Are deadball pitchers really an advantage though? They lead to way more errors, also they will give up more hits and walks, the only place they excel is home runs allowed

It's an interesting problem: You got one era where no one hit any home runs, and another were 40 HR isn't even a great season. It's like they meet in the middle, and 20HR is typical for a 40HR guy.

Is it possible that we have some recentsy bias here? We SAW Pujols play and know how great he was, we didn't see McGinnity pitch, so we can't really comprehend that he would have the advantage, especially using his own equipment. A lot of the dead ball pitchers people use were some of the best pitchers of the era, or at least had one great season with stats like WHIP and OAV comparable to Cy Young winners in the modern era.

Posted by italyprof on 1/22/2021 5:18:00 PM (view original):

Posted by DoctorKz on 1/21/2021 10:51:00 PM (view original):
You still need to resolve the chronic underachieving of guys like Seaver, Carlton, Spahn, Dimaggio and Pujols.

Your built in advantage given to deadball pitchers needs to go bye-bye. Put the post-1920 pitchers on par with the early guys. You need more parity across eras. Too many players get little to no usage because they can't produce anywhere near what they should. That's a serious problem. I should be finding ways to get ARod, Spahn, Lefty Grove, Johnny Bench or Joe Morgan onto my roster. I want Seaver or Marichal as my ace. Ed Summers or Joe McGinnity shouldn't be outperforming them on a regular basis...

Get that fixed, then have dynamic pricing make the necessary market corrections...the game will be fluid, not the current stale, static mess it currently is...that I love to play, nonetheless...

I also agree here. Is it possible to factor into the overachieving single seasons something like an overall career corrective, so that Ed Summers with all due respect is not a better pitcher than Tom Seaver or Warren Spahn?

In any case, yes undo by all means the deadball advantage.

Except that for one season, Ed Summers was as good as/better than Tom Seaver or Warren Spahn. Isn't this what career leagues are for? For those that want to look at the whole careers rather than a single season?

When you're choosing single seasons rather than careers, you're playing for the guy that had one career year, not the guy who was very good for 10-15 seasons.

Also where do you draw the line? Should we adjust guys like Bob Milacki or Shane Spencer, who were otherwise average MLB players but had ridiculous stats for one shortened season?
What about guys who had a promising career destroyed by an injury, like Andy Rincon?
How about Greg Maddux? He was a great pitcher, but that 95 season is still an outlier. Same for 2000 Pedro.
When you got a huge database, there are going to be outliers, we don't mind when it's Greg Maddux, but it seems to bother us when Ed Summers is the beneficiary of one unexpected season.

I'm not here to bash Summers. My point is to level the playing field across eras. I don't want to change his career numbers. I don't know why it was determined necessary to give early pitchers an advantage, I just want to see all seasons get a fair shot.

It wasn't "determined" to make the dead ballers better. It's a function of the normalization math, and the effect on performance of allowing homers (and I believe, all extra base hits). If a modern pitcher had the exact same real-life stat line as Addie Joss or Ed Walsh, he'd be considerably BETTER in the Sim. However, that will never happen, so we need to figure out a way to adjust the normalization. Pedro or DeGrom are better across the board, but given the strength of Sim lineups, their hr/9# ( and xbh#?) will destroy them compared to Joss and Walsh, who are so close to zero. So to make it right, a dead baller who gave up 3 homers in 350 innings needs to have that rate normalized by many multiples to even be in the ballpark of a modern guy who relatively depressed them. That's just not in the normalization math, so maybe some sort of floor needs to be set, because 150% of 0.05 is still way lower than a modern stud at 0.50.

This has gotten away from the OL cap discussion... I believe we need multiple threads to go over these common complaints. Maybe creating an exhaustive list of users complaints is the beginning...

Others have mentioned this too, but Summers isn't necessarily performing better than Degrom, he just gets the appearance of it because fielders are committing a lot more errors behind him. so Degrom's OAV, WHIP, and ERA are all inflated compared to Summers, who more than likely gave up as many or even more "runs" or baserunners, but because they're errors, they don't show in the stats we look at.

If you're curious about this, come join the TWISL that is testing this exact difference. Just need two owners.

https://www.whatifsports.com/forums/Posts.aspx?topicID=525170

Ignore the names on the jerseys, just think about it logically.

Pitchers that don't give up home runs fare better than pitchers that do.

That seems like common sense.

Maybe the problem is the deadballers are too cheap, not that the deadballers are too effective.

Posted by DoctorKz on 1/21/2021 1:37:00 PM (view original):
I set up a $75M Open League.

The only rule changes are real name AAA, and all ballparks are available, not just those in Open Leagues

MLB130559

bump

Guys, I did not mean to post and dip on this thread. There are a lot of amazing ideas and a lot to process. I have joined MLB130559 which should be fun, but also may expose my skills right now. I think there are 3... maybe 4 openings and we are good to go.

A couple of things to briefly touch on, the game HAS to be rewritten. We can't keep running on code that is almost two decades old. Now before people panic, I believe the algorithm is good, but I think we can make it better, meaning more accurate and more fun (which I know is a balancing act). Ultimately we would like to keep the core of the game the same but make improvements. Updating the game to a new code base means the reintroduction of SimLeague Live, it means commissioner tools that resemble fantasy leagues like Yahoo, so you don't have to ping customer support when changes to themes and rosters need to be made. It means a live draft client like other sites fantasy leagues.

I know its a lot to ask for since I am new, but I ask for a little bit of trust that we will keep the game at its core the same because I am more than happy to engage you all in conversation and hash things out. I know my ideas will be flawed at times, like it seems this one was a little bit. But it truly is amazing that we have a community like this. Although you have different opinions and ideas all have the games welfare in the front of your minds.

Thank you all for this great discussion. Also if you want beat on me join MLB130559, it should be fun.

-Adam

Posted by adlorenz on 2/2/2021 6:20:00 PM (view original):
Guys, I did not mean to post and dip on this thread. There are a lot of amazing ideas and a lot to process. I have joined MLB130559 which should be fun, but also may expose my skills right now. I think there are 3... maybe 4 openings and we are good to go.

A couple of things to briefly touch on, the game HAS to be rewritten. We can't keep running on code that is almost two decades old. Now before people panic, I believe the algorithm is good, but I think we can make it better, meaning more accurate and more fun (which I know is a balancing act). Ultimately we would like to keep the core of the game the same but make improvements. Updating the game to a new code base means the reintroduction of SimLeague Live, it means commissioner tools that resemble fantasy leagues like Yahoo, so you don't have to ping customer support when changes to themes and rosters need to be made. It means a live draft client like other sites fantasy leagues.

I know its a lot to ask for since I am new, but I ask for a little bit of trust that we will keep the game at its core the same because I am more than happy to engage you all in conversation and hash things out. I know my ideas will be flawed at times, like it seems this one was a little bit. But it truly is amazing that we have a community like this. Although you have different opinions and ideas all have the games welfare in the front of your minds.

Thank you all for this great discussion. Also if you want beat on me join MLB130559, it should be fun.

-Adam

I don't think it was a flawed idea, and personally, as a customer, I appreciate that you took the time to ask our opinions through a survey and follow-up discussion. I welcome any changes that might come about, because it appears from where I sit that you are factoring in our input. That's all we can ask for.

Posted by dn8779 on 1/21/2021 9:39:00 AM (view original):

Posted by dn8779 on 1/21/2021 7:52:00 AM (view original):

Posted by dannyjoe on 1/20/2021 11:25:00 PM (view original):
This might be a crazy idea from someone who can't remember his last open league, but... if the goals are to freshen things up for established players, and make it more interesting (and winnable) for new players, maybe give the newer players a little more cap room than the more established players they are facing in the same open league. Make it an 80M cap for absolute newbies, but decrease the cap proportionately to a user's experience. Maybe build that in as a manager+GM salary that counts against the cap. Chargingryno has a manager/GM who has won 27,838 games on this sim, so he should be expensive... count him as taking up $2,783,800 out of the $80 M cap. TulsaG has won 7223, so his experience would cost him $722,300 of cap space. There would probably have to be a limit on how much you penalize any user, and it might be better to count only Open League experience. It's only a rough idea, would definitely need some work... But it could be a fresh, interesting challenge if you have to build toward a lower salary cap every time you join a new open league.

I give credit for the creativity of this suggestion and many other ideas, as it is important to keep this game approachable for newer team owners.

But, to play devil's advocate, there is also a large portion of emerging owners, who have paid for many teams and put in the time to learn the nuts and bolts of the game through trial and error, and taken to their lumps by losing in OLs to more experienced owners who have 100+ championships. It's been my experience that competing against those elite owners, examining their stats vs. the league, reading the forums, and gradually improving teams over time, is part of the process that makes this game so fun and fulfilling.

Change to grow the user base is good, but keep in mind that any change that goes too far in penalizing the large percentage of owners that have been grinding it out for years can be detrimental.

I equate these proposals to taxation. Tax increases are often enacted on the wealthiest in the name of helping out the poorest. However, the wealthy are usually smart enough to find a way to use the new rules to their advantage while the poorest experience very little change in their own standing, and it seems the middle class always pays the largest penalty.

Again, I am all in favor of change, but let's also be careful about considering unintended consequences.

"Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up."
-G.K. Chesterton

As a follow-up on my last post, I should at least offer up a suggestion, for whatever the input is worth.

My thought is there is a lot more to like about SLB than to dislike about it, as it is currently designed. There is a concern about freshening things up, but IMHO things already are freshened up every year, when the previous year's real life players are inserted into the draft pool. I see the likes of 2019 Ketel Marte, etc. all over the place in OLs, and that is not a bad thing, but a good thing. Owners are constantly testing the strengths and weaknesses of modern players, and we all learn from how those newly created players perform in the sim. Fads come and go, and eventually the 2019/2020 real life players get replaced by the newer and shinier 2021 players, and team owners figure out how to best employ the new MLB crop effectively. That, in my opinion, is what helps keep the game fresh and exciting.

In OLs I compete against several successful/interesting teams that include real life MLB players from 2018-2020, who break the mold by throwing high rates of strikeouts, hitting high rates of HRs, etc. These teams, by the way, are often fielded by veteran and pro level owners, who have impressively won championships within their first 10 seasons.

The creativity and vibrancy already exists with the constant introduction of real life MLB players every year, and new team owners every day.

Instead of threatening the stability of a game that is already very beautiful as is, why not make it easier for new owners to learn it's inner workings more quickly? The best way to learn is to create a team and run it through an OL, see what more seasoned and successful teams do, and make alterations on the next attempt. Over time, newer owners that apply themselves see steady improvements.

I respectfully suggest that this game's developers save all the R & D funding that would be spent on re-writing the algorithm's code, altering salary caps, revamping dynamic pricing, etc., efforts that will make some customers temporarily happy but many more unhappy ultimately, and make a simple change to ease the new user's learning curve.

For the early seasons in which all new user's struggle, why not reduce the entry fee, to say, $6.50? Perhaps only the first season, or 3, or 5? I'm just spit-balling here. That way, new users could have more opportunities to learn, at a lower cost and risk level.

Or, to get around the issue of experienced users starting dummy accounts to benefit from discounted teams, could the free exhibition season's length be extended beyond 10 games (maybe to 54 or 81 games)? Personally, I found early on that exhibition teams were helpful in gaining a general understanding of how the engine works, but the sample size of games was very small. Perhaps a larger sample size of risk-free games, without the all the full-/post-season entertainment provided, would give new users the chance to experiment in a workshop environment, so they can then bring their partially tested prototypes into a more competitive OL setting.

This may be a simple way to make to the whole game more approachable to new customers, without angering the current base. Just my 2 cents.

I like the idea of longer exhibition seasons at reduced rate, this would allow for better experimentation and testing of different lineups/styles. What about a mega double elimination ncaa style tournament?

Great stuff, Adam! Thanks for keeping us in the loop.

I especially look forward to:

the reintroduction of SimLeague Live

commissioner tools that resemble fantasy leagues like Yahoo, so you don't have to ping customer support when changes to themes and rosters need to be made

I can't wait for Live play to return.

Posted by crazystengel on 2/3/2021 2:17:00 AM (view original):
Great stuff, Adam! Thanks for keeping us in the loop.

I especially look forward to:

the reintroduction of SimLeague Live

commissioner tools that resemble fantasy leagues like Yahoo, so you don't have to ping customer support when changes to themes and rosters need to be made

Selfishly I look forward to the day we can empower you all as commissioners to run leagues and not have to help you manage them.

Thank you for the responses.

As a commissioner, the hardest and most time consuming part is the draft/available players. Being able to utilize tools to manage that would be such a blessing