More than a rumor

[Brad]

I've built the schedule and added the league.
I have a PSBL 2052 pre-Sim 1 file and I'm going through each team and hand-creating ratings that I feel represent their skills and stats. I'm taking quite a few creative liberties, and we'll see how it shakes out. Obviously with the over-talent issues in Baseball Mogul, everyone can't be 90-100 rated in every category. So if there's an A+ hitter that was hitting .230 in a neutral park, they're not getting a 90-100 grade in contact hitting. I've been doing one team a night.

There's still miles to go to get the league side of things ready, but the simulator is close enough and I'm starting the process. A few of the things I need to work on: non-limits approach, player development, aging curves, injuries, lineup AI for mid-sim injuries/rest, player fatigue, especially bullpen fatigue, strategies to handle subs for fatigue, amateur draft, figuring out what to do with ratings.

First dibs to the teams goes to the owners that had them before the errant "Baseball Mogul 2010 reboot" league that blew up in my face.

[OSH-Chucker]

wow. guess i might have to dust off those old files and look where everything was back then. thanks for the update.

[Queen City Red Legs]

So, we're taking the owners/teams/players as they were when the league changed over, and importing them into the new sim engine and starting from there?

[Brad]

Yep-ish. I want to start another fantasy-draft started-at-2015 sim-into-future league, but I'll probably charge for that one.

[StaryFurySK (POR)]

I think that we should take a few lessons from the previous mogul based version of the league into consideration, and perhaps some of the pro's and con's of the most recent iterations of the mogul franchise on this sim.

Talent Pool

This is probably one of the big problems we faced in the previous version of mogul. We had natural development being static (meaning we had guys for the most part following a predictable development from a back-end perspective before we factor in winterball). We had guys getting winterball work about 8 times on average if they were better players. We had guys starting at age 32 that would HFF their veterans to try and get them to peak at age 40+ (something i was finally starting to eliminate as we got towards the end of the original run, but it was still a problem as of 2053 when we ended).

Mogul's response to capped players galore in 2007 and onwards is to just start dropping players to 70 overall players randomly to keep the integrity of a talent curve intact. In more recent versions, say 2012-2013, it would just randomly send guys all over the place, making some better while making the more general population of players worse. Neither of those were ideal solutions, and i would be hopeful that should you take this to a finished product, that it not follow that sort of path. Rather, it should probably give some descriptions of the pathing of the development and outline how many players are turning into generational talents based on the trajectory of previous talent pools, so that as a commissioner i would have a way of understanding where the talent in the league was going on a yearly basis. Not just Quality of Life feature, but borderline league sustainability.

Winterball aka Steroids

I have my hatred for having to adjust 300 players a season, but moreso a hatred for what i kinda outlined in the first post. Winterball in a relative majority in other leagues was capped to prevent turning top end players into even better players. It was functionally to turn the .675 ops guys into .720 ops guys, which provided teams whom had the money to develop depth the opportunity to increase the trade value of their assets while teams close to the cap simply had to find other ways to acquire said talent. While i'm not calling for the winterball to reach real life levels of lack of usefulness, we can't let it get there again.

Draft Scouting

Bazooka LC's to get rid of ASR sharing. Think that it was an easy target because you couldn't share winterball or AAA reports on your own players. People mostly did it because they couldn't generate enough LC's as real world was greater than writing reports. Some people write for the sake of writing, don't force it on people who don't want to do it imho. That allows ASR's and the version 1 to work short term as long as you can decide how to correlate the draft to your version of the game.

[Brad]

That all makes sense to me. I'm not sure people will really like the way I envision player development, might feel a little out of control to owners at times, and difficult to mold your team. I'm not really sure how to accommodate that or if it needs it. Much more can be done programatically.

I want prospects 'tools' to be known, accurate for the position, I want their body types to change a bit as they develop, for the game to talk about them being able to stick at positions. And I want a bit of a mojo effect. So if guys put up stats, they actually start to become better than expected. Tools != Ratings, but they influence ratings development. Realistic aging curves. Speed peaks differently than power.

Still not sure what to do about ratings and scouting. Still not sure about a lot of things. I guess now is the time to dream and influence me.

[Tulsa Tornadoes]

I so want another chance at a draft. Pretty much everyone I drafted in this league has blown up in my face.


Also, my biggest gripe about this league and previous ones, is that since we don't have salaries and salary caps, etc., the great players never change teams - at least not until later in their careers. Personally I hate negotiating salaries, but maybe it is necessary. Granted the super stud players never move much in mlb either, but they do hamstring their teams a little to a lot because of the salaries they demand. In this league, if you have a Trout or McCutchen or whomever, you have no worries about them leaving or about their salaries affecting your ability to go and get someone else.

[Brad]

Ray, sounds like you'll want my second fast-sim league, that's the next one that will start with a fantasy draft.

[StaryFurySK (POR)]

Jul 24, 2014 1:14:53 GMT -5 Brad said:

Still not sure what to do about ratings and scouting. Still not sure about a lot of things. I guess now is the time to dream and influence me.

2004 mogul era drafting if you want to be swayed. i've seen some nice features built into websites, i've seen reports in non-file leagues. I've never seen drafting that detailed and have never been so interested in drafting. You could pretty much program it in as is and beat out any other baseball sim.

the 2010 wasn't bazooka worthy, but was a downer in comparison.

[Brad]

Yea, I like that draft concept still. The 2010 league was terrible. In so many ways I never even publicly said.

[Boston Red Sox]

I'd happily reprise my role as Devil Rays Manager (they can still be the Devil Rays, right? I'm not buying into this Rays junk).

[Queen City Red Legs]

I'm in every league. Even pay ones. The variety and various strategy (as well as the unknown, given I've spend tens of thousands of hours of my previous life on Baseball Mogul whatever) is what's great.

[StaryFurySK (POR)]

I guess another question is the rough timeline on when you expect to have it setup for people to see?

[Brad]

Accomplishments thus far are fairly short:
1. Schedule template
2. I have about 300 players rated.
3. Some good work on lineup validation
4. The league is semi-setup www.purestats.net/PSBL/ but no players yet, and many pages error or aren't configured for a non-limits sim-into-the-future league configuration.

I'd hope to have players w/ ratings, team rosters, salaries, and a working 32-team schedule up in a couple weeks. Building everything required will take some non-trivial time though, maybe around Decamber 1 we could be ready. My actual timeline says more like October, so multiply by 2.5, the standard "Brad can't estimate" factor, and maybe that's close.

[Hyrule]

As I mentioned on facebook, I'd love to play as the Cardinals once again. Joe Bob and Kazuo Uzuki are ready to be let loose!