration years, a move that is looking shrewd for the Talons to date. However, the deal also includes a hefty bonus of $1.1 million if Meyer is named JL MVP.

The Talons might want to start saving up.

GO Talons!

[Ted]

I keep taking the under on Meyer and he keeps proving me wrong. For some reason, I just don't like him very much from a ratings standpoint. I'm not sure he'll age well. He'll probably keep making me look like a doofus though.

[usnspecialist]

I keep taking the under on Meyer and he keeps proving me wrong. For some reason, I just don't like him very much from a ratings standpoint. I'm not sure he'll age well. He'll probably keep making me look like a doofus though.

I think Meyer might be the player you and I have had the most disagreements on in our discussions haha.

[Ted]

I keep taking the under on Meyer and he keeps proving me wrong. For some reason, I just don't like him very much from a ratings standpoint. I'm not sure he'll age well. He'll probably keep making me look like a doofus though.

I think Meyer might be the player you and I have had the most disagreements on in our discussions haha.

Yeah, one thing I like to do is "ignore" a guy's gap power and avk and just look at his con/pow/eye ratings (AVK is already folded into con, and gap power seems to be far less impactful in increasing from say 7 to 10 than say 4 to 7) and all I see in Meyer is a right handed 8/7/5 bat with 9 speed and likely soon to be corner outfield defensive ability. He really does have to be near the top of all those ratings to be doing this.

[Lane]

I keep taking the under on Meyer and he keeps proving me wrong. For some reason, I just don't like him very much from a ratings standpoint. I'm not sure he'll age well. He'll probably keep making me look like a doofus though.

I think Meyer might be the player you and I have had the most disagreements on in our discussions haha.

Yeah, one thing I like to do is "ignore" a guy's gap power and avk and just look at his con/pow/eye ratings (AVK is already folded into con, and gap power seems to be far less impactful in increasing from say 7 to 10 than say 4 to 7) and all I see in Meyer is a right handed 8/7/5 bat with 9 speed and likely soon to be corner outfield defensive ability. He really does have to be near the top of all those ratings to be doing this.

I don't recall if you've explained that before, but it sure explains why you don't like Beast. Err I mean Best.

[Ted]

I think Meyer might be the player you and I have had the most disagreements on in our discussions haha.

Yeah, one thing I like to do is "ignore" a guy's gap power and avk and just look at his con/pow/eye ratings (AVK is already folded into con, and gap power seems to be far less impactful in increasing from say 7 to 10 than say 4 to 7) and all I see in Meyer is a right handed 8/7/5 bat with 9 speed and likely soon to be corner outfield defensive ability. He really does have to be near the top of all those ratings to be doing this.

I don't recall if you've explained that before, but it sure explains why you don't like Beast. Err I mean Best.

It's definitely not perfect, but it helps me not get fooled by all the pretty blue bars at times. Which player is better (same handedness, fielding and speed)

7/7/8/7/7
or
8/9/5/3/10

Probably the first, but the second one has much more exciting "bars".

[RonCo]

I know lots of folks do what Ted does (essentially ignore Gap and Avk to focus on CON/POW/EYE), but I go a bit different direction...

No offense to Ted and his ilk here, but I only look at CON to get a feel for where I think a guy's BABIP is. Otherwise, CON is effectively useless (because all it is is the game's guestimate of what the player's batting average will be--and seriously, who the hell cares what a guy's batting average is in this day of sabermetrics? [grin]), and a little dangerous, because a High CON, lowish AVK will probably under-perform (because of the order the the game calculates its results in--which I've already discussed several times around here). In some ways, AVK can be viewed as an indicator of how accurate CON is...though admittedly that's dangerous, too.

Meyer is an interesting case for this because his high AVK means he'll almost certainly over-perform his 8 CON. His high GAP means he'll add points to his SLG that other folks might tend to discount. He's a total beast, made even more beastly in Phoenix because with Ripley's arrival he can slide to RF and be elite defensively.

[RonCo]

Which player is better (same handedness, fielding and speed)

7/7/8/7/7
or
8/9/5/3/10

Probably the first, but the second one has much more exciting "bars".

If you ignore CON completely on those two guys, you'd go to the first player every time. Do the same thing but change player 2's "3" EYE to a 4 or 5 and that's a more difficult call.

Doing a flat OOTP comparison to guess BABIP, that's probably not a horrible exercise, because its likely those two player's BABIP are in the same zip code.

I do agree that some GMs probably agree to overlook major holes players, but that's no reason to ignore the GAP and AVK ratings. If I had my own personal way, OOTP would get rid of CON completely as a rating, and just show the BABIP rating with the rest. These are the things that actually affect the results.

[Ted]

Which player is better (same handedness, fielding and speed)

7/7/8/7/7
or
8/9/5/3/10

Probably the first, but the second one has much more exciting "bars".

If you ignore CON completely on those two guys, you'd go to the first player every time. Do the same thing but change player 2's "3" EYE to a 4 or 5 and that's a more difficult call.

Doing a flat OOTP comparison to guess BABIP, that's probably not a horrible exercise, because its likely those two player's BABIP are in the same zip code.

I do agree that some GMs probably agree to overlook major holes players, but that's no reason to ignore the GAP and AVK ratings. If I had my own personal way, OOTP would get rid of CON completely as a rating, and just show the BABIP rating with the rest. These are the things that actually affect the results.

I guess "ignore" was the wrong word. I just like the second look. I semi agree about getting rid of CON. I actually wish BABIP wasn't a rating. BABIP is not a skill. It's a result or things like speed, contact ability, launch angle, etc. I'd rather keep CON if it actually represented some sort of scouting "hit tool" and have a speed rating that's speed, some sort of rating that actually tells me something about where and how the player hits the ball, etc. This game is as outdated now as the games of the later 90's were that gave us only contact hitting and power hitting and didn't say anything about walks, or differentiate between types of contact.

GAP power is dumb as shit too. There's no difference between power and gap power. It's the same thing. It's how hard you hit the ball and how you elevate it (or don't). I should really stop complaining in this space about OOTP and actually get active on the dev boards if I really care. But for the love of jeebus, give us some player ratings that represent actual skills, not video game results driven phenomenon.

[RonCo]

Another interesting guy to consider in this light is (now CCJs) Carlos Garcia. He's a wonky 5/8/6/10/3 probably staying in the league with that 10 EYE, but I suggest what really makes him actually valuable offensively is the 8 GAP. He's dropping doubles at the rate of about 40-50 per year if he played full time. That's a big deal.

The guy's got a "5" con, though...and a "3" AVK. By themselves, you'd never sign him. I mean, _several_ people have commented about how bad he is over the years. But add in his doubles and he's a 95-105 OPS+ guy, which he can then add to his defense and his legs to wind up being a 2.5-3.5 WAR player if he played full time. If you just look at his 5/6/10 CON/POW/EYE, you get a hollow offensive player who's only real value is that he walks a lot (which is what people seem to mean when they say he's a classic moneyball player). Which is just ... well ... not right.

[RonCo]

I actually wish BABIP wasn't a rating. BABIP is not a skill. It's a result or things like speed, contact ability, launch angle, etc.

Technically, in context of how the game engine looks at the game of baseball, BABIP is an actual skill for batters...meaning there is a correlation that follows real life offensive baseball players from year to year (a hitter with a good BABIP in year one will tend to have a good BABIP in year two...unlike a pitcher's BABIP, which is close to random). I agree that a player's BABIP skill is composed of other elements...but you can say the same about all skills: power is maybe the result of bat speed and swing dynamics, and blah, blah, blah. The game abstracts all these things, and in that sense BABIP is definitely a skill for batters.

ome sort of rating that actually tells me something about where and how the player hits the ball, etc.

The spray/pull rating says that, actually...though I think what you really mean is that you'd like those ratings to make a bigger difference in the engine.

This game is as outdated now as the games of the later 90's were that gave us only contact hitting and power hitting and didn't say anything about walks, or differentiate between types of contact.

I do agree that the game engine would be marvelous if it were adjusted to work on different basis (a real-time state engine) than the plate appearance, but I doubt that's happening anytime soon.

GAP power is dumb as shit too. There's no difference between power and gap power. It's the same thing. It's how hard you hit the ball and how you elevate it (or don't). I should really stop complaining in this space about OOTP and actually get active on the dev boards if I really care. But for the love of jeebus, give us some player ratings that represent actual skills, not video game results driven phenomenon.

In context of resolving the results on a plate appearance basis, the GAP rating is required to separate line drive hitters from home run hitters.

I agree that if you'd like to see a fundamental shift in the game's perspective (one based on a state engine and several physical elements of the players, rather than one based on the plate appearance), it would be good to go to the boards. But it's also ... um ... healthy? ... to realize the massive changes you're asking for. I've been involved in writing code for real time processing of state engines. It's extremely complicated (aside, I actually started coding a baseball game based on a state engine approach. It's really, really complicated).

Making this change--which I 100% agree I would love, and for which I've advocated--would be a "bet your company" decision for Markus. So while I can spin up a pretty good argument for why they should do it, I completely understand his aversion to taking that kind of risk given that OOTP is now firmly established.

[Ted]

Another interesting guy to consider in this light is (now CCJs) Carlos Garcia. He's a wonky 5/8/6/10/3 probably staying in the league with that 10 EYE, but I suggest what really makes him actually valuable offensively is the 8 GAP. He's dropping doubles at the rate of about 40-50 per year if he played full time. That's a big deal.

The guy's got a "5" con, though...and a "3" AVK. By themselves, you'd never sign him. I mean, _several_ people have commented about how bad he is over the years. But add in his doubles and he's a 95-105 OPS+ guy, which he can then add to his defense and his legs to wind up being a 2.5-3.5 WAR player if he played full time. If you just look at his 5/6/10 CON/POW/EYE, you get a hollow offensive player who's only real value is that he walks a lot (which is what people seem to mean when they say he's a classic moneyball player). Which is just ... well ... not right.

I like Garcia a lot an agree he's underrated. But he's only hitting doubles at a rate of 33 per 600 ABs (sorry, too late to figure out per PA). That's really not that impressive. I was going to continue that the difference from gap of 6 to 10 just isn't enough, but I did some looking around and I may be wrong. I found a bunch of 5 or low 6 con guys with 6 gap power and they were all around 24-28 doubles per 600 pa's, largely influened by speed. So maybe gap matters a bit more than I thought.

[Ted]

Ron, I don't want to piecemeal your response because I'm lazy. I get that its a lot of work. I'm not asking for it all at once. The reason I can point out so many flaws however, is that there has been ZERO change to the player model in the five years I've bough this game. That's bad. Second, I don't really care if BABIP is a skill in the game. The game is supposed to mimic real life. In real life, BABIP is a result, not an input. That's a bad model and will HAVE to be discarded at some point if this game is to progress. I can totally get that Markus doesn't want to "Bet the franchise" but at some point, if he doesn't decide to start making major moves, OOTP will be so woefully out of date that it will be replaced, just as it replaced all the sims we used to play because THEY were out of date and refused to evolve.

[jiminyhopkins]

The Fan Club is REAL!!!

[RonCo]

I pulled the GAP ratings of every hitter in the game, and did a quick pivot table of all their stats as of this moment (late May). Here's a little snapshot.

Take it for what it's worth...note that the 10 GAP rating is similar to the 9 GAP rating, but the sample size is low for the 10.

[RonCo]

Ron, I don't want to piecemeal your response because I'm lazy. I get that its a lot of work. I'm not asking for it all at once. The reason I can point out so many flaws however, is that there has been ZERO change to the player model in the five years I've bough this game. That's bad. Second, I don't really care if BABIP is a skill in the game. The game is supposed to mimic real life. In real life, BABIP is a result, not an input. That's a bad model and will HAVE to be discarded at some point if this game is to progress. I can totally get that Markus doesn't want to "Bet the franchise" but at some point, if he doesn't decide to start making major moves, OOTP will be so woefully out of date that it will be replaced, just as it replaced all the sims we used to play because THEY were out of date and refused to evolve.

Again, I agree with you. The model is ... at least unsophisticated in some places. I've made many long diatribes on the beta boards in the past about how that game should change. You would be proud of me. The fact is that _every_ result-based rating is the composite of several physical traits of the players involved.

Steal success is about jump (reading the pitcher vs. pitcher's skill at hiding his intentions), quickness (initial reaction), raw speed, sliding ability, catcher's arm strength, catcher's arm accuracy, infielder's positioning at the moment, infielder's ability to apply a tag, for just one example.

Power is about ...

Stuff is ... oh, my, don't get me started.

My personal pet-peeve is that I think every pitch should get a rating for velocity, movement, command/control, arm slots, and maybe GB% (though again, that's a result rather than an input) then build pitcher overall ratings based on those. The disagreement we had over that request is what got me so riled up that I quit beta testing for a couple years. They actually got half-way there after that, which is part of the reason I went back. Still, the model is not good...it's just better than it was before individual pitches mattered.

-------------------------

Another issue Markus deals with in making a change like we would both like is that he has a large group of customers who only want to play historical games...or with only real life players. Today's MLB players might be able to be modeled in this new world we're envisioning, but historical players are a blank slate. The work it requires to make them right can be done, but it will be a very large amount of work.

-------------------------

I'm not saying "you should be happy with things"...because I personally am not particularly pleased myself... but it is helpful to me, when I get spun up on the world of OOTP, to step back and see what I'm asking for. I've been doing this a long, long time. The game is 100x more robust than it was in the old days.

-------------------------

All that said, I agree there are many things the development team could do right now to make things better and that are not massive structural changes changes. They could fix the Speed thing. They could improve pitch development (which they have actually been working on every year). They could revamp the fielding metrics to make it clear what something like "Zone Rating" really is. Etc. If nothing else, they could publish things like quality of hit, and location (which they have taken a step toward with the defensive metrics...and on that note, while you say that there has been ZERO change in the player model in the last five years, I must defend the developers there. The defensive model is different than it was even last year (though it's defense--who can call one thing _better_ than the next?)

[RonCo]

I'll say that the little script I was presenting data from a season or two ago (that ran through the game logs and compiled league-wide results of every at bat) showed that you could compile scatter charts of each hitter and pitcher by batted balls (GB/FB/LD/PU) hit into each region by each player against each handedness. You can tell by the new defensive stats for likelihood of making a play that the game is doing some assignment of the quality of a ball in play, so technically that's available too...if they printed that in the game log, I could use that same script to quantify those, too.

I need to pull game logs this year and do some more with that.

But still, to your point, the engine backs into them to some degree...I'm not sure what the actual algorithms are, but I envision a weird balance of a process that uses fundamental AB results that then get massaged by things like hitter type and other things.

In their defense Markus and Matt are quite open to trying to make their representation better, even if they are extremely angsty about ripping up their existing platform.

I can argue both sides here.

[Ted]

You know, "ZERO" change is clearly a overstatement. How about very little discernible change, approaching zero? One mistake game developers make in iterative editions is getting lost in all the work they do, and believing they've made significant changes the customer will appreciate. The game "looks" almost identical to what it was when I picked it up. Yes if I stat dive I can see things are being handled differently, and I don't mean to be overly critical of hard working people. However, you can't overlook the big picture because you got excited about a couple pixels, even if improving them was a monumental amount of work. That's just how it is. I completely agree on individual pitch velocities. How about being able to coach pitch mix. How about some players being more or less resistant to coaching? How about coaching that matters in a measurable way? How about scouting where the scouts don't disagree so wildly with each other that we have to turn it off? What about more detailed bullpen management?

These sorts of things wouldn't require a huge overhaul of the engine I don't think? They'd be much better "Baseball" improvements than "realistic clubhouse simulation" and "more realistic injuries". I'm not a game developer. But I am a "professional" game player, whatever that is worth. I've played video games on average 20 hours a week for more than 25 years. That's probably an underestimate. I've picked up franchises and put them down. I've played big developments to stuff made by one guy in a basement. I'm sure many of you are the same. The simple fact Markus needs to pick up is that OOTP is getting stale. Fast. Someone will take his market from him with a product that isn't if he doesn't do something real about it.

[usnspecialist]

one thing im curious about is if we will see more developments like we want now that perfect team is out in the open. I imagine that took up a lot of the development resources the last few years, and with those now (mostly) freed up maybe they can tweak some of the things with the actual game.

[Ted]

How about Thad Meyer though! Gap power FTW!