5 Burning Qs for Experts

[Drbugboffin]

1) Why draft and sign17-19-year-olds when they're signing price is much higher yet ratings much lower than say, 26-year-olds in the draft pool? Especially since the older player with decent ratings can immediately play in the Majors, but the teenager may take years to develop?
2) Can skipping the Minors and playing a teenager straight from the Draft Pool on your Major team inhibit the player's development potential?
3) How can the A.I. play its pitchers well into the red on the stamina indicator bar and get away with it, while if my pitchers get close to red they start walking and hitting batters and giving away hit after hit?
4) Does re-scouting a player (scouting him again to raise the level of accuracy) do anything? You'd think it would improve the accuracy of the player's ratings, but I'm not seeing that.
5) What's the difference between the "DEF" rating shown beside each player in a game, and the player's ratings for Range, Error, Arm and DP? And do those ratings decrease if a player is played outside his primary position? Sorry, that's 6 questions.

[BirdWatcher]

Originally Posted by Drbugboffin

1) Why draft and sign17-19-year-olds when they're signing price is much higher yet ratings much lower than say, 26-year-olds in the draft pool? Especially since the older player with decent ratings can immediately play in the Majors, but the teenager may take years to develop?
2) Can skipping the Minors and playing a teenager straight from the Draft Pool on your Major team inhibit the player's development potential?
3) How can the A.I. play its pitchers well into the red on the stamina indicator bar and get away with it, while if my pitchers get close to red they start walking and hitting batters and giving away hit after hit?
4) Does re-scouting a player (scouting him again to raise the level of accuracy) do anything? You'd think it would improve the accuracy of the player's ratings, but I'm not seeing that.
5) What's the difference between the "DEF" rating shown beside each player in a game, and the player's ratings for Range, Error, Arm and DP? And do those ratings decrease if a player is played outside his primary position? Sorry, that's 6 questions.

Okay, I'll take a stab at these, hoping that you get other feedback as well since there aren't really definitive answers to most of this (or at least not simple, definitive answers.)

1) I'll answer your question first with a question of my own: how is that you have 26-year old's in your draft? That seems a bit old to be showing up in an amateur draft and makes me wonder about the settings for your draft pool. But regardless, the biggest difference between taking a very young player and an older player is that the younger player has more chance of developing a higher ceiling but also could bust completely while the older, (presumably more developed already player), will be more likely to have a higher floor but a more modest ceiling. I don't use the signing bonus negotiations in my fictional save so I can't really speak to the financial portion of this question, but generally in my experience it is good to draft a mix of older higher floor/lower ceiling players and younger potentially higher ceiling/lower floor guys.

2) Except in very rare situations where a player is clearly fully developed and ready to be a big league player (can happen in OOTP just as it has in real-life), it is not advisable to rush a kid to the big leagues. You risk squandering his potential if you rush him too quickly (and also if you leave him too long at a level that is beneath his skills- it's a balancing act). In my fictional league in which there are five levels of minors, the highest I would usually start a kid that I recently drafted is in A ball, the middle of the minor league spectrum, and that rarely. EDIT: Re-reading this I realize that this was a rather long-winded way to answer your question: the answer is Yes.

3) Not sure how to answer this. I don't usually push my own pitchers very far due to not wanting to risk injury. And yes, I do see the AI sometimes leave pitchers in far longer than I would. But I've also at times pushed certain pitchers and sometimes this ends in disaster and sometimes they just seem to get lucky. (Batters will, of course, get themselves out too and a good fielding play behind a pitcher can also make up for diminished effectiveness.) My sense is that this is more perception than reality, but it would be presumptuous of me to say that you aren't seeing what you think you are seeing as of course I am not there watching along with you.

4) Yes, re-scouting a player should lead to a more accurate perception of the player. But that doesn't mean that there will be a big difference between a low scouting accuracy view prior to a re-scout and a high scouting accuracy after the re-scout. There might just be very small tweaks to how your scout sees the player and depending upon the ratings scale you are using you might not even be able to see them. Mostly the best way to get a more accurate picture of your player's skills is to make sure you have a really good head scout and give it some time as the longer the player is in your system the more information your scouting staff will have about him and the more accurate their perception will be. Plus, don't ignore the evidence of stats either.

5) Without going into too much detail about this, the essential difference is that the positional defensive ratings (the ones you are seeing beside their name during a game) are an amalgamation of their basic defensive skills (range, error, arm, turn dp for infielders, and balanced for the importance at that position- i.e. a right fielder with a great arm but just above average range will have a better defensive positional rating in right than he likely would if those were reversed and if he is playing center field that lack of range will doom him to a much lower positional rating). AND ALSO, those ratings are experience ratings, so if a player hasn't played a position very much yet at the professional level his positional rating will be lower than it will be later after he gains more experience, providing his constituent defensive ratings support playing that position. If you trying to play a guy with infield range that is not very high at shortstop no matter how long you play him there he will only ever have the potential to be average at best, and likely not even that. If you play a guy at third base with a poor arm there will be only so high his positional rating will be able to reach. If you play a guy at second base who can't turn the double play, don't expect any amount of experience to turn him into a good second baseman. It just isn't going to happen. (There is a whole lot more to this, but I'm going to just leave it at that for now.)
The answer to the second part of that question has a lot to do with the defensive spectrum. If you have a guy who is a good left fielder but you want to move him to center field, he better have tremendous range (and a strong arm helps too) or you will have made a bad center fielder out of a good left fielder, and that isn't going to help your team. Now, maybe that left fielder is miscast in left field and actually has the basic skills (tremendous range, strong arm, primarily, though it's always good when players don't commit a lot of errors in key positions also) to play center, but until he gets a decent amount of experience in center field he won't see a bump in his positional rating at that position. If you have a capable first baseman and you choose to play him at shortstop, again, experience is one element (if he hasn't played much at this position there will be a learning curve) but mostly it is unlikely that he would playing first base in the first place (pun not intended) if he had shortstop skills.
You wanna move a center fielder to left field? Yeah, with a little experience under his belt that probably works out fine. You wanna move a shortstop to second base or third base (or maybe first, but he better be tall in that case), that should also work out fine after he gains a bit of experience. Of course, if he's a really good shortstop you wouldn't want to do that, but if he's aging a bit and slowing down and can't quite handle short any more than a move to a position on the less important end of the defensive spectrum might be exactly what is called for.
But- the basic defensive ratings that the player has- range, error, arm, turn dp for infielders (leaving catchers out of this entirely as that's a whole other thing)- do not change depending upon what position you move them to. The positional rating does, based upon a combination of experience and how those basic ratings play at that position. And those basic ratings are what should be informing the decisions you make about where to play a player.

[Drbugboffin]

Thanks to BirdWatcher again for providing a massive amount of nicely detailed info. He should write a book... wait -- he just did! In any case, I know a lot more than I did yesterday.

[BirdWatcher]

Originally Posted by Drbugboffin

Thanks to BirdWatcher again for providing a massive amount of nicely detailed info. He should write a book... wait -- he just did! In any case, I know a lot more than I did yesterday.

Believe me, this only scratches the surface of this immensely complex and immersive game.