So are you sure the guy who drafted the first one didn't see the other 2?

Something that continually gets lost in all these arguments about "I didn't see the best catcher (or whatever) in the draft".

Maybe you saw the best second baseman in the draft, but fifteen other owners did not. Including eight of the twelve guys who drafted ahead of you.

When you look at it that way, in the end, it all evens out.

no, but i believe the way the game is set up it's possible. it should not be. what if he only saw the 3rd option. you'd answer 'well, he should just take the best player on the board'. some of us like to draft based on need, others like picking the best option available regardless of need.

some positions come at a premium. its easier to come accross a good DH than it is an OF, easier to come accross a OF than it is a 2B, easier to come accross a 2B than a C.

check your draft board past. i bet you can find 20 guys in the top hundred that could pass at 2B. how many true C's do you find? true SSs?

I think it's possible if the three best players are all SS or SP or C. Otherwise, I find it unlikely. You keep talking about the "problem" but you haven't offered a solution. Well, unless you count 20/20 shows you everyone but 5/20 doesn't show you the best in the 5 category. Which I thought we agreed would be dumb because every team in MLB knows the top 25% of college or high school prospects.

The biggest hurdle in changing the draft/Int system is most experienced players can see a prospect's current values and make a decent guess at there projected values. So unless the way prospects improve is radically altered, WIS cant make all the prospects visible.

The problem with the whole "I can get a Baseball America and see the top 50 prospects" arguement is this...

In HBD because of the way prospect development is setup and there being not as much randomness as in RL is you get a system that in the end only rewards teams with viable ML players in the first 2 or 3 rounds. Rarely are big league players found outside of that.

If you had a top 50 list given without budgeting you would also need other changes in the draft system. Teams could simply not budget anything for HS/College scouting and come away with ML prospect with their 1st and supplemental round picks.

I don't like that draft picks are so much surer things here than in real life.

Eariler in the thread someone said more randomness means more luck and less skill (or something of the sort) but I disagree. Because the RL draft is so much more random can you seriously say that their isn't skill in how teams drafting? The Pittsburgh Pirates drafted horribly despite top picks for a number of years, only recently turning things around.

An analogy to me for a more random draft would be Texas Hold-em. Their is large measure of luck in the game but over time the better players will rise to the top (organizational strength over time), despite this every player will have streaks of bad luck (i.e. bad drafts)

This type of draft would have the added benefit of make tanking a far less attractive strategy, as opposed to now where getting the top pick almost guarantees you a future ML star. Additionally supplemental picks would become a little more interesting because getting future ML stars (the bust potential would be there as well) would be more of an attainable goal.

coldfeet, i still think you're confusing logic with realism. Like I said before, if you want the ability to see everyone, then for every C you want you have to add in (2-3?) Cs who look equally as good, but turn out to be busts.

Not being able to draft by need sometimes, or, not always getting what you want, isn't a problem of the game...it's a problem in the game. It's part of the gameplay. Making that gameplay problem more fair, or easier is kind of boring, i think. Making it more strategic or precise, improved HBD.

For example, if owners could allot percentages of (or, rank, for simplicity) their budget to each position, then further see or not see players based on those ranks, it would add choice and strategy. As well, maybe this addresses issues like yours, where you want to increase you chances of filling a specific role. It's not realistic, but it does a good job of representing an external environment.

Quote: Originally Posted By coldfeet on 2/07/2010
lets assume my biggest franchise need is a catcher. i've put 20/20 into HS/college scouting. lets assume that there is one catcher in the draft that is head and shoulders above the others. a joe mauer type.

i have spent the max, should i not see him? i see the majority of the other lesser catchers, and i do see some other players at positions i do not have a need who could be almost as valuable. what explains my scouts not knowing the stud C existed? dumb luck.

In our last draft, I spent $20M on college and put SP to the max of 10. But I didn't see one of the top college SPs -- the guy who ultimately went #3 overall.

Quote: Originally Posted By nfet on 2/07/2010
If you're ok with having your 4th pick overall turn into a career AA guy from time to time, then maybe realism is the way to go.

I'd be fine with this. The #4 pick overall may have injury problems that kill his ability to hit his ceiling. Or he may have low makeup, so he falls well short of his ceiling. Or the team drafting him has insufficient coaching/training budget.

Similarly, with "fuzziness," more players should exceed their draft-day projected ceiling. For example, a guy with high makeup, on a team with great coaching and a high training budget. If that happened, then more guys taken in Rounds 5-9 would go from being no better than AAA guys to being major-leaguers.

Combine those two, and you'd have more realistic drafts. A couple of 1st-round picks would be flops. But a few 5th or 7th round picks would be solid major-leaguers, without DITR.

I wouldn't have a problem with an HBD Baseball America Top 50 list before the draft.

I'm guessing that list would include the names of the 50 players with the best OVRs, which would include high-ST/DU SPs who will top out at High-A, and hitters with lots of high secondary ratings (stamina, health, temper) but who are never going to be more than bench players in the bigs.

If someone spends very little on HS/COL scouting and relied on such a Top 50 list to help them draft, 50/50 chance they would wind up with a 1st-round pick who never sees the majors.

This post could not be converted. To view the original post's thread, click here.

I don't think this is quite the same thing. I'm talking about guys who bust without indication.

I don't know so much about the real MLs, so maybe someone who knows more can make the connection better, but in real life when a team drafts a player with a high pick and that guy never pans out, is there usually anything that makes people say something like "well, they took a risk drafting that lazy work ethic/bad attitude/often injured guy, and it didn't work."

I would guess that there isn't such an explanation most of the time.

Isn't that already the case? Or do you not know that make-up plays a huge role in development?

I think people just need to revise the way they think about the HBD draft. Because this is a game based on numerical values for various skills, there's no way to make it as unpredictable as the "real life" draft, in which players are evaluated (largely) on intangible things, or at least evaluated primarily in ways far more subjective than a specific numerical ranking for every skill.

So the next time you don't see the #2 catcher or the #1 SP or whatever, instead of being mad at how unrealistic that is, think of it as though your scouts just didn't think he was that good. And it turns out they were wrong.

It seems to me that if you think of it this way, HBD has done a pretty good job approximating the difficulties of scouting and evaluating talent. There's no good way to avoid all the good draft picks being clustered in the top few rounds, because we can see all the numbers that go into that player's abilities. However, we can't all see the same players. The #4 pick that you saw and the three guys ahead of you didn't is the equivalent of a late-round pick who worked out because your scouts found him and theirs didn't.

The HBD draft will never function just like the real one. Calling for more randomness is, in my mind, a bad idea. In the real draft, every team lands a small handful of future major-leaguers every year. The same is true in HBD. It's just that in real life, they're scattered throughout the draft, while in HBD they're clustered at the top of the draft. I think the system works about as well as it could.