[Mizzery]

I have another thread where I have shared the results of a three team test I started over the holidays after buying a second license when OOTP 20 went on sale. In a nutshell, the team built on power (high POW for hitters, high MOV for pitchers, bring fences in) has significantly underperformed my OBA team (High CON for batters, push fences out, increase park factors for hits).

I have learned a lot from other posters who in the past have shared their deep dive analysis into the statistics of the game, so I thought I would share my own and how I think the game unintentionally devalues current Live players.

I took all of my hitters across all teams that have more than 1,000 AB at some combination of Diamond and Perfect levels. I know other analysis has focused primarily on the Perfect level only, but I felt there was likely a large universe of players like myself that have teams that drift between Diamond championships and .500 Perfect league results, and while we constantly try to upgrade the rosters, the same team basically plays at both levels.

I also used my own cards rather than the entire universe of hitters at Perfect because I feel there are extreme high end players in Perfect that are generally unattainable for 95% of the teams, especially FTP players, and they could distort some of the results.

What was left was a database of 1.5 million at bats at Diamond and Perfect level, which I ran regression analysis on every possible combination of ratings and results I could think of.

As other posters have shared in the past, the hitting ratings do exactly what they are supposed to (r-squared correlations to follow): Avoid K vs. K% was at .9512, Eye vs. BB% was at .9116, Power vs. HR rate .7989, CON vs. Batting Average at .7112, and GAP vs. 2B and 3B rate at .7023.

But what combination of ratings equal success? WAR can't be used because it includes defensive ratings, and I played with TB% and Runs Created, but ultimately landed back on OPS as an easy benchmark, especially because it is agnostic to the rest of the players in the lineup.

The only hitting rating that showed any kind of decent statistical relationship against OPS was CON, at .3939- every other rating had a r-squared to OPS of .05 or less.

When combining the factors, the best combination I could come up with had a .4997 relationship to OPS- and that was a weighting of CON x 5.1, EYE x 1.6, POW x 1.33, and GAP x 1.

There are many other factors that come into play- quality of pitching the batter faces, park factors, defense, and BABIP, which is the one rating hidden on the cards. But I think there is a strong indication that Contact is the single biggest factor for a hitter's success at the higher levels.

Bringing this back to MLB Live Cards, 2019 had the highest HR rate in MLB history, and the highest K rate. Hitters in today's game have changed their swing angle to add loft on the ball to take advantage of the juiced ball and go for the home run, sacrificing contact and batting average in the process.

In OOTP, I have seen only a handful of players who can sustain results at Diamond and Perfect levels with a CON rating below 60, yet many Live players fall under that mark.

The 93 OVR Joey Gallo has a POW rating of 103 and a CON rating of 47. My Gallo card has a lifetime BA of .202 on 18k ABs before I finally gave up. The 90 OVR Giancarlo Stanton has a POW of 100, CON of 58, and my Stanton card has a lifetime .235 BA on 9500 AB, now firmly on my reserve roster. 92 OVR Mitch Garver, 85 POW, 51 CON. Eugenio Suarez, Pete Alonso, Gary Sanchez, etc. all fall in the same camp.

There are historical cards that underperform as well due to high POW, low CON (I've got a 99 OVR Mike Schmidt with a lifetime .217 BA), but the impact is heavier on the Live side.

Obviously this doesn't apply to every LIVE player- Cody Bellinger and Christian Yelich are examples of LIVE players with high POW and CON, but it does suggest that if the OOTP PT universe is tied to some average historical year to normalize for players from all eras, and if current players continue to drift away from historic hitting patterns, as a group, LIVE players may continue to underperform historic cards, regardless of the OVR rating.

I didn't look at pitchers yet, but other posters who have shared their results around MOV would seem to confirm this theory- as MLB hitters hit more HR, MLB pitchers serve up more HR, lowering their MOV rating and punishing them accordingly in the normalized OOTP PT universe.