Minor League Player Strategies
This chapter I'm going to talk a little *edit* (a lot) about player strategies. I know everyone is familiar with them, but how many people can say they fill them out for every player in the organization? I know I can't. Up until now I've just about always used player strategies for every player on my BBA roster and important minor league players. I traditionally went down the spring training roster list during every pre season sim and called it a day.
There really is very little to gain by this minute level of detail involving players that have little to no shot at making the show. But as I will say a million times throughout this guide. This is the Ultimate BBA Rebuild. Any chance I can get to gain the very slightest advantage, I'm going to take it. Even if it involves psychotic micro managing.
Now there are two different types of player strategies I'm going to talk about here. The first is the basic slider options that the game allows you to change. The other is more obscure options that you would need to manage yourself. In both cases the objective is maximize the players statistics by enhancing his strengths and hiding his weakness.
Some will tell you that minor league stats are unimportant. I'm here to argue that. While I do not know whether this is true or not, my understanding of the game is that the better stats a player puts up... the better chance he has at bumping. It's not a gaurantee, but if the object is to do everything possible to aide player development, then it doesn't hurt to want your players to succeed with visual results.
Another effect it has is building a winning culture. By getting the most out of your players it slightly increases your odds of winning at the minor league level. The more a player wins championships, awards, and accolades.. the happier a player will be. A happy player always seems to perform better. Plus his popularity will grow. Which will help you down the road with fan interest, which directly influences cash flow.
Let's start off by breaking down the in game player stategies one by one and try to get a grasp of what type of players will be on the high and low side of these scales. Most of these are going to be cut and dry. I'm sure everyone shares similar views on these sliders. I'll try to add whatever I can along the way.
Stealing Bases
First we need to grasp the scope of the competition. Even though we use a 1-10 scale for all ratings, those said ratings are not equal. Think about a pitcher for a second. If a pitcher has an 8 movement now a days, even at the BBA level, he is awesome. Meanwhile if a base runner has an 8 stealing ability in rookie ball, he is not awesome. In fact he sucks.
Everyone and their brother has great running stats. For me, I usually use 10 as my line in the sand. Anyone over 10 stealing has the green light and everyone below has a full blown red light.
I'm also of the belief that players need to have a higher stealing rating then speed. It's a dumb OOTP thing that I wish I didn't know about and I wish even more didn't exist. But it is what it is and the stats back it up. So if a player has 11 speed and 10 stealing, I'm more inclined to hold them up.
So to wrap it up for this rebuild. I'm going to sort my whole minors by stealing ability. 10 and up get the green light, 9 and below get the red. Higher speed then stealing on players over 10 will get 50%. Other then that there isn't much middle ground. When it comes to stealing my belief is either make it or don't go.
Base Running
This one I'm a little more straight forward with. Ratings have a fairly gradient feel among players so I'm more likely to stagger the sliders more then stealing. Maybe 9+ runs 100%, 7-8 runs 75%, 5-6 runs 50%, and below 5 gets the red light.
Speed should have an impact on base running. But does it? I dunno. It's not an easy thing to track. In fact base running all together is pretty much an unknown entity. There are no known stats regarding it. One thing that we do know is it should be directly correlated to outfield arms and maybe 1-5% catchers(passed balls). There really isn't a situation where a player takes an extra base off an infielder.
I plan to do a quick study on outfielders arms throughout each level of the minors before setting all these sliders. This will help me get a good glimpse of what we're up against and I will scale the sliders slightly to the left or right accordingly. For my money, this is one of those hidden strategies in the game. Sure you need to play up your own strengths, but you also need to exploit your opponents weakness. We'll talk a lot more about that when the time comes.
Hit and Run
I feel like this is a dying strategy in real life. Maybe advanced data proves that's a bad idea? I've always liked it and will continue to employ it in my grand plan regardless. Personally I use two stats to determine hit and run. Avoid K to me means that likely hood that you will hit the ball while contact means that when you do hit the ball, it's less likely to be caught with a higher rating.
So in order to utilize the hit and run, I want someone high in both of those areas. Like stealing, this is more of a... you do or you don't strategy. Unless you have a speedy team like the early 2030's Run Run Robins and are likely to steal the base even if the batter misses the pitch, you stand a good chance of running yourself out of innings if you run with the wrong player up.
As I'm sitting here trying to decided the bar to set for hit and run in the minors, I've hit an unexpected roadblock. Undeveloped hitters may have high contact and avoid K potential, but their currents are going to be really low. So do I just go by their potential, try to develop a scope for each level, or just not hit and run.
My initial reaction is to develop a scope. Someone with a 6 contact and 7 avoid K may be the gold standard in the Single A hit and run game, But that scope may be skewed by drastic variences in talent, Everyone runs their minor leagues differently. What may be a Single A player to me might be a AAA player to someone else and vice versa. I don't think there is really a way to accurately gauge who may or may not be a good player to hit and run with. Unless of course they are fully developed in those areas.
My final thought is that I'm not going to hit and run much in the minors. Specifically the lower levels. As players develop those two skills I will adjust accordingly. I just don't want to press the issue when pitchers stuff is usually ahead of hitters contact and avoid k in the lower levels.
Sac Bunt
This slider creates another internal dillema. Do you really want a prospect bunting a lot in the minors, even if he is great at it? Let's say you have a solid yet underdeveloped hitting prospect. Something like 8/9/7/6/8 potential. But he also has 11 sac bunt ability. Bunting has no potential, just a current. If you crank the slider up, he may give away, I dunno 20-25 at bats a year. In those 25 at bats maybe he would have hit a couple of more homers and/or extra base hits. So is that a good trade off? Probably not.
So as far as developing players and minor league sliders go. It must be done on a case by case basis. First we will weed out the players who can't bunt and set them to 0%. Then we will go through the remaining players and apply a bunting spectrum based on their future hitting abilities. If it's a stud hitter, he absolutely won't be bunting no matter what the skill is. If it's a fringe or low potential prospect, then sure. Move some runners over and set up some RBI's for the true prospects.
Now, here is another question as I try to dig through the layers of a seemingly cut and dry strategy. What if I have a Zimmer level defender(10/9/9/10 infield defense) with barely enough hitting potential(6/5/4/6/5) to make it to the BBA. But he's not good at bunting(5). Does it make sense to crank up his sac bunting slider with the hopes that practice makes perfect and he bumps? I'm going to say yes. If anything I don't think it would hurt to try. If his bunting can bump to 7, it would make him a more useful player at the BBA level.
Bunt for a hit
I heard someone suggest on a podcast once that there is probably a GM that is tracking bunt for a hit abilities. Sadly that is not me. Well until now. It is a great idea. All things equal a player with 10+ bunting skills can hit .10-.20 points higher then one who doesn't bunt. So as we will learn later in this series, I plan to track bunts in a couple of different ways.
Unlike sac bunting, if a player can bunt for a hit, I'm going to let them do it no matter what. From my experience in watching games replays and logs. Bunting for a hit generally happens with no one on base most of the time. So it's not like someone with 10 power and 10 bunting is punting the 3 run homer for a bunt.
If anything it may be a really clever way to game the system. It may be thing where this specific player hits a home run every 25 at bats. Well if he is more likely to bunt with the bases empty, he is assuring that we won't hit a solo home run as often, which in turn would make it more likely that he would hit a home run with people on base in the future. Again, I don't know that this is true and it's not my motive. Just something that makes you think a little.
So that wraps up the hitter strategies. I've already begun setting these up for my Rookie, SS-A, and A teams and plan to do AA and AAA really soon. It's kind of tiresome, boring, and often makes me wonder if there is even a point. I have not seen any real results yet. That is due to a short sample and the fact that I didn't start when the season started.
As far as pitching goes. There isn't as much strategy offered. It's more or less pitch counts and how quick of a hook you give your pitcher. I would love to see this expanded in future versions of the game. Setting the pitch distribution percentage would be a huge addition in and of itself.
I will monitor pitch counts for all pitchers. After filling out my depth chart that I talked about before, my starters are all already at a 60 pitch limit. I have not set RP yet, but will soon. I plan to base it mostly off of stamina. My biggest goal in developing pitching is to get them just the right amount of work. Too much could lead to pitching while fatigued and injuries. Too little will cause slow development. If you can find the sweet spot, you will be putting your pitcher in the best position to bump.
We've covered just about all of the player strategies right? Not even close. Those were just the game sliders. There are also millions of little things that could help you gain an advantage. I haven't and won't even be able to cover all of them in this one article. It's simply too much to give away for 2 measley participation points. But if you follow my journey over the next 6-7 seasons then you too will be able to write a book about it. Here are just a couple though...
If you are developing a prospect, you want them to be as successful as possible. Beware of level innapropriate players. If you have an uber prospect that is still a few years off, check out the week at a glance for him. Like I mentioned before, not everyone will run their farm system like you. Sometimes you see a beast that really doesn't belong at the level he is playing at. We are going to try to watch out for these players and sit our bigger prospects on those days. Maybe that cause us to lose. It probably will. But at least our better prospects won't have to take an 0-5 with 4 k's in the proccess.
The same could be said for the opposite. Let's face it, there are some bad players and some bad teams in the minors. We've even seen in the past that there are times when teams get neglected and have a hard time filling out the roster. In a perfect world, this doesn't happen. But since this is going to be a ruthless and oppurtunistic rebuild, we intend to exploit every weakness to the max and will make sure all our best prospects get their hacks in against teams that are short staffed or weak. A 5-5 will raise a players bottom line that season.
One of my favorite OOTP strategies is ballpark factors. The most common use is to build your BBA team toward it's home park. But the strategy goes well beyond that. You can use it just as effectively to set pitchers and lineups for road games and certainly in developing players in the minors.
As a rule of thumb. Try to always pitch a flyball pitcher in a big park and groundball pitchers in a smaller park. This is oh so obvious, but how many actually follow up on the strategy and map out starts to enhance this? Going further, how many utilize this in the minors to develop prospects?
Well, I've gone well beyond my intended word count in this article and am fairly confident that nobody is still reading. To put a bow on player strategies at the minor league level. I'm currently working on filling out all of the sliders and pitch counts. Moving forward I'm going to make a shortlist of worthwhile prospects that I am going to focus on and try to put them in the best position to succeed on a sim to sim basis. I'll do this by making sure they are in VS weak competetion, rest them against strong opponents, and try to maximize their playing time in parks that benefit their style of play.
Just a warning, there may be a small gap before our next chapter. I've talked a lot about what I'm doing to set up the minor league infrastructure and need to catch up with actually doing it. Plus we are still over a year away from the "Great Brooklyn Fire Sale of 2037" and there really isn't too much exciting stuff that will happen between here and then.
