First Year Player Draft - Starting Pitcher

[niu354]

Can anyone help me understand why historical draft classes have so few starting pitchers? My first historical game starting in 2012 was ruined because I had base pitcher stamina set to "3-year period", and I'd get 2-5 starters in the entire pool. I changed that setting to "entire career" for my second attempt that starts in 1982. Now I'm getting 15, which isn't much better. What am I doing wrong?

[BBGiovanni]

I don't play historical much, so this is a guess. But pitching roles were much much less defined in the "good old days" There were guys that always started, then guys that usually started, a "stopper" in the bullpen and maybe a couple of relief-only guys. Everyone else was... a pitcher. Sometimes they'd get a start as a reward, sometimes because the other pitchers were tired, etc. This is why in old baseball stories there's drama about which pitcher would "get the start". Four man rotations were the norm then too, so there were a lot of dates to fill in with random starters.

Also, things were even less defined in the minors as almost everyone tried to "pitch his way into the rotation". Most guys got called up and pitched out of the pen at first, making "spot starts" until they got regular rotation spots.

Again, I'm guessing but since you saw the numbers go up when you changed to have them rated over a whole career, I bet almost everyone comes up as a "reliever" based on their first year stats/role.

[niu354]

Here's a screenshot of what I'm seeing. I use 1-20 scale. This is all the pitchers in the 1983 draft sorted by stamina.

[Lukas Berger]

Just looking at the image you posted, this pretty much just looks like it's how many SP's are in that particular historical class. It's not like a lot of the guys with RP stamina should have starter stamina but don't. For the most part, they're just career RP's.

Offhand, only one that looks a little off might be David West, who should maybe have borderline SP caliber stamina, but since he threw over four times as many games as a RP than an SP in his career, it's not like this is egregious.

[quillenl]

Originally Posted by Lukas Berger

Just looking at the image you posted, this pretty much just looks like it's how many SP's are in that particular historical class. It's not like a lot of the guys with RP stamina should have starter stamina but don't. For the most part, they're just career RP's.

Offhand, only one that looks a little off might be David West, who should maybe have borderline SP caliber stamina, but since he threw over four times as many games as a RP than an SP in his career, it's not like this is egregious.

Lukas, I was talking to him about this in another thread... and maybe this could be something you guys could consider in a future version. When I run some numbers it does look like there are too few SPers. Woudn't have to change the threshold much to have several of these guys generate with a 3 or 4 stamina and STILL be career minor league pitchers.

Average career for a drafted Starting Pitcher needs to be 8 to 9 years at the pace the OP mentions (15 for 26 teams with 5 man rotations). Guys like Mark Thurmond will generate with a stamina of 2 when you weight by their career numbers. For perspective, if you were to use the 3 year rating to generate them you get 23 players with at least a 3 stamina instead of 15. Average career length for this population would be 5 to 6 years to keep the rotations filled.

At any rate, my thought is that on average you should be seeing the same number of pitchers with Starting Pitcher level stamina whether you imprt based on career stats... or on 3 years stats. Right now that is not the case by a sizeable margin (15 versus 23 for 1983 which is likely representitive of other seasons).

Long story short... I think you could up the threshold for having at least 3 stamina when calcing off career stats and get more representative results any given season. Haven't checked, but I'll bet the average age of a Starting Pitcher (actively in a rotation) when basing off career stats is a good 2 years older than what was seen in the real life equivalent year looking back. Not something I paid attention to in the past, so clearly not a huge deal... but if it is based on a formula it might be something incredibly easy to tweak.

[Lukas Berger]

You make some reasonable points. Definitely something we can take a look at in the future to make sure we're balancing things correctly.

[niu354]

Originally Posted by quillenl

Lukas, I was talking to him about this in another thread... and maybe this could be something you guys could consider in a future version. When I run some numbers it does look like there are too few SPers. Woudn't have to change the threshold much to have several of these guys generate with a 3 or 4 stamina and STILL be career minor league pitchers.

Average career for a drafted Starting Pitcher needs to be 8 to 9 years at the pace the OP mentions (15 for 26 teams with 5 man rotations). Guys like Mark Thurmond will generate with a stamina of 2 when you weight by their career numbers. For perspective, if you were to use the 3 year rating to generate them you get 23 players with at least a 3 stamina instead of 15. Average career length for this population would be 5 to 6 years to keep the rotations filled.

At any rate, my thought is that on average you should be seeing the same number of pitchers with Starting Pitcher level stamina whether you imprt based on career stats... or on 3 years stats. Right now that is not the case by a sizeable margin (15 versus 23 for 1983 which is likely representitive of other seasons).

Long story short... I think you could up the threshold for having at least 3 stamina when calcing off career stats and get more representative results any given season. Haven't checked, but I'll bet the average age of a Starting Pitcher (actively in a rotation) when basing off career stats is a good 2 years older than what was seen in the real life equivalent year looking back. Not something I paid attention to in the past, so clearly not a huge deal... but if it is based on a formula it might be something incredibly easy to tweak.

Update: After further research, we have discovered there's something about my settings causing the shortage. quillenl set up his own version and got over 100 starting pitchers in his draft (including guys likely to be career minor leagers), which is along the lines of what I would expect. The only issue is we've been unable to figure out (so far) which setting is actually different/wrong.

https://forums.ootpdevelopments.com/...76#post4673676

[niu354]

Closing the loop on this...looks like there's a bug in the minor league database for neutralized stats. The issues goes away when using real life stats. I filed a report. https://forums.ootpdevelopments.com/...=311471&page=5 Thanks!

[quillenl]

No problem. I will go to my grave wondering what Neutralized stats have to do with the calculation for Stamina