Question about assistant coaches and player development

[doncicfan77]

I've been getting back into MVP 2005 after realizing that my raggedy beat-up PS2 disc still works, miraculously - I figured I'd come to you PC guys with this question since you guys would know the game's inner workings better than anyone. The player progression system, as y'all probably know, is governed by tables in the PROGRESS.BIG file, which is apparently the same on both the PC and console versions. (The Potential/"Star" rating, along with the player's age, determines whether a player will improve or decline in the offseason. Once the game has decided a player's given attribute will improve or decline based on age and potential, at that point, only the player's age determines the amount by which the attribute will rise/fall, if I'm not mistaken.)

 

At least, according to PROGRESS.BIG, those seem to be the only relevant variables, but that leads me to my question - what impact, if any at all, do your major & minor league hitting and pitching coaches (in Dynasty and Owner Mode) have on player growth? The pitching coaches have their own ratings in Stamina and Pickoff, but more importantly in Control, Movement, & Velocity, which suggests that pitching coaches influence the growth/decline of each individual pitch in a pitcher's repertoire. Similarly, the hitting coaches have ratings in Power, Contact, Discipline, and Bunting. The intuitive understanding is that your manager's Hitting/Pitching/Fielding/Baserunning ratings boost/penalize your team's actual performance, while the assistant coaches' attribute ratings govern how well a player develops from year to year, or alternatively, just adds a second boost/penalty on top of the manager's, since PROGRESS.BIG doesn't seem to leave any room for assistant coaches to actually affect a player's growth/development (which, as that file implies, would just be governed by star rating, age, and the attribute's initial value.)

 

So PROGRESS.BIG would suggest the assistants' ratings just modify player performance, but that's contradicted by anecdotal evidence, and actual in-game loading screen text, that if a prospect's development "stalls out" in the minors, replacing your assistant coach will help them develop better. This game has been studied and modified for 15 years now - so my question is, has anyone pieced together the effect assistant coaches have on player performance *and/or* development? One point of uncertainty in all this is that PROGRESS.BIG seems to decide just if a player improves or declines "overall" - players that "improve overall" in an offseason can still have a few ratings decrease. They just have more attributes that increase than ones that fall. (So it's not uncommon for, say, your primary DH to "improve" and see meaningless gains in fielding/range/throwing attribs, while their contact and/or power vs. RHP declines a bit - yikes!) The fact that "overall" improvement/decline still consists of a mixed bag of rising and falling attribs does allow for the possibility that potential/age determine the "overall" improvement or decline, as implied in PROGRESS.BIG, while your assistant coaches can theoretically still influence which specific attributes are likely to rise or fall regardless of whether the "overall" change is upwards or downwards.

 

So the tl;dr is, I know it's probably been asked before, but in the above context of what we do know about player progression, what if anything do hitting/pitching coaches do? For that matter, if anyone also knows about scouts and the role their ratings play at each of the three levels - majors, minors and amateurs - I'm curious about that too (all the teams have their best scout as the MLB scout and worst as their Amateur scout, which seems completely backwards, as you'd seemingly want the higher batting/fielding/potential scouting ratings at the amateur level.) And trainers too, with their "arm strength" and "leg strength"! But mainly I'm just curious about the role of hitting/pitching coaches in Dynasty/Owner Mode - there's been plenty of speculation, but does anyone know anything conclusive?

 

Thanks in advance!