As I’ve mentioned on Discord, I’ve dusted off my old player development scripts and have been having a good old time with them for the past two days. They make fantastic Writing Avoidance toys in that every new thing I get opens up about a hundred thousand new questions.
Therefore, I’ve been playing with hundreds and hundreds of ideas (did I mention they make fantastic Writing Avoidance toys? And that I'm getting good at hyperbole?), but here’s a new one I’ve never looked at before.
When a pitcher gets a new pitch, what pitch do they get?
Is it random?
What gives?
# First, a quick note on my test league. I created a vanilla 8-team league, turned off injuries and a whole bunch of other stuff (including coaches).
Pretty much everything else is default, specifically in this case, all the development modifiers and TCR settings.
I made zero changes to any players. Just took them as they came.
I then ran 80 seasons to get the core data.
I also saved off the file at the beginning as a Quick Start so I can go back and twiddle with settings later to make comparison studies against this baseline if I get time (or need more reasons to enact Writing Avoidance). At the end of each season, I have the game dump all its csv files, then run scripts to comb through them to pick out various rating data for comparison. Pretty simple, really, though since my coding skills are rotgut level, it takes me forever to get them right.
Anyway…there we are.
#
This data is a listing of every time a pitcher added a pitch across the whole of the league.
Given that there are thousands of pitches/pitchers, I’ve only been able to spot-test the algorithm, but each case I’ve studied has been right, so I’m feeling pretty comfortable with the results.
I tabulated it by the number of pitches added by pitchers of each age.
Then, given that this is an 8-team league, and ours is 32, I projected that result in a linear fashion to what we might expect (with vanilla settings and no injuries) in a 32 team league. Bottom line, I have no idea how it will compare to our league at all. As I'll note in a bit, there are enough factors to warp things to the point where this doesn't relate at all, but the data is interesting and fun to OOTP-neep out to.
Here is the chart:
A few things to note…
1) If we divide the totals by 80, we get an idea of how many pitchers of each age per season we might see receive new pitches each year. For example, this projects 228 16-year-olds receiving new pitches. Divide by 80 and you get just under 3/year. So that for the entire age suite and we get about 24. So about 75% of teams will have a pitcher acquire a new pitch of some type (on default settings?).
2) In this data set, the bulk of pitch acquisition happens before age 22, but some continues at a reasonable level through age 26. After that, we see sporadic new pitches pop up, but they are quite rare.
3) I should be a little careful of “quite rate” simply because the number of pitchers of each age is not the same. So raw percentages can’t be taken from here. That said, 4 35-year-olds gaining a Fork Ball in 80 seasons seems rare enough to qualify.
4) I should also note in these 80 seasons that they include all the players originally created as well as the kids drafted and not yet in the majors. So, though there are thousands of players in the sample, it’s not quite 80 years of full careers.
5) Note that the Change Up is a rare add. My feeling is (and something I want to study) that when it comes in, it comes in big, and is a primary tool the game uses to create new high-impact SP. Maybe that’s just me, though.
6) Note, also, there were no new Knuckleballs developed in this set.
This is only one of the gazillion things I’m refreshing my mind on these last few Writing Avoidance days. But my intention is, after digging into even more weird, esoteric crap, to go back and do the same thing with Coaches added, then again with injuries, and again with multiple development settings.
That should be interesting, anyway.
For now, though, I present this to you as a way for you to dally away at least a little of this October Sunday while we wait for a sim.
