My NeL Player Profile Project

[Makonnen]

I think I have this sussed for OOTP22 at least--it all revolves around Doom's tool, as it lets me put in year by year entries for the players. So OOTP thinks it has "normal information" for them. Progress on that slowed due to work and some other hobbies, but should kick back up soon.

I hope to release the 1875 - 1910 database within a month or two, along with a website with snippets like are in this thread for each player. I think that is the ultimate solve, at least for the current version of the game.

[luckymann]

Originally Posted by Makonnen

I think I have this sussed for OOTP22 at least--it all revolves around Doom's tool, as it lets me put in year by year entries for the players. So OOTP thinks it has "normal information" for them. Progress on that slowed due to work and some other hobbies, but should kick back up soon.

I hope to release the 1875 - 1910 database within a month or two, along with a website with snippets like are in this thread for each player. I think that is the ultimate solve, at least for the current version of the game.

Thanks bud - this is what I actually do manually now, are you just entering raw stats or your i9s?

[3fbrown]

Thanks for this thread Lucky, even if things fell apart more than you would have liked. For what it is worth (and I posted about this some time back) I've been doing manual imports for Black & Cuban players for my league, which just finished the 1917 season. I am in some ways less organized than you, or at least less systematic. I keep a semi-updated tally of where the league's talent levels are (say, what are the 0th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 100th percentile values for pitcher movement and so on) for all talent ratings. Then I use Seamheads - and Eric Chalek's MLEs and other information when available - to create players from scratch.


I have not had issues with player development that I can tell, not like you describe. Some players don't live up to their potential, some do. Pitchers tend to overachieve, but I think that's because may show up at age 17/18/19 and have a lot of time to increase velocity and thus increase their potential. The best pitcher in the league right now is Bill Lindsay, and the league pitching leaders are dominated by Black/Cuban pitchers like Joe Williams, Dick Whitworth, Dizzy Dismukes, John Donaldson, Dick Redding, Juan Padron, Lico Mederos, Dick Redding, and Dicta Johnson. It doesn't bother me, but it's an issue that I would need to address if my goal was maximum accuracy. Black hitters have not dominated to the same extent (I feel they are well balanced overall), but the two league MVPs in 1917 were Oscar Charleston and Cristobal Torriente. I am still running OOTP 21 though, maybe that matters.


I can answer one of your points of confusion though. Carlos Moran's defense - it's bad because he is left handed! The AI does not like that! If you make him a right handed thrower it should clear things up, even if it's not the truth.

[luckymann]

Originally Posted by 3fbrown

Thanks for this thread Lucky, even if things fell apart more than you would have liked. For what it is worth (and I posted about this some time back) I've been doing manual imports for Black & Cuban players for my league, which just finished the 1917 season. I am in some ways less organized than you, or at least less systematic. I keep a semi-updated tally of where the league's talent levels are (say, what are the 0th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 100th percentile values for pitcher movement and so on) for all talent ratings. Then I use Seamheads - and Eric Chalek's MLEs and other information when available - to create players from scratch.


I have not had issues with player development that I can tell, not like you describe. Some players don't live up to their potential, some do. Pitchers tend to overachieve, but I think that's because may show up at age 17/18/19 and have a lot of time to increase velocity and thus increase their potential. The best pitcher in the league right now is Bill Lindsay, and the league pitching leaders are dominated by Black/Cuban pitchers like Joe Williams, Dick Whitworth, Dizzy Dismukes, John Donaldson, Dick Redding, Juan Padron, Lico Mederos, Dick Redding, and Dicta Johnson. It doesn't bother me, but it's an issue that I would need to address if my goal was maximum accuracy. Black hitters have not dominated to the same extent (I feel they are well balanced overall), but the two league MVPs in 1917 were Oscar Charleston and Cristobal Torriente. I am still running OOTP 21 though, maybe that matters.


I can answer one of your points of confusion though. Carlos Moran's defense - it's bad because he is left handed! The AI does not like that! If you make him a right handed thrower it should clear things up, even if it's not the truth.

Appreciate the feedback 3fB, as well as the Carlos Moran clarification.

This project is far from dead, quite the opposite - I am working toward making a database that uses my stats rather than the current ones. But obviously this is a massive step up and will take a lot of work and time.

I am currently in the first phase of this, where I just use generic career paths where players develop and peak at similar rates and ages. The testing for that - which is designed to see how closely the game follows the inputted stats - has gone really well and given me the platform to move onto phase two. This is where I actually go to each individual player and try to approximate their historical careers with regard to better and worse seasons using the same combination of SH and MLE data. It will never be identical, nor do I want it to be because there are just too many statistical holes for NeLers that play havoc with their ratings in-game. What it is designed to do is at least replicate each career to some degree while providing the overall career output for the game to produce, just like it does with MLBers. In this way, my ratings will be able to be used under all game conditions - recalc / dev / both / TCR set however you want it. Hopefully I can also make it so these NeLers come in as rookies automatically in the appropriate year.

This will only be for the 450 or so players EC currently covers with his MLEs and any he subsequently provides this data for. The plan is to use Doom's DB tool to replace the current stats with mine.

As I said, this is all some way off and will be subject to what, if any, changes are made in 23 with regard to NeL players.

Just as a taster, here are the stats Phase One has produced for NeL players thru 1930. The pitchers need work, so I'll only include the hitting stats. I have only included the biggest names in this iteration.

Retired players




Active players




I will be continuing this test process until all of the NeL players in this first batch have come and gone, so somewhere around 1960, and will put the final results up here at that point.

[luckymann]

Up to 1937 now - just had Oscar Charleston retire as the greatest MLB player to this point.

His 3-year peak period - including that unbelievable 1926 - was a few points too strong and has been adjusted accordingly, but otherwise this is what I'd expect of OC and was right in line with the input slash of 332/401/534.

[luckymann]

Well I am so happy that 23 has taken the first step toward getting the NeLers closer to where they should be. From initial reports, where they are now should satisfy all but the most fanatical follower of these leagues.

Of which I am obviously one.

So I have added an extra couple of phases to this ongoing project, more than likely only for my own sake but I thought I'd keep posting for any of you who are interested to follow along.

The first of these phases is to run a "control group" sim on 23 from 1920 to 2019. I will actually start this in 1901 to give the league a few seasons to settle before the NeLers presumably start appearing in 1920. I will do nothing to these players, merely observe how the game treats them and what sort of results they get.

In the meantime, Phase 1 is now complete. To recap, I ran 72 NeL players using my edits applied on a yearly basis as a sort of manual recalc for periods mirroring their IRL careers as closely as possible. This began in 1890 and ran thru 2019.

Of those 72, 32 ended up making the HoF.

Here are their final stats.

I won't bore you with the tinkering required, but in general these results assure me I'm on the right track with my methodology.


Here are the final leaderboards.

Feel free to shoot through any specific requests.

G

[LansdowneSt]

First, great job with the time and persistence to accomplish the hard part - letting the control group run should be easy!

Second, congrats to Ortiz, Yaz and Lee Smith for their appearances on the leaderboards, because, you know, Go Sox!

For context, can you give the HR totals for Ruth, Gehring, Ott, Williams and Musial? Curious what the "LTM subtraction" was for the NeL contemporaries. It will be factor for many but as a counting stat, HR's is an easy one to observe the League Total Modifier impact at a glance.

[luckymann]

Originally Posted by LansdowneSt

First, great job with the time and persistence to accomplish the hard part - letting the control group run should be easy!

Second, congrats to Ortiz, Yaz and Lee Smith for their appearances on the leaderboards, because, you know, Go Sox!

For context, can you give the HR totals for Ruth, Gehring, Ott, Williams and Musial? Curious what the "LTM subtraction" was for the NeL contemporaries. It will be factor for many but as a counting stat, HR's is an easy one to observe the League Total Modifier impact at a glance.

Thanks bud and, yes, good to see some of the Sox lads at the top.

I perhaps should have mentioned that I manually tinkered with the LTMs to roughly accommodate the NeL guys being there. I just went hunting for historical season totals I thought gave enough upside and applied them EG I used 1940 (1571 HR) for 1932, which had 1358 IRL. Fairly unscientific but seemed to do the job.

Here are those HR totals you asked for:

Ruth 597 (14th)
Gehrig 404 (66th)
Ott 494 (t-30th)
Williams (Ted, I presume) 546 (t-17th)
Musial 503 (t-26th)


From what I am seeing in the early part of the control group, this is something that will need to be addressed at the game level and in the meantime taken into consideration by anyone looking to run an integrated historical MLB sim with anything close to acceptable accuracy. I'm in 1925 just using the default MLB LTMs and Ruth has 175 career HR so far. More pointedly, he is yet to hit 30 or more in a season. Gehrig just broke the record with 35.

[LansdowneSt]

Originally Posted by luckymann

From what I am seeing in the early part of the control group, this is something that will need to be addressed at the game level and in the meantime taken into consideration by anyone looking to run an integrated historical MLB sim with anything close to acceptable accuracy. I'm in 1925 just using the default MLB LTMs and Ruth has 175 career HR so far. More pointedly, he is yet to hit 30 or more in a season. Gehrig just broke the record with 35.

Control group in OOTP22, correct? Version is held constant for the run? Yes, Ruth was the definition of statistical outlier so HRs lost to LTM will be more extreme for him. But the talent level of the league is higher so some of that is just the nature of the what-if scenario itself. Looking forward to the results.

[luckymann]

Originally Posted by LansdowneSt

Control group in OOTP22, correct? Version is held constant for the run? Yes, Ruth was the definition of statistical outlier so HRs lost to LTM will be more extreme for him. But the talent level of the league is higher so some of that is just the nature of the what-if scenario itself. Looking forward to the results.

No, I didn't think there was any point in running it on 22 with the new ratings in place. There is no real actual control group in 22 given how the NeLers import. I initially was going to do a quasi one in 22 where I just imported them, edited them once with my stats and saw what happened but I don't really see the purpose now.

[LansdowneSt]

Roger that. Conceding what we all know. The previous treatment of them wasn't worth it. So, an OOTP 23 control group. I look forward to the results even more

[luckymann]

Originally Posted by LansdowneSt

Roger that. Conceding what we all know. The previous treatment of them wasn't worth it. So, an OOTP 23 control group. I look forward to the results even more

What I am going to do, however, is restart the control group and apply the same LTMs I did in the master group. Just to make them a bit more readily comparable.

[luckymann]

OK, so the v23 sim has run (well, actually as I write this first bit it is in the early 1970s). Here are some observations. Not criticisms, observations.

I reiterate my earlier thought that the improvements made to NeLers for v23 will satisfy most OOTP players.

BUT...

For this new setup to work properly, the NeL players need to be made fully-fledged major leaguers. Having to incorporate full historical minors just to get them in is highly problematic, both because the influx of ahistorical players - MiLB (Emmitt Fulenwider hit 37 HR in one season... WTF??) and NeL - just nerfs the LTMs way out of whack, which will peeve the histo purists beyond words. Also, it makes the save incredibly unwieldy having all of those extras added on, not even taking FGs into consideration. Furthermore, as it stands the NeL players will not appear automatically in RD saves.

To show the stats generated in this sim, I'll use my original v22 sim as the reference point.

So here are all the stat results in the v23 test for the players who made the HoF in that original v22 sim. Sadly it seems for hitters there is a bug that makes the player's final season WAR total come up instead of his career, so I sorted them by HR instead.





Of these, in the v23 sim only 6 made it to Cooperstown: Cristobal Torriente, Turkey Stearnes, Josh Gibson, Willie Wells, Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby.

A couple other interesting (to me, anyway) points of note:

• Their versions of Newt Allen, Tetelo Vargas, Hilton Smith Vic Harris and Wilson Redus did better or close to by career WAR than mine.
• Lennie Pearson (8.2 lifetime WAR according to BBRef) won the 1940 Triple Crown and ended up with 157 career HR. He didn't make it into my test.
• Roosevelt Davis had the winningest season in history with 31 in 1927.
• Bonnie Serrell, another who didn't make it into mine, hit 393 to win the 1942 batting crown and followed it up with another win the next year after hitting 356. His 39 triples from that 1942 campaign remained the highest until the end of the sim.

I'll post the final leaderboards when the sim is finished.

[luckymann]

OK, this took a while because the size of the save became so bloated with all of the MiLB stuff.

Finally, we got to the end of 2019 and the stats / leaderboards are as follows:

Some fun little tidbits from this sim.

Over 120 seasons, neither of the Bay Area clubs in all of their various incarnations won a title. My Oakland A's made the playoffs six times, the Giants five. Interestingly, the Padres never won it all either. They were the only two foundation clubs without a Championship. The Cards led this with 18 from the Cubs with 15 and Tigers 14.

The season-record race for HR was utterly enthralling over the years. It looked like Jimmie Foxx's (from 1933) and Lou Gehrig's (from 1936) tie for 59 was going to hold up. Only Eddie Mathews with 56 in 1954 had come close in 60 years.

Then McGwire tied it in 1995 and broke it with 63 four years later. Bonds hit 60 in 2000 and 2004, then he also tied it in 2001, a season that also saw Sosa hit 60. Then Giancarlo Stanton tied it twice, in 2012 and 2015 - on both of these occasions he had quite a few games to grab the record outright but couldn't do it. JD Martinez hit 60 in 2017 and Matt Olson made one last run for it in the final 2019 season before coming up short at 56.

Henry Aaron was a beast in this sim, taking the all-time hits record from Cobb with 4157, finishing behind only Bonds with 688 HR and behind only Rickey and Bonds with 154 WAR.

Pujols finished 2019 on 645 HR, 3rd all-time and the only active player on the upper reaches of the list. He's also 4th with 3550 hits.

The all-time wins figure (Walter Johnson, 399) was almost identical to the all-time saves (Mariano Rivera, 398).