1924 FOOL-H Offseason Thread

[Alan T]

Originally Posted by TimGuru

Based on my past experience in historical leagues (extensive), minors cause more and more problems as more "notable" players show up (i.e. guys you will have heard of and have expectations for) in a less than fully developed state. If DC is using a similar database to the one I experienced a number of guys will turn up at a young age and underdeveloped to potential, because for one reason or another they had a brief appearance in MLB before their full fledged career. OOTP does NOT treat raw 19 year olds kindly at the AAA level...ever. The same is kinda true on the other end of careers, all you sentamentalists that hang onto guys for far too long can stash a guy on the reserve roster and bring him back in a down year later, with an expectation of less diminishment of ratings than if you had sent him down to a AAA team.

In a strictly historical league, reserve roster is the way to go. There are not enough players and the stats generated in the minors are not really indicative of MLB potential...refer back to all the comments about people not knowing what constitutes a good starting pitcher. If AAA was such an information laboratory, wouldn't we all have been putting questionable starters there for a year for a litmus test?

In talking to Markus about this type of development issue in the past, his comment is that player development does not depend at all on what levels there are or how many levels or any such thing. What it depends on entirely is the level of competition compared to the player who's development is in question. That is why I keep telling everyone to be patient with prospects in the other FOOL leagues, because rushing them up to the majors could mean them playing against too tough a level of competition that stunts their growth.

The same thing is true about minor league play. It bases it off of the average level of talent in that league. If your player is playing against much better talent, it will cause them stunted growth. If your player is playing against too inferior of talent, then it will also slow their development. So having -more- minor league levels as some suggested does resolve that ootp development issue, but yes it is ahistorical (even though having amateur drafts, free agency compensation, free agency period or many of the other things we do is ahistorical as well).

Switching to a reserve roster means the players play zero games so there is no comparison level of talent issue involved any more. There is no stunted growth for not having comparable talent as Markus has the reserved rosters configured to work around that. So in a sense the players on the reserve roster just practice ALOT all season. There are some downsides to the reserve roster as you evidently can't teach players new positions there or get them experience there (from the testing I tried this past season at least), so that will hurt defensive development, but other than that hitting and pitching primary development should still be ok. It will hurt 2 way players that in the past some of us have had train one season as a hitter and one year as a pitcher, you likely will have problems doing that with a reserve roster as well. And obviously you don't have stats to rely on either to determine a player's readiness for the majors.



So there are pros and cons to both ways.. I'm sure I didn't cover everything, but trying to give an impartial review of both sides of the issue in a way to not influence folks to my side

[TimGuru]

I'm unabashedly trying to convince people that the move was the right thing.

As you say, development is based on the competition available at the level of minors. If you take a player with low ratings but high potential and put them in AAA, they are competing against a handful at most of other such players, MLB veterans who are being stashed in AAA, and 12-18 or more "ghost" players of AAA caliber. So, a raw young underdeveloped player is vastly over his head at AAA.

Most draftees worth anything arrive ready to play anyway. Put them in MLB. This isn't FOOL.