This is a pretty awful change, and the number of posters that don't seem to understand jpeters' point is frustrating. The amount of "OK, but nobody actually locks 1/600 prospects to AAA, so what's the problem?" is agonizing.
The development team's argument that "well, raw athleticism is represented by potential ratings and not accounted for in current ratings" is nonsensical. Current ratings are "ability to apply raw athleticism to the task". The development team's argument boils down to "people are naturally better at something that they might be naturally better at". If this is the case,
then just reflect it in their current ratings.
Which is exactly what kidd_05_u2 argues:
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Originally Posted by kidd_05_u2
Wouldn't career paths like Campbell or Jackson Holliday be modeled better as coming out of the draft with current ratings that are good enough to play at AAA? Good enough to tear through the minors and not good enough to easily succeed in the MLB, while avoiding this bad situation where potential affects stats.
The challenge would be to get the AI to still put some of these players through the low minors, though nowadays teams are getting more and more aggressive with early promotions.
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To which RonCo responds:
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Originally Posted by RonCo
Yes. This is exactly how those players should be modeled. Some players blaze through the minors because someone made a "mistake" and put them into an environment where their current skills were considerably greater than the guys around them. They only stabilize once they are put into an environment where they are at the right level--which could even be the majors.
The idea of using potential ratings to influence current results is a bad model.
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Yes! Exactly! Top prospects don't perform better in the minor leagues because they might be good major leaguers someday. They perform better in the minor leagues because they're better at baseball than the other minor leaguers they are playing against. It just boggles my mind that the dev team doesn't see this.
fhomess elaborates:
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Originally Posted by fhomess
I think this is where OOTP is not yet agreeing. I'm hearing a "ends justify the means" response from OOTP on this. However, I think the issue is that the model is bad because it confuses the end user of the game. Stats should be generated according to the same ratings at all levels of play. If we're using potential ratings in conjunction with current ratings for minor leagues but not major leagues then they're playing two different games. The end user doesn't know that, and can't be expected to logically assume that, either. It's entirely counterintuitive.
Perhaps the issue that OOTP is trying to model is the wider variance of expected outcomes that prospects have based on their skill level which OOTP doesn't really have a rating for.
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I find it interesting that RonCo, who I recognize as "that guy who did countless statistical studies of the OOTP defense model", and fhomess, who I recognize as "that guy who gave us StatsLab", are on the side of "this is a poor model".
The actual problem is that almost nobody ever comes out of the amateur draft with the current ratings to go anywhere higher than Low-A. The fact that real-life teams send everybody to R/A- and the good players tear the cover off the ball is because those good players should have 40s, 45s or 50s, not 30s, and probably could have been sent right to A or AA. It's not because they have potentials of 70+ that somehow compensate for their actual 30. Real-life teams don't send all of these guys straight to A or AA for a variety of reasons, many of which have nothing to do with ability and everything to do with things like personality, maturity, and organizational culture.
But now? When current ratings don't matter? What level do I send a guy to after the draft? Who knows! Because his ratings aren't his ratings! And
then I can't trust his statistical output because it turns out that his potentials are being factored in to those, but only in the minor leagues, and if he's got good potentials he's going to perform well regardless of his actual ability and I'm only going to discover his actual ability once I place him on the big league roster.
Eckstein 4 Prez then shows up to make the point, with lots of words!, that Bill James disproved the "there's something different about the Bigs" nonsense decades ago.
So why are we bringing it back?!?
I already don't use minor leagues in my solo leagues anymore because it's not possible to tune the totals to be what I want without running 474,000 test sims first (and because players develop regardless of playing time; playing time is really only for getting additional information through stats, "rotting on the bench" or "giving a guy reps to figure it out" is sadly just not much of a thing).
The two online leagues I participate in, the OTBL and the TCBA, are broadly OK looking enough that their minor league totals don't bother me. But I heavily use minor league stats when evaluating whether it's time to push players up another level. The fact that minor league stats are almost completely meaningless in OOTP26 is enough for me to say that the OTBL, the league I run, may be on OOTP25 forever. And we may be a drop in the bucket, but a lot of the ownership in that league only buys new versions of OOTP when I upgrade the OTBL.