Did you see where I said "death is gonna love this"?

Posted by deathinahole on 3/21/2011 6:57:00 PM (view original):
Well, looks like I missed the bi-annual "more better" requests.

Looks like it's all under controi. Carry on.

I hadn't checked in here in a while...I just wanted to state, unequivocally, that I was NOT asking for "MORE BETTER". I assume it was a given that if talent were added at lower levels of the draft, it would be taken away elsewhere. I had no idea that needed explanation.

HD had an issue with way too many players being top level talent, and their recent recruit generation changes have made the game far better. So, in general, I'd say I'm more of a fan of "LESS BETTER", though HBD's talent distribution seems pretty solid, in my opinion.

I also wanted to mention that I don't regularly read the HBD forums, and I didn't realize I was bringing up a gripe that's been addressed repeatedly. The addition of the Suggestions forum seemed a better place to air a complaint than sending in a ticket, though who knows if site administrators read these threads anyway? I suppose you can blame me for not reading through every post from the last six months, but if you guys are frustrated by people bringing up the same issues over and over again, why not just ignore them?

Wasn't the purpose of this thread to ask for players to develop to their "full potential"?      I'm pretty sure that's just "more better".

Player development is one of, if not the weakest aspect of the game.

As is obvious from years of posts, most people who come to this game expect "Projected" to mean what it means in the rest of the world English-speaking world.  A reasonable expectation. The more invested in the budgets that set projections, the more accurate they should be.  The more invested in developing players, the greater the chance they exceed their projections (not reach them).

If an owner invests the average amount in scouting and the average amount in coaching, he should expect most of his players to end up pretty close to their projections.  Some number of players would end up better, some would end up worse.  If the budget scale is 0-20, that implies 10 across the board in all budgets that impact projections and development would result in, on average, hitting projections.  With an equal number of players over and under.

If you invested 15-20 in budgets that impact projections and development, they you should expect some (not all) players to exceed their projections.

What projections means in HBD is some dream, never to be achieved, state.  It's consistent.  No matter what is spent on scouting & development, very few players exceed their projections.  I haven't played that many seasons, but I've seen none, on my teams or any other teams.

If you're in a world that has nothing but owners that have 4+ seasons of experience or who took the time to read thousands of forum posts, the current system is workable.

But if you have newer owners, a lot of them are going to make trades thinking projections is a reasonable goal, so they're going to make trades that will get them back less value than they think.

Another way the game is wired to keep good teams good and make it harder for bad teams to level the playing field.

Player development is silly. Consistent, but silly.

90% of the development happens in the first 2 seasons.  Period.

No amount of playing time or good coaching can change that.  Neither can any amount of sitting on the bench or bad coaching.

If you have the best coaching possible, if you trade for a player in his 3+ season, you can't do anything to improve his development beyond maybe a meaningless 1 or 2 points.

In the real world, some players develop early, some late.  Coaching at any level, at any point in a career, can make a difference.  Not on every player, all the time, but on some players some of the time.  Can't happen in HBD.

DITR seem to be random.  Not based on any merit. (I admit I don't have enough data to be sure about this).  And all it does is bump the projections way up.  Player is almost certainly not going to hit them.

None of this means there should be more good players.  I'm just saying the current program for projection numbers and player development is not very well done.  Great job for version 1.0 of a game.  Not so great many years later.

Too long. You don't know what "projection" means so I stopped there.

pro·jec·tion (pr-jkshn)

Sounds to me like the projections should be reduced to reflect reasonable expectations based on some average or expected development curve instead of the best case scenario.   As tufft said, In typical usage the word "projection" means expected outcomes and we use words like "ceiling, upper limit, maximum, upper bound, etc." to reflect the most optimistic estimates.  (I know if I supplied my boss with numbers labeled "projections" that were based solely on "best case" estimates, I'd get slaughtered.)  This usage is closer to your definition than what happens in HBD.

If roughly half of players exceeded projections and the other half fell short, I don't think anyone would be complaining.  (which isn't to say that the game couldn't benefit from some variety in development curves, e.g., slow and steady, peak early, peak late, etc., so that when you're looking at that 25 yr old that's still 5-10 points shy of most projections you don't know for certain that he won't be able to make up most of the gap.) 

It also seems fair to ask that if the definition of "projection" is "4. A prediction or an estimate of something in the future, based on present data or trends." then why aren't the projections ever adjusted to reflect "present data or trends",  I mean it's fairly obvious to everyone except for new players (and HBD scouts apparently), that a 26 year old player 10 pts shy of his projected rating in some category isn't going to get there even if everything from that day forward is absolutely optimum.   

I'm not sure HBD projections are "best case scenario".   I think we(as in all HBD owners) remember the 97 that didn't happen but quickly overlook the 60 that became a 63.  It happens. 

However, you do make a legit point about the 26 year old.  While some learned skills tend to develop into a player's 30s, it is silly for a 26 y/o with 74 power to be projected as an 81.  If he's been at 74 for 4 seasons, that's it.   While we(HBD owners again) should know this, it does create an arguement over projections and their usefulness.

Nonetheless, it's well understood that the more you spend on ADV, the better(read: more accurate) projections you'll get.   And we know that 20m does NOT produce 100% accuracy.

Let's examine that for a moment.   Do you think real-life scouts come back with "He's an OK player.   .260 with double digit power is his destiny"?    

I doubt it.   I'm pretty sure MLB teams have high expectations for every player they draft in the first 3-5 rounds.  They're "Can't miss", "Overpowering arm", "Will have 40 homer potential", etc, etc.  

The 2000 draft(I think we've seen enough to say who's a BL player 10 years later). 
http://www.thebaseballcube.com/draft/rounds.asp?Y=2000&P=June-Reg&R=1

From the 40 chosen in the first round, I'd say Utley and Wainwright probably reached or exceeded their projections.  As the first overall pick, I'd love to see the "projections" on Gonzalez.  I bet he's underperformed them.

What's even better is that the facts debunk the "Teams get BL players in the late rounds all the time" myth.

1st-21
2nd-17
3rd-7
4th-12
5th-7
10th-6
15th-2
20th-2

Gonzalez was compared to Palmeiro at the plate and Grace in the field.

He has a ways to go to hit 569 homers and he's falling a bit short of a .288 BA and .885 OPS.   2 GG to Grace's 4.  

At this point, he is not reaching his projections.

"Let me start by telling you this: Adrian Gonzalez will never be as good as me, period.  I don't know how to say it any more clearly than that.  Never."

Posted by MikeT23 on 4/6/2011 9:26:00 AM (view original):
What's even better is that the facts debunk the "Teams get BL players in the late rounds all the time" myth.

1st-21
2nd-17
3rd-7
4th-12
5th-7
10th-6
15th-2
20th-2

Well it would be better, if it were true.  Filling in the gaps in your data (same source) and comparing to the Season 7 draft (any player recording >1 yr ML service time) in Jaha you can see that the HBD distribution of BL's appears weighted toward the top, while MLB's distribution is significantly flatter:

Rd.	HBD	MLB
1	35	21
2	22	17
3	13	7
4	4	12
5	3	7
6	1	7
7	1	7
8	1	7
9	0	3
10	1	6
11	0	8
12	0	4
13	1	2
14	0	2
15	0	2
16	0	1
17	0	6
18	0	1
19	0	2
20	0	2
21	0	0
22	0	3
23	0	1
24	0	3
25	0	2

Of course this is only one data point and some of the difference is possibly due to poor development of marginal players in HBD and the salary cap and bonus demand system in HBD may exert some kind of force keeping better players in the earlier rounds, but in the 2000 draft you did have players like Rich Harden going in the 17th round and Jayson Bay going in the 22nd and I'm fairly certain that no players of that caliber have ever gone past the 8th or 9th round in HBD.   In any case it's pretty difficult to say "the facts debunk...the myth."

I think it's pretty obvious that the talent is taken at the top in both drafts.    For all we know, DITR handles the 14 players taken in rounds 18-25 in HBD.