Man this draft class is pretty weak and as usual not much pitching to speak of.

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Chessie Ironhorse

You should have seen it before I tweaked it...All in all this is a pretty decent draft class, from what my scout tells me. Some pretty good pitching prospects, weaker on the batter side...which is a good thing this year.

Well, it looks like at the end of the first round, we'll be picking 1-star potential players.  With NY picking 21st, that's all me.  Sadly, the bonus some crappy player will get paid for being selected at the end of the first round will likely be more than he'll ever earn in the rest of his baseball career.

I'm not really sure what is going on with this game.  Even fairly recently, there were several five star prospects to choose from.  This year, there is one... and he's a MR.  I used to look forward to the draft every year, but now there seems to be little point in even bothering with it.

My scout tells me there's one 5-star, three 4-star, three 3.5-star, one 3-star, and two 2.5-star prospect.  Throw in three 2-star prospects, and the rest are 1.5 star or worse.  That's as bad as I can ever remember, though we've had a few weak ones lately.  I guess maybe a handful of the deep prospects will get nice talent increases and may become decent players, but I certainly don't see why essentially every second round player drafted is a complete crap shoot.  That seems to mostly reduce it to luck who ends up with good prospects and who ends up with career single-A players...

Sorry for the negative post, but this draft class is really disappointing. 

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Caelon
GM New York Empire

But by the same token, if I'd beefed it up any more, we'd have people complaining about it being too good.

It's a touchy thing to tweak the draft pool. For example, increase certain pitching modifiers, and you end up with a small group of good SP prospects, and a huge batch of MR studs. Use those same settings with a little endurance tweak, and you end up with a larger SP group and smaller MR group.

I'd like to see (in future versions) a more result-focused player creation system, where I can say, OK, I need X number of 2-3 star SPs, x number of 4-5 star SPs, X number of good power hitters, etc...so that it's not tweaking the modifiers, but rather telling the game what we'd like to see in a draft pool, and then leaving it up to the game to make that happen.

Right now with the modifiers we have, it's difficult to manipulate that and not cause unwanted side-effects. Plus, I think some of the fiddling in recent seasons has not helped the league as a whole. We've ended up with too many 5 star prospects, and sort of inflated both the offense and defense too much...moreso offense in the last few years.

I'd like to get back to a more sane level of play, with realistic results based on (like SkyDog), the past 25 years of baseball. Yes, we may end up with fewer 5 star players, but it should be across the board, and the end result should be a better balance for the league.

Having said that, it may be true that the talent dropoff is higher after the 4-5 star players. Perhaps there are fewer mid-level (2-3 star players) with this class and previous ones as well. I spent a good bit of time last night experimenting with it, but perhaps I didn't look closely enough at the mid-level pool. I'll take another look tonight and see if there's an opportunity to beef up the middle of the pack guys.

I won't be surprised if it's impossible to do so without adversely affecting the top prospect pool such that we have too many good players and people complain about that.

Add to that that we've had too many good offensive pools in the last few years, and you quickly get to the point where you want to monkey with things as little as possible and let the game level out some in terms of player creation. I didn't boost batting modifiers at all (as per OOTP community's stat studs recommendations), because the last thing this league needs is more offensive power right now. Again, we need to settle things down and get some balance back.

I'd rather leave it be as much as possible this year, and then get us back to a baseline modifier in the next year or two (even if we boost default mods across the board).

In the end though, I'm hopeful that the modified player development algorithms will show more chances for booms, wheras in the past you could count on 90% busts, and 10% booms. I' hoping to see more 1-3 star players develop into solid players than we've seen before. Supposedly OOTP9 does a better job of this, but we'll have to see for ourselves.

Given enough time, it's possible to test all of this out, and there have been some in the OOTP community (Skydog and RonCo, for instance), who have done so extensively. It's incredibly time consuming to change our league such that it can be repeatedly simmed over long periods of time (it can take hours just to prepare for testing). It'd almost be faster create a new fictional league entirely to test with. But then in order to really see what's happening, you have to take yearly CSV dumps and run statistical analysis of them, etc...it's far more involved than I'll ever have time for, which is why I have to base decisions on those who have taken the time to do this.

Weird my scout shows 13 5-stars, 10 4.5-stars, 11 4-stars, etc. I'm really starting to doubt my scout's skills heh.

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GM of Chattooga Eagles
The Eagle's Nest

I'll post what it looks like to my scout when I get home. Really need to start bringing my laptop to work again...bugs me not to be able to look stuff up in game during the day.

My scout shows the followin star ratings for the draft pool:

5 star: 17 (9 pitchers/3 SP, 8 hitters)
4.5: 13 (7 pitchers/4 SP, 6 batters)
4: 6 (4 p/1 SP, 2b)
3.5: 8
3: 5
2.5: 16
2: 5
1.5: 6
1: the rest

Doesn't look all that bad to me at all.

Perhaps scouts are the problem.

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Vienna Buzz

Yeah, let's not forget the role that scouts will play in all of this.

My scout has: 2 5 star batters, 1 4.5, 2 3.5, 7 3, 2 2.5, etc
pitchers: 2 5, 3 4.5, 4 4, 3 3

So...4 5 star, 4 4.5, 4 4, 2 3.5, 10 3, 7 2.5

That looks pretty decent to me, really. Always keep in mind that your scout can be more wrong or more right...

Good Lord!  You're definitely right in that regard, the difference in scouts is amazing.  New Glarus's scout has six 5-star guys.

Some scouts see the glass as half full.  Some scouts see the glass as half empty.  Apparently my scout in NY doesn't think there's even water in the glass!!!

Seriously, can I fire my scout and hire someone else?  So far my initial impression of him is not too high.  And let me tell you what I don't like about him, specifically.  In making his Projections, he "Highly Favors Ability".  I don't want a guy who highly favors anything.  I'm fine with "Favors Ability, or Favors Tools" (though I'd prefer Ability), or Neutral.  But I definitely want a guy more toward the center than this guy.  Since we don't get to choose our scouts (which in general is still the right way to do it, IMO, for simplicity), how do we address something like this?  There are a couple guys available as scouts I'd rather have than mine.  :-)

Chris Bowman, you are FIRED!  ;-)

Oh, and you're right about the draft pool.  It looks better with most other scouts, and deep enough that I might actually be able to draft a useful player in the first round.  That's certainly enough for me...

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Caelon
GM New York Empire