Player Development

[Battman]

Just took a look at this, and need some input. I have Reggie Jackson going into the 1971 season on my team, the Pirates. I want to move him to CF for the season. Trying to get him to work on it in the Player Development program. Changed his position in the game to CF, but Player Development is only showing the option to Improve Defense in RF. LEARN NEW POSITION does not give me an option to choose a position. How do I get him to work on his defense in CF?

[Francoeurstein]

Force start him in CF in Spring Training.

[md40022]

I will say that I just finally got to play with the development lab for the first time a week or two ago and the "learn new position" program did seem a little stupid being that you don't get to pick the position that they try to teach the player.

In what scenario does a team take a player and say "this offseason we want you to focus on learning a new position. We don't care what position it is. Literally just learn any new position."

To me, if you want to try and teach the guy to play CF, you should be able to choose that as a sub-menu choice after choosing to learn a new position.... From there, if the training program flops and he doesn't pick up the position so be it. Some guys just don't fit certain positions, of course. But for that training program to be so open ended that you don't even get to specify what position the guy is attempting to learn ---- that just seems really weird. I just dont see "pick a new random position and learn it" as a reasonable real life player development technique lol.

[Leo_The_Lip]

Originally Posted by Francoeurstein

Force start him in CF in Spring Training.

Utterly unhelpful. We all know how to do that.

Like the previous post, I wanted to get a jump start on ST and have Noelvi Marte learn 3B--like in real life!

Annoyed by the lack of choice, I went ahead, only to see the AI choose first base--the least useful choice other than converting him to a pitcher.

I went the ST routed and he played 80 games at 3B, 15 at SS and 2 at first, the rest at DH. He will go the improve fielding curriculum this off season as there is room for improvement.

I genuinely enjoy the new Development Lab, and have had decent success. You need to get a feel for the types of players who will benefit and those that will always fail. Personality is key, as is intelligence.