61.16 Montreal Completes Induction of 2061 Draft Class

[Bob Breum]

Montreal signed all twenty members of its 2061 draft class. The group includes two catchers, two first basemen, two second basemen, a third baseman, a shortstop, four left fielders, a center fielder, three starting pitchers, and four relievers. The total cost of bonuses for the class was $8,920,000. Eight of them are 17-year-olds just out of high school.


Denes 'Shadow' Terovolas
Montreal picked 18th in this draft. With their first pick, they selected 20-year-old third baseman Denes 'Shadow' Terovolas. With three years of college experience, he is already very polished. Scouts project him with a plus-plus hit tool and plus power. He is not fleet of foot, but his line drive style should play well in Ubisoft Field. He has been assigned to AA Mississauga.

Raúl Sandoval
With their second selection, the Blazers chose 17-year-old infielder Raúl Sandoval. He projects to have plus contact skills and above average power. He is a poor baserunner with a poor batting eye. He has strong infield skills, with plus-plus range, a strong throwing arm and a decent glove, although his double play footwork needs improvement. Scouts praise his work ethic and adaptability. He'll report to rookie ball.


Jim Garrick
Montreal invested its third selection in another polished three-year college veteran, 21-year-old left-handed hitter Jim Garrick. It is unclear whether he can stick at catcher with his modest throwing arm and shaky catching skills, but it is even more unclear if he can play first base with any degree of success. Club insiders say that there was a lot of debate internally before his selection, questioning if there was any defensive home for him, but his powerful bat eventually won over the skeptics. Of course, it was for this very reason that Garrick was still on the board midway through the third round of the draft. Scouts project him with plus-plus power, a plus hit tool, and a plus batting eye. His only weakness as a hitter is strikeouts, and boy howdy, this is a major issue for him. Last season in college, he struck out in over one third of his plate appearances. He has a reputation as a leader and has drawn admiration for his strong work ethic. He has been assigned to Single-A Dearborn Heights.


Gui-fan Guao
The fourth round of the draft saw Montreal choose 19-year-old switch-hitting outfielder Gui-fan Guao. With some college experience, Guao is advanced for his age. Although a switch hitter, he is more comfortable hitting from the left side. Scouts project him to have elite power into the gaps, which was the obvious attraction for the Blazers' brain trust and should pair well with his plus-plus speed. He is especially adept at bunting for hits. Otherwise, he should be an average hitter with a below average eye. Defensively, he profiles as a solid left fielder but lacks the range or the arm to play elsewhere. Hes been assigned to Short Season A Nassau.

[BaseClogger]

I see what you are trying to say about Garrick’s “hit tool” but I think typically K rate is part of the hit tool definition.

[Bob Breum]

I see what you are trying to say about Garrick’s “hit tool” but I think typically K rate is part of the hit tool definition.

It is my understanding that BABIP is a measure of batting average. From the OOTP Wiki: "BABIP - This rating shows how good a player is at likely to put the ball in play and get more hits, with a higher batting average." [Editor's note: that is an extremely awkward sentence.]

I have read multiple attempted explanations from assorted online experts of what constitutes the hit tool, and they are all over the place. Some say it is the ability to put the ball in play; some say it must take into account the quality of contact; some suggest that the score should be adjusted if the player has plus plus speed and is more likely to beat out balls that other players would not.

From The Athletic: "I was never taught a specific definition of the hit tool, but I’ve come to use it to refer to the ability to make quality contact. Not just any contact, mind you, but quality contact. If contact were the only goal, Nick Madrigal, who posted the lowest strikeout rate in organized baseball last year, would have an 80 hit tool, or at least the highest hit tool of any prospect. Contact is not the goal, however; hard contact, the kind that results in base hits and extra bases and the power to advance runners, is. All contact is not created equal, and some contact might even be undesirable (he writes, as, in a parallel COVID-19-free universe, Albert Pujols rolls over into another 6-4-3 double play).

"But I’m going to hedge a bit on that definition, too: You have to make enough contact for this to work. Yoán Moncada has the highest BABIP of any MLB hitter over the past three seasons, signifying at least a high rate of hard contact (and, likely, some good luck), but he has also struck out over 30 percent of the time. He’s making high-quality contact when he’s not striking out. Domingo Santana has done just about the same thing, and I don’t think anybody is confusing his hit tool with an 80.

"So the best answer I can give on the hit tool is that it’s an interaction between the two. If you remember linear programming from high school or college math, it’s a bit like that: Somewhere there’s a point where the two constraint lines intersect, and that’s the optimal answer. You want all the hard contact and not much of the soft kind; you don’t want excessive swing and miss, but nearly every hitter in the past 20 years who’s made a lot of hard contact has struck out at least 15 percent of the time. Mike Trout is the exemplar here: he strikes out about 20 percent of the time, over 100 times a year, but he consistently makes high-quality contact. He has an 80 hit tool — and I don’t think that’s a controversial opinion."

This suggests that the hit tool includes a correlation between batting average and power, which was specifically decoupled in OOTP 25, but it does not imply a correlation between batting average and strikeouts.

I suppose that I could use "projected batting average" instead of hit tool in future evaluations. I am open to other descriptions that are consistent with standard baseball jargon.

[BaseClogger]

I think decoupling power was the right move and the new Contact rating is analogous to hit tool. It’s the combination of making contact (AVK) and quality of contact (BABIP).

[Bob Breum]

I think decoupling power was the right move and the new Contact rating is analogous to hit tool. It’s the combination of making contact (AVK) and quality of contact (BABIP).

AvoidK does not affect the rate of contact. It only addresses how often the player strikes out. You can see this in the Development Lab, where one option is to have a player work on hitting with two strikes.

[BaseClogger]

Isn’t rate of contact ABs minus Ks divided by ABs? Therefore AVK directly feeds a rate of contact calc.

[Bob Breum]

I'd love to see @RonCo weigh in on this.

[RonCo]

Well...hummmm...are we talking OOTP or real baseball? I'll get to my view of OOTP in just a sec, but I have an urgent need to point out the OOTP and true baseball language are at odds because human beings can use language to mean whatever they want it to mean whenever they want it to mean something. "Stuff," for example, in baseball is actually amorphous. I say that because sometime back I took an hour or two and Googled baseball people talking about "Stuff" and got a considerably entertaining array of conversations that basically boiled down to "I know it when I see it." one guy will have nasty stuff. Another has major league stuff. Some folks say a guy with high velo and some movement has great stuff. Others say that a guy who can hit corners with an array of pitches had amazing stuff. Some use "Stuff" as kind of an overall rating.

At the end of the day, you hear these things and the main thing they have in common is that "this guy is good at getting hitters out."

Similar, the term "hit tool." I personally have a vision of what it means when I say it, but when I try to define it in precise, mathematical terms that roll into a baseball sim that resolves its results on the basis of an at bat, it starts to get murky very fast.

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Anyway. What follows may be a lot more than you asked for, but I'm on a roll...so...

They did change the content of the OOTP "rating" that is called Contact. Where it used to be a direct projection of batting average (that was always doomed to be wrong), it is now really "Bating Average Without HR" ... for which there is no real baseball term, though some seem to want to call it Hit Tool, which is as good a name as anything. Note, I use quotation marks around the term "rating." because OOTP does not use, nor has it ever used, the Contact "rating" to calculate its results. Markus left contact there because he wanted _something_ to represent "batting average," and that was mathematical way to do it.

To really understand what the ratings are doing, it's helpful to understand the order of events OOTP uses to calculate an AB.

I should say here that (1) I do have a pretty fair sense of what the order is -- which you can figure out mostly on a thought experiment basis if you spend some time focusing on it, but (2) there are some nuances that break the thought experiment and can only be completely proven by spending some time testing. Then (3), I do believe that at some point OOTP swapped an order of events which makes some subtle differences in performance.

In the meantime, the Devs have shared a bit with me that I will not divulge here because I don't want to risk breaking an NDA. I will, however, share what I determined on the basis of my thought experiment, and you can do with it what you want.

First, what is a plate appearance? Where does it start? I decided to think of a plate appearance in terms of contact. There are two things that can happen that do not entail the batter even swinging: A walk, or a HBP. Hence, I put those first, meaning I assumed that the engine matched up pitcher control and hitter Eye ratings (and pitcher and hitter HBP ratings) first, and determined if a walk occurred. Once this decision had been made, the "plate appearance" became an "at bat." And if this was the case, then the rest of the ratings would be more easily assessed as an At Bat (which is, of course, what batting average is based on)

This made intuitive sense to me, but there are also many places in-game where the game is telling us that might be the case.

As one example on the top of my mind, looking at the Historical Simulation Accuracy screen, you'll note that BB/PA is tracked, but Ks and HRs are tracked as K/AB and HR/AB. So, yes, I'm quite certain the game decides BB and HBP first.

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Next comes the thought process on what to do with balls in which a batter makes contact (or at least maybe swings). The game has Power (=HR rate/AB), and Avk (=K rate/AB), and BABIP (= Hits on balls in play). Hence it needs to calculate Balls in Play. This is easily doable now since we've already finished with walks. Here, though, is the murky bit. Do we calculate HR first, or Ks first? The purist in my wants to calculate K's first, and maybe the game does it that way. But arguably it could also calculate HR first. Or, it could calculate the odds of both at once, and then use one RNG to determine if either one happened in one fell swoop. This is something you can test without GREAT difficulty, but you have to think about it some.

Regardless, whichever you choose, you have now removed BB/HP from the PA (and were left with an AB), and now also removed HR/K from the AB. This then leaves you with a Ball In Play.

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If you assume my logic is right, that means the next step is to apply another RNG to the Log5 matchup of pitcher and batter BABIP ratings. In a great world, pitcher BABIP ratings (IMHO) would all be essentially the same...but OOTP has now added more influence to pitcher in this area, and whatever that influence is comes here. If the game determines there is a hit, it would branch down a path to determine doubles and triples (which I note also show on the Historical Sim Accuracy screen as being tracked per hit). If it determines the result is an out, it would naturally flow down a different path to determine GB/LD/FB outs and whatnot.

At this point, I believe -- but don't know exactly how -- the game would most naturally apply the influence of defense in either direction (changing a hit to an out, or changing an out to a hit or an error).

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So, there you have it. To the best of my ability to think through things, that's how BABIP/AVK/POW/GAP/EYE -- STU/MOV/CON/GB% -- RNG/ERROR play together in the base game flow.

There are, of course, a bunch more stuff that probably influences all these things. If you think about this flow, you can probably make some decent guesses as to how park factors might be put into the calculations (but I admit fully I don't know what those are). Same for morale boosts or lags. Fatigue goes in here someplace, and perhaps even across several places. And Framing for catchers. And what about those players who seem to blaze for a year, or have a horrible season, then bounce back. Is there something extra outside the core flow? Probably. Weather plays a part, too. And I'm sure there's more. I'm just not thinking fully.

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Like I said before, this is probably more than you were really asking. so, sorry about that...and like I also said before, there are some details that I'm not comfortable sharing that might add some depth.

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So, is BABIP/AVK "Hit Tool?" I don't know. You tell me.

[BaseClogger]

That settles it: Garrick has a mediocre hit tool