[cuervo72]

Been chatting about this, and I figured I'd share it here.

To start, some have complained about the randomness in OOTP dev. I actually don't have a problem with randomness itself. What I had a problem with Markus saying that it *wasn't* random, when pretty clearly it was (which he's since found was due to a bug). I do think there should be times when dev probably shouldn't happen (huge shifts don't seem to make sense in the offseason). And the randomness looks ridiculous sometimes -- negative one week then positive the next, leading it to look like a big ping pong ball. But overall, I can accept that take on dev.

However, I find myself coming back to Jim's approach with FOF. A player is what he is (except in rare volatility instances), we just don't always know what that is starting out. I think this is a really good approach - there really isn't dev by-and-large (again, some random happenings here and there are fine). In fact, I think it could work better for baseball than for football -- this is actually an instance where stats could be meaningful. In FOF, it's really hard so tell what a mask is based on stats; no minors, crappy guys often don't get to play, small sample sizes, individual stats for some positions are hard to analyze, etc. Jim kind of gets around this with his emphasis on combines and interviews. But in baseball, if you have a guy with huge potential that over the course of 1000 AB can't
seem to put it together in the low minors...you might begin to wonder about him. Same goes with a roster-filler who just happens to keep hitting .300. He looks bad on paper, but might actually be masked - and if you look at performance, you might gain some clues about that mask (or, it might be a string of lucky rolls). Eventually though, the mask goes away and you know what you have.

Thoughts?