Quote: Originally Posted By leppykahn on 11/24/2009
And, there are two ways to view ratings in a game like this.
1. All ratings work together in every situation. Ie, Power and Contact have similar affects on every pitcher. The players in this way are hemogenized, and you get usually exactly what you expect. A player with similar power + contact hits a similar amount of homeruns.
2. A player goes to the plate with a specific purpose. Ie, Belt the ball, or do whatever to get on base. Therein following, that a player who is unskilled at one, would rarely attempt to do the other. Ie, you won't find Juan Pierre attempting to belt the ball over the fence, and you won't find a slow spray hitter aiming for gaps very often.
ie. as you note based on your pitch hitting charts, that there is a distinct difference between a need for contact and power. The game plays that way. The way I see it, Contact is a measure of timing in order to hit the gap, and power is the ability to destroy the ball. Based on specific players like the ones noted by Swamphawk, it's clear that the game was designed in such a manner. If you occasionally make contact with the ball, but murder it, strike out a lot (ie, Adam Dunn), why is that so fundamentally worse than hitting 80+% singles but hitting with precision (Ichiro). Both are clearly elite players, despite having very different skillsets.
This change is disturbing for me, because it changes the fundamentals of how the game was intentionally designed initially. Unlike what some may think, the game was designed so that 0 power, but a high split, means the player can get the ball into the outfield, even to a corner. A player with 0 contact isn't going to automatically strikeout consistently always.
Splits are/were defined as the ability to drive the ball vs a certain pitcher, which means, to hit it in a certain spot, and use their power/contact effectively. However, players with extremes don't need as good of splits, because they can compensate in some other way. For instance, a speed demon could leg out an infield hit. A power hitter can whiff away knowing he has 3 swings and as many fouls as he can muster.
Parts of this are true and VERY false. First, what's true:
Players with extremes don't need as good of ratings, that is true (but misleading).
Now what's false:
Even though they don't need as good of ratings, they need ML marginal ratings (as opposed to numbers that are in the 40s. or 30s. Or even the 20s in a couple of swamp's cases...). Power used to compensate and trump ALL the other ratings, which no other rating in the entire game ever did. Now, the ratings truly do work in concert. This, contrary to what you erroneously think, is a good thing.
Splits are defined as the ability to hit a y or hit a righty (or, in the realm of pitchers, how well they will perform against a y or righty hitter). That's what they mean. You're dressing it up in a manner that isn't true, and describing it as more of a push/pull/power thing. And incidentally, there
is a push/pull tendency. You're dressing it up too much -- if a batter has a lower rating against righties, he will not hit righty pitchers well. That's all it means. The other ratings, at that point, aren't reduced or anything -- he just won't be that effective against righties.
Now, does that mean splits are the most important ratings? Your milage on that might vary...but they are now at LEAST as important as power.
Also, players without good splits could compensate -- ONLY if they had good power. A guy with no power, crappy splits and batting eye, but really, really high contact -- not that useful. Make it only a high batting eye? Still crappy. You see the point? A guy with ONLY a high power rating could be successful, and that was not true with ANY OTHER RATING. In order to get that Ichiro type player, he'd at least have to have really high splits as well as ridiculously high contact -- probably he'd have to have a high batting eye as well.
What's also misleading is that you're saying that power hitters in this game know anything. They don't "know" they're ratings or anything. It's numbers against numbers, and if their numbers are the crappy-one-note power guys, they shouldn't be as successful as they have been.
Basically, in your last post, you summed it up about people slipping through the cracks. You essentially just called it a glitch with that comment. On top of the fact you can sign those guys EXTREMELY cheaply...so you can invest your player budget in other places. You were exploiting a loophole in the game to your advantage, and now it's closed.
As for me dictating who should be good in this game, I'm not. Either the ratings all mean something together, or they don't. With power working the way that it was, that wasn't happening. Now, they do.