BLB Feeder Leagues

[Jake]

chippered, you deserve a medal for this.

[Ryan]

chippered, you deserve a medal for this.

Ehhh, its something I want to see in the league and I can see others concern with it. Since I suggested it, I think its only fair that I do some of the leg work in testing it out.

I was actually going to set up a new solo league today, but this sounded like more fun, lol.

[Andrew]

Thanks for the help chippered. The injury issue is my biggest concern. I think talent will sort itself out since it's a direct correlation of how large the draft class is regardless of where they come from.

Another question I have is how it fills out the draft class. In our league it creates 360 players each year for the draft. So say in year 1 180 players come from the feeder league. Will it create exactly 180 more players to bring it to 360? What if in year 2 220 players come from the feeder league. Will it then only create 140 players to bring it to 360 or will it create 180 again and end up with a lot more players than we need.

This might be difficult to test because I'm not sure if you can differentiate between feeder league and regular players in the draft pool. I guess the easiest way to tell is just note the total number of players in the draft pool. If it's always the same we know it's working correctly.

[Ryan]

So it's only 4 extra reports per player. The league file size increase would be minimal in that case.

If you're up for testing more chippered, maybe take a look at injury proneness for feeder league players. I'm curious to know if they start with the same spread of proneness as a normal draft class (in which case, it seems like injuries would increase because they would have more chances to get hurt) or if their proneness is developed over their time in the feeder leagues.

No... check their proneness in edit mode... see if it starts lower in the feeder league than a draft pool player.

Alright, heres what we've got in regards to injury proneness:

I picked a team in my High School feeder league from our test league since I can find the youngest players here. The entire team seemed to have pretty varied proneness numbers. It didnt matter if a guy was 15 or 18, some guys were prone and some were not.

The spread in proneness is 1-200, with qualifiers of OVERALL PRONENESS/BACK PRONENESS/LEGS PRONENESS/ARM PRONENESS, in that order. That order is used below as well.

Here are some samples:

15 year old: 157/89/79/50
16 year old: 90/92/81/74
15 year old: 9/139/71/103
18 year old: 47/167/101/76
17 year old: 57/9/63/54

Now, here are some samples of guys that got hurt, the injury, the starting proneness ratings and post injury proneness ratings:

15 year old: 3 months torn back muscle 79/28/104/68 --- 79/53/104/68
17 year old: 3 weeks tender shoulder 58/198/42/46 --- No Change
16 year old: 5 weeks fractured eye socket 36/59/88/37 --- 76/59/88/68
*** I guess I can see his overall proneness changing since he got hurt, but his arm proneness? He got hit in the eye. Weird.
16 year old: 12-13 months ruptured ulnar collateral ligament 87/84/73/49 --- No Change
***This one surprised me. Seeing a guy out for a year with a major arm injury, I thought he'd tank for sure. I followed him until I was done testing. He ended up being a second round pick, but was still in the minors, but he had only been drafted the previous year. He never had great ratings, so its tough to see if he stumbled after the injury, but his proneness never changed.

I think a lot of this is random, but there is just no way to prove one way or another. Guys definetly do start out with injury proneness though, and that proneness can increase upon being injured. But not always. Its just tough to tell.

Any questions, let me know.

[Ryan]

Thanks for the help chippered. The injury issue is my biggest concern. I think talent will sort itself out since it's a direct correlation of how large the draft class is regardless of where they come from.

Another question I have is how it fills out the draft class. In our league it creates 360 players each year for the draft. So say in year 1 180 players come from the feeder league. Will it create exactly 180 more players to bring it to 360? What if in year 2 220 players come from the feeder league. Will it then only create 140 players to bring it to 360 or will it create 180 again and end up with a lot more players than we need.

This might be difficult to test because I'm not sure if you can differentiate between feeder league and regular players in the draft pool. I guess the easiest way to tell is just note the total number of players in the draft pool. If it's always the same we know it's working correctly.

I'm going to create another league so I can test this from scratch.

But, my fiance is giving me this look so this will probably wait until tomorrow, lol.

[Andrew]

I'm going to create another league so I can test this from scratch.

But, my fiance is giving me this look so this will probably wait until tomorrow, lol.

lol, no worries. We have plenty of time.

[mahoney2]

Damn I thought I was the only one up at 6:50 in the morning on Thanksgiving.

[Matt]

I'm going to create another league so I can test this from scratch.

But, my fiance is giving me this look so this will probably wait until tomorrow, lol.

Tell her that until your married it's still a contract year for her.

[Ryan]

Tell her that until your married it's still a contract year for her.

Hehe, yeah I'll get right on that.

[Ryan]

Alright gentlemen, I did some pre and post turkey festivities testing today, and here are the results:

First, I set up a replica of our league:
-24 teams

-A-AAA (30 man roster limit)

-High School and College Feeder Leagues (30 teams each for 60 total Feeder Teams, per Andrews previous post)

-25 man roster limit for all Feeder League teams

-10% foreigner limit for BLB teams

-0% foreigner limit for Feeder League teams

-Games per league: BLB 162, High School 40, College 50

-Draft specs: Players created for 15 rounds / 10 rounds actually drafted

Draft Breakdown:
- 1st draft year: 264 players in draft pool
- 2nd draft year: 393 players in draft pool
- 3rd draft year: 434 players in draft pool
- 4th draft year: 453 players in draft pool
- 5th draft year: 626 players in draft pool

So, as you can see, the number of players in the draft pool continually increased, which is probably not good. Reason being, only 240 players are drafted each year (24 teams x 10 rounds = 240).

After each draft, the remaining players are swept into the FA pool. Now, I think most everyone agrees that having extra guys to pull from the FA pool is nice, but after year 3 of the draft, there were 1113 FA's. That number stayed consistent through year 5, when there were 1178 players available in the FA pool.

At this point I wanted to see if there was anything we could do to lower the number of guys coming into the draft and decrease the number of outstanding FA's.

I deleted 10 Feeder League teams from High School and 10 from the College level, leaving us with 40 total Feeder League teams (20 High School / 20 College). I then went into each league (HS and College) and deleted the FA's that were left after deleting the teams since all players from deleted teams go into the FA pool in their respective leagues.

Here is the draft breakdown after deleting 20 teams from the Feeder Leagues:
- 1st draft year: 308 players in the draft pool
- 2nd draft year: 316 players in the draft pool
- 3rd draft year: 344 players in the draft pool
- 4th draft year: 337 players in the draft pool
- 5th draft year: 326 players in the draft pool

This helped quite a bit. There are still players left over to dump into the FA pool, but only about 60-80 per year. The FA pool topped out at about 700 at most, and usually settled in the 550-650 range in these years, hitting 661 in the 5th year.

The number of guys in the draft stabalized nicely, IMO. And if we want some mix of guys from feeder leagues and guys that are randomly created, we can lower the number of Feeder League teams even more so. Best of all, its a pretty easy process and one that we can use to keep player levels the way we want them, should something happen in the future that we dont like.

One of the best parts of this was going into the high school and college leagues, looking at the players and finding guys to short list to see how they progress. I think this could help us figure the scouting out a little quicker as well. And its fun as hell to see some history on the guys we're drafting for our team.

EDIT: Something I thought of after posting: If we want to continue to have players created for 15 rounds, we will have to create more players than the game was creating. For 15 rounds worth of players, we would need 360 players in the draft pool. Now, I had the game set up to create players for 15 rounds, but for whatever reason, it wasnt. Maybe because I had the hidden player feature off?

EDIT #2: Ok, so when I deleted the Feeder League teams it must have bumped the number of rounds for created players down to 11. So that answers that question. Nevermind I guess.

Like the others, I saved this league as well, so if anyone has any questions, feel free to ask.

[mahoney2]

One of my concerns is, can you speak to the quality of the guys? If we use feeder leagues as you have setup, how much elite talent is there in comparison to some of our previous drafts?

Thanks for all your work this is great stuff.

[Ryan]

Yeah, I was concerned about that as well, and I noticed that one of the first drafts I had in one of these leagues mirrored this years draft (in my scouts eyes) in terms of quality players. My scout saw this years BLB draft as a few exceptional players, but more depth in the middle level guys. Thats what I saw in some of the drafts I looked at.

I'll be honest though, I was checking the draft pretty closely at first, but after a while I just wanted to get the testing done, lol. I found myself looking at player progression more than simming and looking for results, so I kind of had to force myself to move on at some points. But, from the checking I did, I found that it fluctuates some, kind of like our drafts.

I think the only problem is that using the new scouting system it would be difficult to determine an overall feeling towards the draft since our scouts seem to vary quite a bit, from what I gathered on the boards anyway.

The other thing about this is that I think the quality of players would remain since we would still be using the same modifiers to create our guys.

One thing I can say is that some guys will change dramatically in your scouts eyes over the course of a high school or college career, for good and for worse. And, some guys will stay the same, whether they are a scrub, an average guy, or a stud.

I tracked about 30-35 guys when checking injury proneness, and when they were finally dumped in to the draft pool, it was interesting to go back and check their past scouting reports. Also, if you happen to change scouting directors, the game keeps your old scouts reports on guys so you always have some kind of background. Not sure if everyone knew that or not.

Thats a good point you bring up either way though.

[Carlos]

Is it possible to check out what these players do over the course of their BLB careers?

We need to consider what the quality of talent may become. The draft may be random in terms of quality, but scouts can be and are off at times. So, we need to make sure that 20 years later when we have nothing but players that were originally high school stars in our league, that the talent has not decreased or increased too much.

Also, are you getting a good mix of pitchers and position players for the draft?

[Ryan]

Is it possible to check out what these players do over the course of their BLB careers?

We need to consider what the quality of talent may become. The draft may be random in terms of quality, but scouts can be and are off at times. So, we need to make sure that 20 years later when we have nothing but players that were originally high school stars in our league, that the talent has not decreased or increased too much.

Also, are you getting a good mix of pitchers and position players for the draft?

I think I can answer these questions.

As far as checking the players out over the course of their major league careers, that would be tough to track, as I would have to shortlist an amazing number of players, track their talent level, and their statistical output.

Now, not all players sent into the draft from the feeder leagues are studs, as the talent mirrors a regular league. At every age there are studs, good players, midlevel guys, and below average guys, so we'd always have a good mix of guys coming into the draft.

Overall, I think the players will develope normally based on our modifiers we have set in our game. Andrew can speak to that more accuatly than I can though.

But, you will have the usual ebb and flow from year to year. There is nothing we can do about that, nor should we want to, as it will allow the league to move in a natural progression. Even using our random player creation for the draft we have that progression.

Now, I can say that I'm happy with the testing I've done, but the only way everyone else can be happy is to either take my word for it () or set up a league and run through it as I did.

Just take control of a team, create a scout similar to yours in BLB and take a look at the draft each year. That will most likely tell you more about this process than my testing can ever tell you, since my opinion in talent and players will most likely differ from everyone else's, much like the BLB. Which is the way it should be, IMO.

EDIT: Forgot to add, there does seem to be a solid mix of pitchers and position players. As other things, it varies from year to year, but I just checked my most recent draft, and it seemed well balanced.

[Lintyfresh85]

I ran one last night... I only looked at the 'top' players from High School, according to the stats leaderboard and followed them. I must say, it was pretty damn cool to see the all time HS Home Run leader, get drafted, and then make his rise through the Dodgers system.

I think I only simmed about 5 years, and after those five years, I think only five guys that started out in HS when I started the sim were actually in the ML. I think that's pretty realistic. Infact, all five were MR's which makes sense as they can go through a system pretty damn quick.

I haven't done nearly enough testing to make any judgements like Chippered has, but it was pretty neat seeing all of the players progress from scrawny 15 year olds to Major League stars.