Range Factor 25

[wudl83]

I played around with ratings. We already have set the Plate Blocking for Catchers to 99 and the Fielding Anticipation of all players to 25.

Now I set the Range rating for all players to 25 and....I'ts amazing!

1) Less infield and outfield dives instead of a ton of them.

2) Balls are hit over outfielders against the wall for doubles or triples instead of outfielders catching every ball which goes over their head.

3) Outfielders slowly jog to the outfield wall when they know the ball will be a homerun and watch the ball flying instead of running against the wall in a hurry which caused a stupid animation.

4) Bouncers in the infield now cause much more trouble for infielders and bouncers become a challenge instead of being routine plays.

I have made 4 videos in the game of those situations. You got to know that those situations happened within only the first 4 innings of this game! I am currently trying to convert the videos into animated gifs so you can see them.

[wudl83]

Here you see how Joe Panik has trouble reaching a A-Gon infield bouncer, but reaches the ball and makes a nice throw to Ishikawa at first to beat out Gonzalez.

With a fielding range rating of 60, 70, 80 or whatever this one would have either been a dive or a routine play.

[wudl83]

In this one, Joe Panik makes another nice throw on a bouncer by Carl Crawford. Panik's throw is in time but a little bit of the plate, so Ishikawa has to make a step to tag off Crawford.

With a higher range rating this would have caused no trouble for Panik.

[wudl83]

Here you see Mike Morse how he's jogging to the outfield wall. Tim Hudson has left a pitch over the plate and Matt Kemp bombs it over the left field wall.

Normally, those are the times where the outfielders start to sprint to the outfield wall, which not only looks awful, but also makes no sense.

This is connected to the range rating by a 100%.

[wudl83]

This one isn't like what I described earlier (hit over a OF's head), but you bet that with a normal range rating Carl Crawford would have caught this ball!

With a rating of 25, there was no chance for him, like in reality!

[wudl83]

Now I want to tell you the reason why it works. For this one you got to understand the range rating.

I've made a small pic to illustrate it.

Imagine the range rating like a circle (or area) around the player.

The higher the rating, the bigger the circle (or area).

Now when a ball is hit, every player on the field, especially those who are positioned in the direction of the ball, will start acting.

This is the time the range rating comes into play.

If the ball crosses the 'outer line' of a players 'circle' (or 'area') the player gets a fielding boost, which gives him a quicker reaction, let's him sprint or makes him jump.

Now look at the attached gifs in the posts above and can see exactly that. Look at the animation of Mike Morse, where the homerun of Kemp flies over his head. Exactly at the moment the ball crosses Morse's head (gets into his 'circle' or 'area') he gets a speed boost which only lasts for a fractional part of a second, because it doesn't take much time and the ball gets out of his 'circle' or 'area' again. And when it gets out of his 'circle' or 'area' he suddenly starts to jog like he did before.

In general we do NOT need a high fielding rating, because every player acts without it, too! The range rating does give nothing than a boost!

And this boosts are what cause those tons of dives and succesful catches of balls which would be difficult to catch.

If you set the fielding rating to 25, which is the lowest possible number which can be assigned, only two ratings are left which make the player act quicker or slower: acceleration and speed.

Any thoughts or questions? I definately will edit every player to a fielding range rating of 25. This makes the game much more realistic

[aceshigh]

Nice results... looks definitely more realistic. I have a couple questions: First of all, are you using automatic or manual fielding? I have noticed that sometimes, on easily playable flyballs, the game will not give the outfielders a speed boost, but will actually slow them down while running towards the ball, making the controlled player dive through the air to make a spectacular diving catch: it's like the game had planned that move all along, since the ball was hit. I guess this fix will keep that from happening too often? (I use manual fielding) Also, this rating means the number of hits will noticebly increase, am I right?

[wudl83]

Nice results... looks definitely more realistic. I have a couple questions: First of all, are you using automatic or manual fielding? I have noticed that sometimes, on easily playable flyballs, the game will not give the outfielders a speed boost, but will actually slow them down while running towards the ball, making the controlled player dive through the air to make a spectacular diving catch: it's like the game had planned that move all along, since the ball was hit. I guess this fix will keep that from happening too often? (I use manual fielding) Also, this rating means the number of hits will noticebly increase, am I right?

I have played only a few games right now, some with user controlled fielding, some with automatic fielding. Both methods showed lots of improvement.

Regarding your problem with OFs which are slowed down I can tell you that it can't be erased, but with the fielding rating at 25 I have the impression that it's reduced at least. May only be an impression, though.

In general you should see a few more hits, that's right. But if you drive down your contact ratings for both user and CPU hitting, while giving the hitting power of both user and CPU hitting a small boost, you should see the best results. I also drove up infield and outfield run speed (fielding) of both user and CPU fielding by 5. Seems to help.

My last 4 games of which I tracked stats had 17 hits per game (home team + away team hits sumed up) on average.

I can only tell everybody that you should give it a try.

Here is another beauty I never saw in 3 years of playing MLB 2k12. A hard hit grounder passes Dee Gordon:

[wudl83]

Couple of additional information:

If you fear that after that all fielders would act equal, I can tell you that this fear is without a reason.

You still have those ratings which make the fielders act different:

- glove

- arm ratings (strength/accuracy)

- speed

- acceleration

That's more than enough IMO. Put Mike Morse into LF and put Gregor Blanco into LF. The difference will still be huge. Morse has a weak glove and is slow, Blanco has a good glove and is fast. Guess who's more likely to field better?

Besides that I have found out that there are seemingly even more 'useless' ratings in the game.

I am refering to the Doubles and Triples ratings for both hitters and pitchers. They simply make no difference to the gameplay. Nada. In the gifs above already all pitchers and hitters have their doubles and triples rating at 25. And as you can see Buster Posey hits a double (in the gif with Crawford) nonetheless.

In the game itself hitting (or giving up) doubles and triples is dependent on

- contact

- power

- speed

- acceleration

- base running aggressiveness

I don't know why 2k put a doubles and triples rating into the game when it has no meaning.

[wudl83]

To add even more thoughts, I think that (at least that's my feeling) we see not enough wild pitches or passed balls in the game.

In reality, about 0.7 wild pitches happen PER GAME. That's about 0.35 wild pitches per game for a single team.

You can see the relevant stats here: http://www.sportingcharts.com/mlb/stats/team-wild-pitches/2014/

When you play the game 2k12, how many wild pitches or passed balls do you see? I even can't remember when I saw the last wild pitch or passed ball to be honest. What I will give a shot is the catcher's blocking pitches rating at 25, so basically set to the lowest rating available.

I would be everything but surprised seeing an increase in wild pitches and passed balls.

[aceshigh]

In general you should see a few more hits, that's right. But if you drive down your contact ratings for both user and CPU hitting, while giving the hitting power of both user and CPU hitting a small boost, you should see the best results. I also drove up infield and outfield run speed (fielding) of both user and CPU fielding by 5. Seems to help.

My last 4 games of which I tracked stats had 17 hits per game (home team + away team hits sumed up) on average.

That's exactly where I wanted to get. Using BSU's V4 roster and his sliders, I get a lot of hits (like 14/15 for each team, almost every game), not to mention when I simulate CPU games in my franchise when you will always see a couple games every day in which a team gets over 20 hits. So what I did was tuning up the pitching's difficulty sliders, as well as turning the contact down for both user and CPU hitting, by about 5 points. Now I get less hits (realistic figures), but players strike out even on pitches that I leave down the middle, and I get really low pitch counts because the CPU players will chase a lot of pitches, missing. If I lower the contact even more, I'm afraid I'm gonna get an unplayable game...

[wudl83]

That's a matter of both sliders and ratings.

I have done a ton of testing sliders and ratings variations over the last few years. Some things are very awkward on how the AI seems to be coded and how it is working.

As I said yesterday, there may be some ratings in the game which don't even matter for gameplay or simulation (they only influence the overall ratings of the play - heck, how dumb is that?), while on the other side some ratings seem to do all the job.

When playing a game, my tests pointed towards strikeouts being dependent on the pitcher's ratings (mainly the pitch rating itself, contact rating far less, it might even not matter whatsoever) and the hitter's ratings (contact and eye) as well as the sliders which influence that (pitch speed, pitch break and pitch success for pitchers as well as contact ratings for hitters), too.

The lower the hitter's contact (dependent on contact and eye rating of the hitter and the contact slider), the more likely a strikeout will happen. The higher the pitch success or control slider of user pitching (or how it's called) and the higher the rating of a pitcher's pitch, the higher the chance for getting a K. Add pitch break into the mix and you have a slider which influences hits like hell. The higher breaking slider, the less likely it is to make good contact. Additonally, the power sliders from the hitting department and the pitch speed rating then influence how hard a ball is hit. They both don't have much to do with contact, but more with the balls speed of the bat when it's hit or how likely a K will happen (well, that I can say is at least somehow realistic).

It's not easy to find a balance but - and I don't want to criticize BSUFan since I know how difficult it is to make rosters and ratings - some ratings in his roster are at least a little bit off. A bunch of pitcher ratings is simply too low and (to a much lesser degree) some hitter's ratings are too high, while also other hitter's ratings are too low. But as I said and only to make it clear, this is no bashing of BSUFan, he has done one hell of job.

But only to give you an example. BSUFan gave Huston Street (LAA closer) the following pitch ratings (pitch type/movement/control/speed):

Sinker 87, 89, 91

Slider 77, 65, 84

Changeup 57, 69, 82

Fastball 61, 57, 91

Throw some sliders and changeup with Street and you know what will be happening. He will give up too many hits, that's it. Know what I mean?

(At this point, it would be useful to explain what the control and what the movement ratings do, but I will address this later if there's some kind of interest, and leave it at that. And I should tell you something about pitcher's overall ratings as well, which is directly related to how many different pitch types a pitcher can throw.)

As far as I can draw conclusions when looking at BSUFan's ratings it seems like he has shied away from giving to high or too low ratings for both pitcher's and hitters. While I like this approach for hitters very, very much, since it does work gameplay vise indeed, it doesn't work as good for pitchers.

But, that's not his fault, because in combination with the sliders it may work for HIM when HE is playing the game. So everything's fine from this regard. The problem only occurs when someone else plays the game who has a different (better or worse) game playing ability than him. Then, because not only the sliders matter, you may see awkward results or however you wanna call it.

You can't adress problems in this game with sliders only or ratings only, you always have to adjust BOTH and after that it all depends on your playing ability as well. So you have three components working together and since we aren't all equally good at playing the game we can only give tips and after that one has to draw his or her own conclusions.

The only thing oneself can do, if he/she shies away from editing the ratings, is to adjust sliders. And then, as I said, it's still dependent on your playing style or how good you are at playing the game. And after all still the ratings do matter.

There are some global things which work for everyone, e.g. the fielding anticipation rating and fielding range at 25, but more or less everything else (both ratings and sliders) is dependent on yourself.

[LouisvilleLipp]

Nice find. Maybe there is hope for this game after all. I'm tired of games where both teams get 10-15 hits and the scores are 8-7 or 12-2. I like some variety in the gameplay, a few 2-1 or 1-0 games every now and then. Good research nevertheless. Let us know what else you come up with please. And is there a way you can create sliders with these changes and make them available for the community? Thx again.

[wudl83]

I want to directly answer your first 3 sentences, LvL, since I know what you mean.

The most important thing IMO is a reasonable amount of differentiation.

IMO this game tends to be 'too random' sometimes, meaning that you don't see much of a difference when e.g. pitching with King Felix compared to pitching with Scott Feldman. I bet that many people have a ton of problems pitching with (in reality called) Aces, meaning you have a hard time getting hitters out. On the other side, I sometimes have the feeling that I don't have a much harder time hitting King Felix compared to hitting Scott Feldman. (Those names serve as a placeholder, I only want to point you towards a certain direction.)

The hitting sector in this game is not too bad IMO, as well as the fielding sector. Do a few tweaks (both ratings and sliders) and it will play out quite well (at least if you forget some bugs in the game engine for a minute). But what's really off is the pitching.

As I said above, I think BSUFan did a very good job with the hitter's ratings, his pitcher ratings may work for him, but e.g. for me, they don't. Again, this is no bashing!

The problems aren't mainly his ratings (while I got to say that we would have to adjust them for pitchers a little bit IMO), but more the game engine itself, which then hower can be broken down to the ratings, but that's the thing we can adjust.

I could try to make some sliders or give you my sliders which work for ME, but that's no guarantee that they will work for YOU. They could only be a base of which you do your own adjustments. And besides that, there's the problem that I have already adjusted a lot of pitcher ratings and revamped the rating system completely.

I don't have the time right now, but I will come up with some info on pitcher ratings and how they affect the game play as well as the revamped rating model. Because IMO that's at least as important as the fielding range and anticipations adjustments.

[BSU-FAN]

While i think its great that we continue to test these kinds of things out here is my two cents on the subject. I myself played around with editing the range of fielders a while back and if you move it too low(and 25 is way to low in my opinion), players will sometimes stand there as a routine ground ball rolls by their feet. So what i did prior to any of my roster releases this year was lower range ratings based on the fielders abilities and position. If you go and look, Pitchers have a much lower range on average then an outfielder but each players range is also based on their speed and individuals skill sets. Also with my current range ratings I have seen everything that is posted in the clips above happen in my franchise games fairly regularly without lowering the range ratings anymore then I already have. Here is what I suggest to do for those of you looking for the most realistic franchise numbers when playing or simming a season. The best rating adjustments to make to the sliders if you are seeing too may hits/runs would be to lower your contact and power by 5 points (just like someone said in an earlier post) if you start readjusting everything it will make others stats fall way out of wack. My sliders are built from using years of info gathered from Operations Sports, MVPmods, and using years of playing experience put together. I currently have played 3+ 162 game seasons under these sliders and the only adjustment I make personally is I lower my contact to a 30 and my power to a 60. I left the one I uploaded at 35 for contact and 65 for power taking into effect that many "beginners" will not have the patience needed to work counts which is extremely important to getting realistic stats. At the end of each of my seasons in which I played all 162 games...my stats were as "realistic" as anything I have ever seen from a baseball game to date. I almost never lead the league in any team stat and in turn am hardly ever dead last in any stat either. The only stat I struggle with is I hardly ever walk batters. But in turn I usually end up in the bottom 5 of walks drawn but am never dead last. This means my stats are finishing within the realm of all the simulated games and I don't have any outrageous stats or numbers that are unbelievable. However to Wudl83's point....everyone plays the game differently and at a different skill level then others, so if you play with auto fielding on, or do/don't work the counts, do/don't use inside edge to pitch to batters' weakness, or you turn on auto base running....any if these variables can drastically change other stats throwing everything out of wack. One rating being just a little weak or a little strong over the course of 162 games can make for some extremely unrealistic stats at the end of the year so just be careful and be sure to fully test out any changes you make. This was just my 2 cents on these issues.

[wudl83]

Thanks for your input.

Regarding fielders standing around and routine ground balls passing them: If you raise pitch speed/hitting power, you will not see too many of those with fielding rating at 25. If the balls are hit harder, the balls will travel quicker. Balls which pass a fielder won't look like routine groundballs, I promise.

I've never ever (and that's no bashing) seen those plays from above regularly when playing MLB 2k12. Doubles which bounce back from the wall after flying over outfielder's heads was as common as rain in the Sahara desert.

And yeah, I've seen awkward results when siming, too, like another person said before. That's maybe because of something like Kershaw's contact ratings in the 70s and so on.

[DaSteelerz]

While i think its great that we continue to test these kinds of things out here is my two cents on the subject. I myself played around with editing the range of fielders a while back and if you move it too low(and 25 is way to low in my opinion), players will sometimes stand there as a routine ground ball rolls by their feet. So what i did prior to any of my roster releases this year was lower range ratings based on the fielders abilities and position. If you go and look, Pitchers have a much lower range on average then an outfielder but each players range is also based on their speed and individuals skill sets. Also with my current range ratings I have seen everything that is posted in the clips above happen in my franchise games fairly regularly without lowering the range ratings anymore then I already have. Here is what I suggest to do for those of you looking for the most realistic franchise numbers when playing or simming a season. The best rating adjustments to make to the sliders if you are seeing too may hits/runs would be to lower your contact and power by 5 points (just like someone said in an earlier post) if you start readjusting everything it will make others stats fall way out of wack. My sliders are built from using years of info gathered from Operations Sports, MVPmods, and using years of playing experience put together. I currently have played 3+ 162 game seasons under these sliders and the only adjustment I make personally is I lower my contact to a 30 and my power to a 60. I left the one I uploaded at 35 for contact and 65 for power taking into effect that many "beginners" will not have the patience needed to work counts which is extremely important to getting realistic stats. At the end of each of my seasons in which I played all 162 games...my stats were as "realistic" as anything I have ever seen from a baseball game to date. I almost never lead the league in any team stat and in turn am hardly ever dead last in any stat either. The only stat I struggle with is I hardly ever walk batters. But in turn I usually end up in the bottom 5 of walks drawn but am never dead last. This means my stats are finishing within the realm of all the simulated games and I don't have any outrageous stats or numbers that are unbelievable. However to Wudl83's point....everyone plays the game differently and at a different skill level then others, so if you play with auto fielding on, or do/don't work the counts, do/don't use inside edge to pitch to batters' weakness, or you turn on auto base running....any if these variables can drastically change other stats throwing everything out of wack. One rating being just a little weak or a little strong over the course of 162 games can make for some extremely unrealistic stats at the end of the year so just be careful and be sure to fully test out any changes you make. This was just my 2 cents on these issues.

Add a new paragraph in here somewhere plz lol

[DaSteelerz]

wudl, I like what you're onto here. I've always loved your slider set, it changed the game for me. I really like where this is going!

[Griz891]

Going to have to give this a try...Sounds very interesting!!

[LouisvilleLipp]

Well...if you're busy which I'm sure you are, maybe you could post the pitcher, hitter setting adjustments here and we can make them ourselves. Would be grateful if you could make it happen. Thx again.

[wudl83]

The problem isn't that I am busy (although I am , the problem is that (as I said) I played around with the ratings, too. And if I give you my sliders and you have different ratings, I don't know if my sliders are compatible. If you still like to, I can post them nonetheless.

Now that I've opened the rating topic we can discuss it right now.

I use a 8 (more like 7) step rating system now. The reason is that I never understood why 2k came up with its rating system in 1 point increments from 25 to 99. How can someone differentiate players in 1 point intervals when the actual range goes from 25 to 99 on a reasonable base? IMO that is crap and nothing else. Tell me: How do you determine if a player should have a 88 or 87 power rating, or a 55 or 56 speed rating? That's crap and that's it. That's at least my opinion.

As some of you may know, I did a roster some time ago (which I had to stop because of not enough free time). I had an Excel-Sheet set up which gave me the ratings via formulas which were based on stats. That was good, but the problem was, that I had a lot of identical numbers (e.g. lots of 75 or something like that). Because a lot of ratings were identical I thought of making it easier. And to make it easier I tried rating steps of 5 instead of 1 (e.g. 55-60-65-70... instead of 55-56-57-..67-68-69). I realized that for gameplay it made no difference. And it made no difference for simming as well. The players still had different OVR, the players still acted differently.

But since I am a guy who likes to make things not only easy, but as easy as it can get, I decided to take it even further. If you break it down to 8 (7) ratings it not only becomes much easier to decide what rating a player should get (to say if someone is a 66 or 67 is difficult, to say if he is a 65 or 70 is easier but still not easy enough for me, but to determine if one should have a 60 or 70 is quite easy), but you also have the advantage when editing players that you do not need much time. And as I said a difference of 3 or 4 for a single rating makes simply no difference ('no' literally meaning nill, nada, nothing).

I've come up with this:

99 - excellent

90 - great

80 - above average

70 - above average

60 - below average

50 - poor

40 - awful

30 - as bad as it can get (this ones mainly used for the hitting ratings of pitchers or the bunt rating of power hitters and so on)

And now forget the '0' and think of '99' as '100' and get rid of the last '0' as well and then you have: 10 - 9 - 8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3.

You can apply that to every single rating (not tendencies!). And believe me: it makes no difference if someone has a contact rating of 70 or 74, 87 or 90, 54 or 50 and so on.

[wudl83]

And to add something: the 'beauty' we get is that you only have to look at fangraphs and know within a few seconds which rating a player should get for most hitting stats for example.

Me, I like to take ISO (http://www.fangraphs.com/library/offense/iso/) to rate a players power (of course split up in vR and vL). Now if you look at the link I posted, you will see this table:

Rating / ISO (rating in game)

Excellent 0.250 (99)

Great 0.200 (90)

Above Average 0.180 (80)

Average 0.145 (70)

Below Average 0.120 (60)

Poor 0.100 (50)

Awful 0.080 (40)

(30 for everything worse)

Now assigning ratings is as easy as it can get and it's not only easy, it's also realistic! You only have to tweak the table from above a little bit and make some reasonable adjustments and that's it.

For example Lucas Duda has an ISO of .274 against RHP this year, while he only has an ISO of .040 against LHP. This accumulates for an overall ISO of .224. Look at the table above and you see that .274 would be excellent (99) and .040 would be 30. That makes no sense, so I would say give him a power rating of 90 against RHP and 60 against LHP.

This method is the most realistic, easiest and quickest I have come up with and as I said it makes no difference in gameplay if he has a power rating of 87, 93 or 90, 57, 60 or 63.

But for editing most players it's much easier. E.g. Jose Abreu has an ISO of .273 against RHP and .307 against LHP accumulating for an overall ISO of .281. No doubt, he is one of a few guys who have 'excellent' power against both RHP and LHP (99 and 99). Buster Posey has .165 against RHP and .210 against LHP, this would be a power rating of 70 against RHP and 90 against LHP.

[BSU-FAN]

I think this is a very interesting method to simplify things and I'm curious to see what the stats from a 162 game played and simmed season would look like using these methods. This is far less time consuming then the methods I use. But for fear that this will come out wrong, I want to start off by saying that I am only stating my opinion about this to share my knowledge of the game as I see it and how I rate players. This is not to put down or to diminish Wudl83's ideas at all. I truly appreciate this kind of discussion for it can only make the game better.

With that said, I do have to say that I respectfully disagree with some of the assertions made about the ratings. Mainly we disagree on how the game uses ratings when playing or simming a game. From my research and experience playing/simming the game with a player who has a contact rating of 70 vs 74 is noticeably different...mostly in the stats over 162 games. Also more times then not when simming a season the higher rated contact player will usually(but not always) have a higher batting average.

I'll be the first to admit...some of my ratings aren't perfect or I just missed one cause of lack of sleep. Kershaw or Stanton are two players who come to mind who were sorely under rated just by pure accident and I myself have increased their ratings in my personal franchise.

And to comment on when you stated earlier when you said you thought I "shied away from rating players to high or low"... there is some truth to that. To me, if a guy is rated a 99 in anything, he better be the best that will ever live in that specific area. When coming up with a ceiling for a rating I used the MLB records as a base to start at. So for example: Home-runs the "ceiling" is 73 but since steroids aren't prevalent anymore, I rounded that down to 69(which in turn equals 99) I hope this makes sense and while my methods are much different than yours I'm not saying they are better. I think the most important thing when it comes to ratings and you have that covered is, that all ratings are relevant and consistent to each other from team to team and player to player, after that the game should play pretty realistic with the tweaking of some sliders.

I think we should possibly create a thread for statistical tracking to find out more precisely what ratings effect what and by how much...just an idea.

[LouisvilleLipp]

Another thing I failed to mention which is off topic, is why didn't 2K put the effort into MLB2K12 that they did NBA2K14? NBA2K14 is a fantastic game. It replicates NBA basketball just like the real game. IMHO, it's the best sports simulation made, including Madden. The animations, presentation, jerseys, cyberfaces, sliders, courts, the whole nine yards. Then, there are a couple of sites where modders customize things on a game that doesn't need many. Is it different programmers or what? They shortchanged the baseball game big time. NBA2K14 is what MLB2K12 should have been.

[wudl83]

My answers come in in red to make clear to what I made references. I will write my answers directly into your post!

I think this is a very interesting method to simplify things and I'm curious to see what the stats from a 162 game played and simmed season would look like using these methods. This is far less time consuming then the methods I use. But for fear that this will come out wrong, I want to start off by saying that I am only stating my opinion about this to share my knowledge of the game as I see it and how I rate players. This is not to put down or to diminish Wudl83's ideas at all. I truly appreciate this kind of discussion for it can only make the game better.

I respect you and know (as far as I can tell that from reading someones posts in an online forum who I don't know in reality) you as a kind, respectful and honest person who has put and is still putting a lot of effort into this game. When thinking of modding MLB 2k your name comes up first on my mind.

With that said, I do have to say that I respectfully disagree with some of the assertions made about the ratings. Mainly we disagree on how the game uses ratings when playing or simming a game. From my research and experience playing/simming the game with a player who has a contact rating of 70 vs 74 is noticeably different...mostly in the stats over 162 games. Also more times then not when simming a season the higher rated contact player will usually(but not always) have a higher batting average.

I'll be the first to admit...some of my ratings aren't perfect or I just missed one cause of lack of sleep. Kershaw or Stanton are two players who come to mind who were sorely under rated just by pure accident and I myself have increased their ratings in my personal franchise.

Maybe you have made different experinces than me, but I remember simming a season in which I gave Jered Weaver a homerun rating of 25 against both RHB and LHB. And in the end he didn't give up more homeruns than with a higher rating. If I remember it correctly I even posted this somewhere else on this board but I couldn't find the thread in which I told about it. I also remember that last year, when Nolan Reimold still was with the Orioles, I had given him as well as Ryan Flaherty a power rating of something like 70. It was around this number. At this time, Chris 'Crush' Davis was hot like Lava and therefore I gave him a power rating in the upper 90s. I simmed a few seasons and there (again, as I remember it correctly) Nolan Reimold and Ryan Flaherty both had seasons with 25+ (sometimes even 30+) homeruns, while Crush Davis didn't beat them in this stat. Of course the ratings do matter for gameplay and simming, but I feel highly safe that the game calculates the stats in simming on a kind of (at least to a degree) 'rating independent' method and for compensation uses randomness and the stats from previous seasons (as you know, you can edit them with Vlad's editor, at least I could until the editor went broke for me, like for others, too, sadly.)

Regarding your ratings: Yeah, I thought of something like that that it must have been on accident or something like that that Clayton Kershaw had such low numbers in your roster. But because of you having edited such a ton of players this is nearly inevitable. One person alone is unable to make no mistakes, therefore no one should criticize your work for that mistake.

And to comment on when you stated earlier when you said you thought I "shied away from rating players to high or low"... there is some truth to that. To me, if a guy is rated a 99 in anything, he better be the best that will ever live in that specific area. When coming up with a ceiling for a rating I used the MLB records as a base to start at. So for example: Home-runs the "ceiling" is 73 but since steroids aren't prevalent anymore, I rounded that down to 69(which in turn equals 99) I hope this makes sense and while my methods are much different than yours I'm not saying they are better. I think the most important thing when it comes to ratings and you have that covered is, that all ratings are relevant and consistent to each other from team to team and player to player, after that the game should play pretty realistic with the tweaking of some sliders.

I am totally on your side when you say that the bulk of ratings should be somehow in the 'middle', meaning they shouldn't be too high or too low. And I support your opinion to the point where you say we need something like a ceiling. The problem I see with that is that the game is created for the (if you forget Arod and some other douchbags) post-steroid era. So what I mean is that perhaps we shouldn't take the numbers from the steroid-era as our ceiling, but take the stats from the past few years (say starting 2009 or something like that).

Regarding the realism I do agree to what you said again. But nonetheless I would still say that some ratings in the game are irrelevant. Or to say it better: some may be irrelevant, while for others I do not know why they are there or what they really do.

I think we should possibly create a thread for statistical tracking to find out more precisely what ratings effect what and by how much...just an idea.

This is a very good idea IMO. I don't have the time to open another thread today, but within the next few days I should be able to create a thread for this idea.

All in all I am really thankful for your answers and opinions in this one. This discussion is really going into the right direction.