I've always taken Contact and Power pretty literally and thought of vL and vR as being more about the hitter's likelihood to drive the ball (I think this was mentioned in a dev chat once). How does it work for you when you're evaluating free agents or the draft class though. I'll invent two players:

Player A - Contact - 80, Power - 85, vL - 60, vR - 60
Player B - Contact - 70, Power - 70, vL - 75, vR - 75

Assuming all else is equal, who are you taking? I think it'd be player A for me, though if I felt like his vL and vR might not crack the 60s, I'm not so sure.

I think your home park factors in a bit here. Batting eye also is high on my evaluation. As a personal preference I favor power.

What yumen said. If the batting eye is 75 or above, both hitters will be pretty awesome. Speed would be a bit more important for player B than player A, but it would help both players, obviously.

I would take Player A. I see both players having an average in the .270s (assuming neutral park), but A has more power.

I don't really think of vL and vR as the ability to drive the ball. I think of them as multipliers that affect all the other hitting ratings. You have to consider them in conjunction with the other ratings.

If it helps, I have a very quick/dirty way to estimate batting average and OBP. It's not foolproof, but it seems to estimate a player's career numbers pretty well. Take the average of the vR and the contact numbers add 200, and that will give a rough estimate of his batting average. Then add the eye rating to get OBP. For example, a guy with a 60 vR, 80 contact, and 70 eye - I would expect him to hit .270 with a .340 OBP. If his vL rating is very high, I'll add 5 or 10 points to the average estimate and vice versa if very low. If he's got great speed/BR, I'll add 5 points. If he's a switch hitter, I'll add 10.

Again, not even close to foolproof, but it's a very quick way to come up with a ballpark estimate of hitter performance, and it's worked pretty well for me.

My batting average estimate is pretty similar... I factor in VsL more formally than arcticlegend but it's about the same.
My only difference-- I don't think speed affects average at all in this game; over the years my batting average estimator, without speed, works equally well for players with 30 infield hits a season as it does for those with zero. I'm convinced that the only way speed affects OPS in this game is by adding to slugging percentage (!) by turning singles into doubles and doubles into triples. I think infield hits are just flavor; that is, they are created for fast players by turning other singles into infield singles.

By the way-- my OPS estimator has players A and B as equal within 5 points of OPS.

Posted by arcticlegend on 6/25/2021 1:55:00 PM (view original):
I would take Player A. I see both players having an average in the .270s (assuming neutral park), but A has more power.

I don't really think of vL and vR as the ability to drive the ball. I think of them as multipliers that affect all the other hitting ratings. You have to consider them in conjunction with the other ratings.

If it helps, I have a very quick/dirty way to estimate batting average and OBP. It's not foolproof, but it seems to estimate a player's career numbers pretty well. Take the average of the vR and the contact numbers add 200, and that will give a rough estimate of his batting average. Then add the eye rating to get OBP. For example, a guy with a 60 vR, 80 contact, and 70 eye - I would expect him to hit .270 with a .340 OBP. If his vL rating is very high, I'll add 5 or 10 points to the average estimate and vice versa if very low. If he's got great speed/BR, I'll add 5 points. If he's a switch hitter, I'll add 10.

Again, not even close to foolproof, but it's a very quick way to come up with a ballpark estimate of hitter performance, and it's worked pretty well for me.

This actually does work pretty well...I was doing something similar to this but factoring in the vL, too...this is one less step and seems just as accurate.

I think that vRHP number is pretty important. If Player A in the example had 80 Pwr rather than 85, I think I'd go with Player B. Essentially saying that a 15 point difference in vRHP trumps a 10 point difference in both Contact and Power, for fair/good but not great numbers in Contact and Power. When you get into the 85+ range for the other numbers there isn't enough room for a "vRHP Multiplier" to have effect.

In other words, if the example showed Player A had Contact and Power of 70 while Player B had 60 for both, but 15 points higher for vRHP, I'd definitely take Player B, imho.

I should note that the formula breaks down with either very high or very low numbers. if you have a guy who is 90s across the board, my formula would expect him to hit .290 with a .380 OBP, but it can actually be much higher than that. On the other side, if you have a guy with 40 contact, 50 vR and vL and 50 eye, I'd expect him to hig .245/.295. But in reality these guys often seem to be worse.