...as high as trainer ratings:

There are always a handful of players in every league that hit 99 (and a few that even hit 100) in trainer ratings (those that develop in the offseason like power, speed, health, etc.) But you VERY rarely see 99 in the coachable ratings (those ratings that progress throughout the season). Isn't it safe to assume that 1) ratings ceilings for coachable ratings have just as much chance to reach 99 as trainer ratings and 2) the reason we don't see it that often is training happens automatically but coaching and playing time create a lot of room for owner error? If so, this means most, if not all, owners are missing out on a few extra points of development in their players.

For example: In one of my leagues there are four “98”, two “99”, and zero “100” ratings in all of the four coachable hitting categories (contact, vL, vR, and eye) of all the players in the majors. In another league its two “98” and one “99”. In another league it is six and one, respectively.

Those same leagues have many more players with 98-100 in power or speed and those are only two categories as opposed to the four I'm using above for comparison.

My best guess as to the reasons for this is that either a) players are not being exposed to good enough coaches, b) players are not getting enough playing time, or c) both.

Ideas to help prospects reach the absolute maximum potential:

1. Put ML caliber prospects on the minor league team with the best pitching/hitting coach right after draft/signing (typically this means starting out at AAA, but most owners start their players at rookie or LoA). Additionally, hire PC’s and HC’s for the BC role to maximize development in those ratings. (For example, hire the two best HC’s you can find and put them both in AAA, one as a BC. Then hire the two best PC’s you find and put them at AA, again, one as a BC)
2. Promote prospects to the ML club as soon as is reasonable. Early enough to take advantage of higher ML coaching ratings (many owners seem to wait 4 years when development is all but over, when many prospects, especially the elite ones, can hit the ML’s after one or two seasons of development)
3. Developer chats have indicated that GP is the criteria for player experience, not IP or AB. Prospects should be played in every game of the season even in their first year as a pro when they have low durability. This can be achieved relatively easily through the player rest page. Ensure every ML caliber prospect has a player assigned to spell him. For example, set the rest setting to activate in “1 run ahead” (or behind) in the 5^th inning, or sooner if you prefer, to prevent injuries.

Thoughts?

Well, it seems that levels should be appropriate to the age of the prospect. So not sure #1 will work there.

I've been doing #1 for years and if there's a downside, it's too tiny to see. Put Brett Cashman in the majors at 19 because my ML hitting coach was far superior to any other and his power made him a reasonable 25th guy as a third C. He didn't play a ton and struggled (.203) and went up 10 points (OVR, for simplicity), and went up 2 pts in this ST at age 20. I put my top 2-3 draft picks in AA/AAA most of the time, going with whichever had the better coach at the players' roles, and did it long enough before the update to be able to compare using the formula predicting growth. Some exceeded the formula projection, some met it, and some fell short. For a player with a longer track record, Kosuke Aoki went to AA after being drafted at 18. His year-to-year OVR (47 at draft) went 51-58-64-69-1-1-1. Cashman's draft OVR was 44 followed by 51-61. Howie Cambridge did part of his first season at High A but was in AA at 18 and AAA at 19. 43 at draft then 52-62-68-72-73.

They might have developed the same or a little better if gradually moved up, or having them with the best coaches might have maximized their growth. It doesn't seem that being above their age-appropriate levels or struggling statistically has hurt them any. I glanced at another 4-5 players I had prioritized after drafts and all appeared to have normal pre-update development. It could be that all the different ways we try to maximize development only make a slight difference, which would make it hard to pick up. If 90% of development is pre-ordained (barring injury and awful coaching), the remaining 10% variable would be nearly impossible to nail down given all the variables (non-skill ratings, coaches' secondary ratings, playing time, level, etc.) in play.

I agree that levels should be age-appropriate for best development, but that doesn't mean someone took the time to program it that way (as opposed to adding a sentence in the Help section).

If 90% of development is preordained barring stupidity/catastrophe, then we're tatalking about trying to squeeze an extra 7 or 8 points out of a player with a rating over 80 or 90 anyway, since we're talking about doing this with your best prospects.
Wouldn't it actually be more valuable, if it indeed worked that way, to do it with your fringe prospects? A 60 player becoming a 70 might be more valuable than a 90 becoming a 99. It would be like cooking your own DiTRs. But who would have the inclination to invest in that experiment?

HBD has put out contradicting info and tips on this. They've said both prospects should be with the best coaches and they should be at the appropriate level for their age/ability and promoted once a season or development will stagnate.

Both can't be true. If they are both true, the one undermines the other. They've never said which is more important.

Good luck getting enough data to figure it out on your own. You would need a LOT of teams and a lot of years. There are a LOT of variables, many you can't control. You could be years into a test and get shut out of a good AA P Coach. Or you could budget big $$ for a 90+ fielding coach and still not get one. Or a player could get injured.

Back when we could see all players development patterns, we could learn a bit from what other GMs did. You could look at prospects who developed badly and go to the team and player history to see how much the played, where they played, coach ratings, and at least figure out some of what didn't work. But a few updates ago HBD took away our ability to see other players development history, so now we can't even do that.

The Games Played vs. Innings Played / Pitched thing, IMO, sucks. They seem have recently come clean with that. So it does seems we should all be screwing around with our MinL settings to our best position prospects come out of every game in the 6th inn and best SP prospect throw just 50 pitches a start so they can start 50+ games. I didn't make those changes because I hoped HBD would retract that, but now that they haven't I suppose we should all be dumbing down the MinL a bit more and at least give this a try.

Back when we could see all players development, I came to believe it is possible to screw up a players development by not playing them. If they played, they got better. While I didn't run math models on it, I don't think coaching ratings have all that much to with hitting and pitching ratings getting better. Who knows if patience is 100% or 25% more important that disciple or if high numbers there make up for lower numbers in P and H ratings? Nobody. Including probably nobody who's still working at WIS. Now that they are working on the game again, I have to believe since coach hiring is the most boring and seemly least productive part of the game, if they could change it or fix it, they would.

Long rant ends in -- Same advice I gave the guy who posted about trying to 'rig' the DITR thing. Find something else to do with your time. Within HBD or outside. Do what you have to do for a few days to get OK coaches. I doubt that hurts. Play your best prospects a lot. Without running them down to low, which risks injury, unless you're playing the 20 Med / 60 Day DL game, in which case you should run your best P prospects down to 0(0) and start them every game until they get hurt. Then keep them on the 60 Day DL until they got 2 or 3 cycles past where they could have come off.

What you can do maximize development vs what you'll get with OK coaching & playing time is not worth your time.

Posted by joshkvt on 6/18/2016 12:50:00 PM (view original):
I agree that levels should be age-appropriate for best development, but that doesn't mean someone took the time to program it that way (as opposed to adding a sentence in the Help section).

Bingo! Anyone who's spend time developing software knows how it happens in the real world -

Day 1 there are a ton of good ideas. Let's create all kinds of coaching ratings and a way for them all to work together that will impact how players develop.

And we'll make player development based on that cool coaching rating formula, and playing time (in this case, sadly, it seems games played instead of innings), and 2 different budgets, and some unpublished but we'll swear it's true ideal promotion schedule, and a extra credit for playing in post-season games, and a bit of random luck or not, and ....

And then you start coding.

And it takes a lot looooonger than you thought it would.

So to get version 1.0 out into the world, you move some of your ideas from the 1.0 list to the 1.1 or 2.0 lists.

And you go live with something that works, but does not have everything on the dream list.

At the time, you're sure you'll get to that stuff.

Then, in the case of HBD, the company is sold (hooray for the founders). And most of the original programs leave the company (hopefully with big $$ because they did great work).

And the new company, for whatever reasons, doesn't ever get around to the 1.1 or 2.0 list. Or decides based on what they've learned to change these lists.

None of this makes the program, or the programmers, or the company bad. It's just how it happens. Every single time.

So the next time you find yourself obsessing on coaching patience and discipline, keep this in mind. I'd make a big bet they are little to nothing to the game but numbers on the screen.

To be clear, the 90% I threw out there is pure conjecture. The conjecture comes mostly from having seen a few R5 pitchers maintain normal or good development while throwing just a handful of innings over a full season. If playing time and being good enough for the level are significant development factors, that shouldn't happen, unless maybe the ML coaching is outstanding and the player has extremely high Makeup/Patience.

That would be a difficult experiment to do. You'd have to have two young players with identical ratings across the board and put them on different development paths for 4-5 seasons. And you'd have no way of knowing whether one had a significantly higher built-in ceiling than the other. To even rise to the level of small sample size, you'd have to be able to repeat it with 3-4 additional sets of identical players.

If — a big if — going to whatever level has the best coaches is the better path, it doesn't matter whether you're better off doing it with top or fringe prospects. You can squeeze all of your prospects likely to make the majors onto your AAA and AA teams.

Curiosity - does this say that pitchers develop better under a 4 man rotation? Or, from a different direction, a pitcher would develop more from 5 innings in 40 games than from 7 innings in 33 games?

@brigadier - I put all my P prospects, including SP's at SuA (or at the very least as a tandem) to get as many game appearances in as possible.

This is based off the first question from the last developer chat found here.

Q:For development of young players, is the playing time factor based on IP/AB, Games played, or a combination of the two?(joshkvt - Hall of Famer - 2:02 PM)

A: Games played.

It should be noted that DC often contradict the previous ones. Truth is, that particular one makes zero sense. I've messed around with it and have noticed no difference in development patterns. Very small sample size but I just don't believe that statement is correct.

@Mike - I'll throw this hypothetical out there. Picture an extreme example of an absolute stud prospect, a SS that can mash everything. His glaring downside is a DUR of 25. Does he have any chance of hitting his HBD assigned ceiling based on PA? What about based on games played? If WIS uses PA there's no way he hits his ceiling with 150 PA a year. If WIS uses games, he has a shot if you monkey around with player rest settings. Using games played makes sense if the developers wanted all players to have a shot at hitting their max potential regardless of DUR (which is my hunch). Either that, or their G, IP, PA, or whatever metric they use has a really low threshold for earning development points (also possible).

Now you could debate whether a player with 25 DUR should ever reach his potential but that's a different argument...

I get what you're saying but I'm just not seeing it.

For instance, in the real world, if you want to develop a starting pitcher, you do not have him throw 5 pitches every day. Conversely, you do not develop hitters by letting them have 1 AB for 144 games nor do you develop fielders by giving them 1 inning in the field every day.

If the concept of this game is to somewhat mimic MLB, the development process you're suggesting makes no sense.

FWIW, the DCs have stated that players playing "over their head" won't develop properly. None of us believe that to be true.

If they did program it based on IP/PA, it would be just as easy to do it taking DUR into account. If WIS translates 25 DUR into 180 PA, they'd just set the target for 100% development of that player at 180 PA. If hitters with 25 DUR consistently got 25% of the development given to a 100 DUR player, those guys would never grow out of AA and it would likely have been easily noticed. DUR seems close enough to a percentage of games that can be played (or PA/IP) at 100% that the formula could be % Development = Games Played/(DUR*1.62) as easily as = Games Played/162.

https://www.whatifsports.com/HBD/Pages/Popups/PlayerRatings.aspx?pid=7606064

https://www.whatifsports.com/HBD/Pages/Popups/PlayerRatings.aspx?pid=7606064

less development than I expected this year. Coach had hitting rating in the low 60s and patience was near nonexistent.

on the other hand https://www.whatifsports.com/HBD/Pages/Popups/PlayerRatings.aspx?pid=7777095 at the same level did ok.