[Syd Thrift]

I re-read this in the light of the morning and, in the interests of pointing out that I am dumb, I am wrong. What was I even talking about?

The real reason you don't see only say 3 SPs rated as 80 given a cohort of 150 of them: standard deviations assume a normal distribution. OOTP ratings are not normally distributed, which is how you'd see things if they were arranged in a classic bell curve. At best the way to describe the ratings is if you're looking at only the long tail on the right side of a normal-distribution bell curve. Just to get into this league, just to get a shot at the minor leagues, even, you're multiple standard deviations better at baseball than the mean. So, like, even if ratings looked like a tail, you should not only see more 50s than 60s, but you should see more 40s than 50s, more 30s than 40s, and more 20s than 30s. The majority of guys rated 40 or lower are going to be buried in the minors or else released/retired/undrafted, but that's how it *should* look and that right there I'm sure makes SDs tough to parse.

That covers the low end but on top of that, OOTP's actual ratings are a bit fuzzier than that, a bit flatter than normal distribution would imply but I think based more on the talent distribution of modern baseball, and also more random and not self-correcting if, say, too many (or too few!) players have a given talent level the way you'd need with a truly smooth curve. The end result is that if you wanted to be completely right and true with SDs so that only 3 guys out of 150 had 80s, you'd have fewer 55s and 60s too and I think at some point the devs said "yeah, let's try to do this in spirit but let's not go too crazy".