[billyray1984]

Originally Posted by Hstrong175

The whole player development system really mystifies me. They are up and down from a development perspective. How do I need to navigate this? I have seen players go up in stars, but lose let's say one contact even though they are having a great season, why does this happen?

Overall and potential ratings are a construction from OSA or your scout. They do not affect player performance and can be very misleading (especially with pitchers). You need to look at the "game" ratings (i.e. contact, gap, power, eye, avoid k, etc.) AND at the stats (and age, and injury proneness, and personality, etc.) to correctly asses a player.

And when I say stats, I don't mean only counting stats, but more advanced stats too. Every stat site has a primer on crucial stats (woba, war, wpa, etc.). I'd suggest taking a look at those to get a feel to how they could help you assessing your players.

Prospects need a lot of time to develop and bust out in baseball more than in any other sport and the game correctly models that imho.

Does putting money into budget and scouting, i think the max is 24 mill per. Does this actually make a difference

I have found that maxing the player dev budget, when possible, is a bonus. Less so with scouting. Experiment.

In terms of coaches, do they really impact player traits depending on their coach traits?

The game devs say that yes coaches impact players. How much and in what way ? That's a mystery. It's also pretty much a mystery in real life too, so all you can go is hire and retain the best coaches you can and make sure they get along with your players.

I sometimes wonder, do the numbers actually matter for a player in terms of contact, control and all those different traits.

They do and they do not. If you have scouting enabled, you need to remember that the ratings presented come from the lense of your scout (like in real life) and reflects his biases and the budget alloted to scouting. This is why you need to look at stats too (and other factors) to correctly asses a player. Depending on the rating scale you are using, two players could have the same rating in a category and perform differently due to rounding too.

I quickplay my games, and my starters and bullpen ERAs were over 5, and that was like good for 8th in the AL.

Another thing. I find with losing teams, they hit a point in the season and just tank. I was 49-60 at the end of July, and ended 61-101. At one point earlier I was 4 games under .500 and then went to 11 games under then to 40 games under. It has happened more than one season in a row.

Sorry for the long windedness, help me out here.

Momentum does play a role in overall performance, but I doubt the game engine models "tanking", unless the player actually makes an effort to tank (i.e. play backups, bench starters, etc.).

You need to realize that baseball is very high variance (just like poker) and is probably higher variance than any other sport due to how hard pitching and hitting a baseball are. You could be holding all the best cards (or players) and still get a diffenrent result than expected.

I hope this helps.