I'd like to hear how you would assign weighting to the following six offensive categories to create a basic offense rating (if they had to add up to 100%).  For example: 

contact: 20%
power: 20%
vsL: 13%
vsR: 20%
eye: 20%
speed: 7%

Obviously this rating is not helpful in specific game situations, but I'd like to hear what you would assign to create a general offensive rating.

It kind of depends since the ratings work off one another. In general, I rate power as significantly more important than any other ratings. If I had to do it the way you did, I would say:

Contact: 10%
Power: 35%
vsL: 15%
vsR: 20%
Eye: 15%
Speed: 5%

depends on where i want the hitter to be in the lineup...

when i get my team to where i want it... i like to have players with high OBP, and i'll gladly trade power for walks and steals and average. Lots of walks means high pitch counts and getting to the bullpen faster. I'd rather have a guy that hits 300 with a 370 OBP with 15 Hrs than a 50 HR hitter with 240 avg and 310 OBP.

But I do like having 1-2 pure power hitting... where i overrate power over contact vR and eye above all else and disreguard speed.

I also like having a pure vL hitter on the bench too.

As a starting point:
contact: 20%
power: 30%
vsL: 10%
vsR: 20%
eye: 20%

I view speed separately and only in tandem with baserunning. If speed and baserunning are both over 70 that's a plus of some size, depending on what exactly they both are; if either is below 70 I basically value both at zero.

I'll relatively de-value power for one or two hitters at the top of the lineup.

Speed coupled with contact can produce a lot of infield hits.   I don't think it's wise to discount it.

"Lots of walks means high pitch counts and getting to the bullpen faster."

Not necessarily an advantage in HBD. Or actually, in real life, for that matter.

"i'll gladly trade power for walks and steals and average"

Walks and steals don't advance runners on base the way power does.  The object of your offense should be to (a) get runners on base, and (b) advance them to home.  You really need a good balance of OBP and SLG in your lineup, hopefully optimized in your batting order to maximize the number of runs you score.

So far the general offense rating looks like:

contact: 10-20%
power: 20-35%
vsL : 10-15%
vsR: 20%
eye: 15-20%
speed: 0-7%

Widest range so far in power.  Seems like eye is a little favored over contact.  Would like additional data points from more HBD vets...

It depends entirely on what kind of hitter your lineup needs.

I'm willing to sacrifice contact and/or speed for sluggers in favour of power and vR/vL.

Same for power in table setters in favour of contact, speed, and vR/vL.

The only two areas I'd refuse to compromise are vR and eye.  if your guy is below 50 in either of those, he's going to struggle most of the time.... and if it's both, he'll be a trainwreck, unless he's got a good glove are brings some other stuff to the table (power, speed + baserunning, etc.).

To look for only one kind of player is short sighted.

Here's what I'll say about this: you'll rarely see an outstanding hitter (OPS above .900) with power below 70 and you'll almost never see a guy who puts up truly elite seasons (1.000+ OPS) year after year who isn't 85+ power. But I've seen plenty of guys OPS 1.000+ with one of the other ratings in the 60s or even high 50s if everything else is good enough. I think I would take a 70/95/70/70/70 guy over an 80/70/80/80/80 guy. So, in my opinion, if you are talking about trying to find a top-level hitter, you need a ton of power plus 2 out of 3 of the contact/splits/eye ratings to be damn good as well.

On the other hand, I think things get iffier when you are trying to find that "just productive enough" guy on the cheap. Maybe you are trying to decide which no-bat defensive shortstop to take or you are capped out and trying to find a cheap solution in RF that can still OPS around .750. In that case, I think you need to look more closely at the combination in ratings. I had a guy whose ratings were something like 55/90/30/15/75 who gave me 4 solid pre-arb years of .800ish OPS as part of a cheap leftfield platoon. As MikeT mentioned, a guy with high contact, speed and baserunning might be able to give you a .350 OBP and tack on 40 or 50 steals to make himself somewhat useful if he can play defense. I think if a guy's contact, power and eye are all below 70, it doesn't matter what his splits are, he's probably not going to OPS over .800 for his career.

In general, I guess I differ from some on here in that I don't necessarily look for a "balanced" lineup. I think you just look for the most productive hitters you can get at each spot. I don't think there's all that much of a "synergistic" effect of combining high-OBP guys at the top and high-SLG guys in the middle as some people tend to think there is.

I've built teams with lots of power, good eye/splits with little regard to contact.   They just didn't score enough runs because our BA(and OBP) just weren't high enough.

I think opie is looking for a rating system to apply to the draft.   Once you get the best players available, you can fill in the holes.

contact: 13.33%
power:   19.17%
vsL :       20.00%
vsR:       22.50%
eye:        25.83%

I thought this might be an interesting exercise.  It's nice to say what we like but what do we actually do?    I group players when making roster decisions.   COF/COF, C, and MIF/CF.     There is some bleed over due to defensive replacements, rest, etc.   But that's how I group them.  We just played game 101 in Hamiton.  I thought I'd check to see the percentage of AB each guy is getting from his group.   The results for your viewing pleasure:

		con	pow	vl	vr	eye	spd	AB	% AB
Brian Mattingly (R)	1B	83	87	70	81	61	84	406	0.21
Willie Scoroposki (R)	1B	66	85	53	58	87	46	105	0.05
Esteban Sanchez (L)	3B	84	91	76	81	65	90	321	0.17
Vic Cervantes (R)	RF	65	74	66	56	72	72	380	0.20
Marino Lee (R)	LF	84	73	80	78	73	100	333	0.17
Charles Baek (L)	DH	71	89	66	84	72	27	376	0.20
		75.5	83.2	68.5	73	71.7	69.8	1921
Carl Bieser (S)	C	67	78	93	31	70	14	158	0.39
Harry Ortiz (R)	C	67	66	47	87	21	39	241	0.60
Harry Jacquez (R)	C	29	65	67	60	73	59	2	0.00
		54.3	69.7	69	59.3	54.7	37.3	401
Glenn Gibbs (S)	CF	71	38	50	65	72	99	343	0.27
Vasco Diaz (L)	SS	68	36	62	53	59	98	160	0.13
Humberto Martinez (R)	2B	76	71	82	69	82	99	382	0.30
Jimmie Blanco (L)	2B	73	39	60	67	46	18	242	0.19
Vic Ramirez (R)	SS	35	88	54	26	36	50	126	0.10
		64.6	54.4	61.6	56	59	72.8	1253

Blanco is the only one who's really played any significant time "out of his group(26 starts at 3B).   Diaz got hurt so Ramirez played more than he would have.  Sanchez, Lee and Gibbs have had some fatigue issues but I'd say they've only been benched 6-8 times because of it.   If I had to say "These are my best hitters", I take Mattingly, Sanchez, Lee and Martinez   The stats back this up.   Gibbs is a glove man and Baek is my DH.  

In summation, it's not much of a surprise that I like POW at the corners(4 of the 5 are over 85) and speed up the middle(all three starters are 98+) .   Catcher is a strict platoon with a preference to splits.

This told me more about me than I knew.

Posted by MikeT23 on 2/16/2011 8:33:00 AM (view original):
Speed coupled with contact can produce a lot of infield hits.   I don't think it's wise to discount it.

Mike, I'm almost certain, after looking at this several times, that infield hits are a "flavor" of hit rather than an actual event where speed makes an out into a hit.  That is, the sim decides the guy has gotten a hit, and then if he's fast it's more likely to be reported as an infield hit. 

That's obviously different from real life and I was surprised, so I tried to confirm it several ways... the simplest was to take several pairs of guys, one with lots of infield hits and the other with none, but similar blue ratings, and compare their BAs.  After adjusting for park, and if they had enough big league ABs to compare, I found the BAs to be nearly identical for all pairs.  No advantage for the guy with all the infield hits.

Bunt hits I think are similar... there are guys with about 10-15 bunt hits on teams with 0-5 sacrifices, suggesting that it comes not from a "super-successful" sac attempt, but from a hit being labeled a bunt hit by virtue of speed.