Historical Managers
 

Has anyone ever come up with ratings for historical managers? I think it would be a nice touch to actually have McGraw, Mack, LaRussa, Lasorda, Weaver, and Martin in the game.

Its been brought up before but how would you rate them?
Some managers took over midseason, Some changed according to the team they had. Plus how would it effect the historical accuracy?
Is the players performance off because the game is not accurate enough or would it be because John McGraw didnt manage like John McGraw.

Just change the names of the managers that the game creates to match history for that year, or whatever. Don't worry about the ratings. What I have done a number of times is change the strategy preferences to these managers once I've renamed them. Then I use the option to have the team strategy slider match the strategy preferences of the manager. When a manager gets fired and rehired by a new team, the sliders for that new team will automatically adjust to agree with those strategy preferences. So, for a small amount of work, you can get have managers that add an extra dimension to your league.

How is this accomplished?

Tell me which step you didn't understand. :)

The part where you make every team's strategy match their manager's strategy. Are you saying you have to go in and manually force this in each time a team changes managers? It just sounded like you activated some "option" that made it happen every time. If that is the case, I'm wondering where you find this "option", since I am not finding it.

Well ive done the renaming before but thats just it. Its historical managers in
name only. Youve changed the strategy for the managers but thats part of a historical manager. If you change strategy to hit and run and the manager ends up with Babe Ruth i just dont see that working out so good. Plus are the managers gonna adjust to diiferent players? In the end i do kinda what you do and rename the managers but leave strategy totally to the AI.
im really not sure if its possible to have historical manager ratings.
Its like trying to offensive linemen in football.

It's in the Action menu at the bottom of the Team Strategy Page. Get familiar with the menus down there. They can be very useful. :)

The managers have two functions: 1) one is player development; and 2) strategy. The ratings are only about player development. The strategy preferences can influence what happens in games when the AI is in control. But those preferences matter only when the team strategy sliders are aligned with the manager preferences. This alignment can happen three ways: 1) when the game is first created; 2) when a new manager is hired by a team; and 3) when you tell it to make that alignment using the Action menu. All of this is only useful to know about if you understand the function of the team strategy sliders. If you do not understand the sliders, then none of this is useful information.

...

Oh i know that but if you set a preference is it still an even field?
What i mean is are you giving a boost to manager you rate high.
So you tell the manager to hit and run on slow team. Does the manager overide those strategy settings? I would like historical managers but i just dont see how you can do it and historical league because changing strategy might be favoring one team whereas with original AI it should be even for every team.

What I do is edit all the managers in the league, so no one team gets an advantage or a disadvantage. Does that answer your concern?

Yeah but do you edit all the managers the same. if so then wouldnt it be better to just rename them and leave it to the AI. If you edit them differently does it give a team too much of an advantage?
I guess they should have a slight advantage with a good historical manager but im not sure how you would measure that. Unless maybe you had a formula for say when to bring in a closer and you looked at all the teams the managers managed and figured out what was good, average, bad etc.

Could you run 2 sims both with same exact settings but one with the managers edited and the other without? Just to see how much effect it has.

When I've mostly done this, it's been when I've been studying stats and game logs from RL seasons, so that I have a feeling for how RL managers called plays for their respective teams (e.g., some called more SBAs than others). Then I would use that to modify their strategy preferences accordingly. It was simply to give the teams more of a distinctive character that would come a little closer to mimicking what they did IRL.

You could also doing it by simply looking at the makeup of the teams, or watching what happens in games, to better align the AI managers with their teams.

It might make a difference in the standings at the end of a season, but you would have to run a lot of test sims to even guess at how much of a difference. I just do it to add a little extra dimension of interest to a league.

Well i guess it doesnt matter what the strategy settings are since players are still gonna have to perform. But my main concern is will the team or manager adopt to each other's strengths? Would Earl Weaver's strategy work if he had then 85 cards? Or will the game adapt? How does it effect the teams draft and trade offers?
Then again how much effect does a real manager have on a team.
I mean even if you have slow but power heavy team would pass over a Tim Raines or Vince Coleman for an average power hitter.

I guess thats why i just rename them only. I just dont think a manager's skills & strategys can be rated fairly and some may have benefited or not from the teams they had. Was Casey Stengel a great manager or was it those 50's Yankees? Would any other manager have had the same success?

If we could rate the managers for each season and the teams still preformed close to what they did in real life for that season. Then maybe average the ratings for every season a manager managed then maybe i might see the historical managers working with the historical leagues.
Otherwise im not sure if they are really historical managers other than name only.

Though i sure would like to have them

I would call this paralysis by analysis. :) I also think you are over-estimating the influence of the managers on ultimate outcomes. But you should do what you feel comfortable about. I just wanted to an alternative to the randomized characteristics of managers in OOTP. Nothing more than that. :)

Yeah thats what i ment. Is it a managers skills or just plain luck?

Well, the manager who get paid millions every year (think Torre or Cox or LaRussa) could probably give you a strongly felt opinion about that. :)

I would say that in OOTP, it could make some difference in a close pennant race, but you'd be hard pressed to prove it.

OK, I am a little confused (at work without the game in front of me) If I match the strategy of the team to the manager, these strategies change when a new manager is brought in? Do I go in and synch the team up again with the new manager or is it automatic?

Im sure they would but was a manager like miller Huggins really good or was it because he had Babe Ruth.

Its not the pennant race that im really concerned with. Its after you get your league setup to where you have historical players playing with results close to what you think they should be. Of course everyone may be a little different. Some may expect Ruth to hit 55-65 homers for 1927. Others may be ok with 50-62. Anyway im afraid changing the strategy settings may effect their performance too much.
I dont want a carbon copy of the real league but i do expect a player to perform close to what he did.
I changed the settings on the 1927 yankees and had them steal and Hit & run more. They still won the pennant and they had more steals but their team hr's dropped to 115 and Ruth only had 44 hr and Gehrig only had 140 rbi's. Yeah i know you would expect to lose some power and i think changing
the strategy changes the balance of historical accuracy.
Thats why i prefer to let the AI do the strategy settings for the teams.
Not sure if explained that right.

Automatic. That's one of the interesting things about the way the game works. However, if the new manager is not one of the guys you've already tailored, you could decide to give him a real name and edit him as well.

Again -- and let me emphasize this -- it's just a way to have a little more fun with the game, if you are willing to put in the work. Definitely not required.

You should absolutely do what you prefer. But I hope you understand that the manager strategy preferences -- and consequently the team strategy sliders set for each team -- are random. They are not based on any AI analysis of the team. If those preferences and sliders happen to match up well with the team, the team will prosper. If the matchup is not a good one, the team may not do as well. So the AI fires the manager and hires another one. And if the team still doesn't do well, the AI fires that manager and hires another one, and keeps doing that until the team does better. It's a kind of trial and error process that I think is designed into the game. You can speed that up by editing a better matchup from the beginning.

OTOH, if you like the randomizing, trial-and-error process (and it does have it's own appeal) you should stick with it. Besides, it's less work. :)

Yeah its random but for me the stats always seem close to the real thing. When you have Ty Cobb batting .367 over a career, im not sure if i want to mess with that. But at the same time i wish i could use historical managers.
But i guess im too afraid of making historical managers that would wreck that.

Then again maybe if i dont use the extreme settings like aggressive base stealing then it wouldnt effect hr hitters like Babe Ruth as much or vice versa.
I do like managers having an effect on wins and losses i just dont want it to
screw up the historical accuracy.

No problem. If you're happy, I'm happy. :)

Yeah thats the main thing. Dont do something if your not happy with the results.

BaseballMan

Who says Managers strategies become stagnant?

Miller Huggins in Cincinnati was run and hit, bunt kind of guy. With the Yankees he was wait for your pitch, hit and run type of manager

Yes but how do you determine exactly when his strategy change? Some managers change because of the team and some teams change because of the manager.

I'd say the 2 core players usually will change a manager's strategy. For Huggins, it was Ruth and Muesel

Here's a question...

How do I keep GM's and Managers from retiring? Right now I have the owners as GM's and Benjamin Shibe retired after 1901.

Connie Mack will be impossible to recreate as a MGR if they just have them retire around the age of 60

I just thinking on how much different it would be to NOT using coaching system at all, under the current formula.

After all it´s historical players with non-historical managers and teams that have totally different ideas how to play than the historical team had the same year.

Using some standard system and letting the players ran their stats to get perhaps historical close stats.

Thinking on some big old APBA baseball cardgames, Strat-o-Matic and such. They never used the impact of managers.

The development of players should also be taken care off with recalc. I can´t see how coaches can develop a player that will be adjusted come recalc time in October.

Having the comment that teams will fire managers until it get the correct one also scares me.

Hopefully Markus will look into this since it would be great to have real managers to really impact the game.

This raises a question that I've never even thought of, what kind of strategy is used when the coaching option is turned off? Is it just a vanilla offense with all of the strategy sliders set at 5? Or is it something different.

Yes

There is a school of thought which holds that "correct" historical league play is to use recalc and retire-according-to-history, and to turn everything else off, including player development, dial down injuries, etc. I interpret this as a desire to have an historical league recreate history as much as possible within the framework of a computer sim that's also a game.

I do not use recalc and retire-according-history, and I have everything else turned on. My desire is to put myself in the shoes of a GM/manager of the day, with no more ability to predict the future development/health of my players than they did.

There are, I am sure, OOTPers who mix-and-match options that result in something other than those two alternatives. But, as you point out, there is the potential for this to be self-defeating, not just in player development but also things like the impact of major injuries on future playing abilities. It is good idea for people to think this through when they choose options.

Not so different from what happens IRL. :) I was only suggesting that it happens a bit more in OOTP, and what I suspected might be the reason for it. It's not that big a deal: manager strategy preferences don't differ all that much -- unless you edit those preferences to create bigger differences. I have done that a number of times. It adds interest to the game.

Given that "correct" history has already happened and that there is not a big bunch of fun in merely seeing how close you can get the game to come to that for me, I basically play as you do, change stuff up and see what's what. My all-time HR leader is Ed Sanicki who was a big power guy in the minors. Now I didn't see that coming so he wasn't on my team but I could have if I'd paid attention. And that to me is the heart of playing this game.

A variant on this which I find quite interesting are the players who start out, or come into the league as rookies, with very good ratings, but who for some reason (Bad injury? Bad attitude? Deported to Mexico? Ran off with the GM's wife? Shot by the GM?) only played a year or two. With retire-according-to-history turned on, these guys disappear on schedule (which, of course, you know is going to happen). In my league, they often hang around to have pretty significant careers (then they run off with the GM's wife ... :)).

I must say that even based on total recalc I can´t see that history really repeats itself even with recalc. After all we can look at each and every player on his own, getting the stats close.
BUT then we must also see what batting order he played in and a couple of thousand other factors that never can be the same.
So even with a player going "almost" as IRL, we still could have very big difference from whatever happend.
Then if you let the AI deal and sign contracts you will NEVER find the same personel in a team at almost any given time during a dynasty.

So with recalc on it´s more than likely the outcome of a season is very different then IRL.

The sliders are truly all the same when starting a dynasty with no coaches, BUT one can use the Action Ask AI for strategy and you will get different settings for each team (I tried it).

However I don´t know how much it actually differ from if I had managers.
My problems was just that it was fictional managers (historical one that had to be adjusted by me) with historical players.
That will also give different results as IRL.

There are OOTPers who like to sim out decades or multiple decades at a time, and take great satisfaction (my interpretation :)) in seeing the same names on the leaderboards as they see in history. If they see strange names there, it means their historical league did not function correctly for them. Recalc and retire-according-to-history are key devices for producing this result. Random player development, major injuries, etc. are deterrents to achieving this result.

AFAIK, people who enjoy OOTP this way do not care that much about whether teams perform as they did in history, or if the Yankees win as many World Series as they did. This could not be done in OOTP anyway. So, in that respect, you are correct.

I don't think we are going to see historical managers included in the game, because there is no "historical managers database" to use for that purpose. I think it might be possible to modify the game design to make it easier for people to create mods for others to use (although every time I think about how that might be done -- game design, that is -- my head starts to hurt :)).