HBD 101: Managing Your Prospects

Every season, your team is presented with 25 prospects in the draft, plus however many international free agents you sign. This will serve as a very basic guide to help you get the most out of them as they progress through their careers and ultimately make your major league club.

It's worth noting that there are a number of different schools of thought on the best ways to develop your prospects. Some people believe in the one year, one level philosophy where a player spends a year at Rookie Ball, a year at Low A, a year at High A, etc. Others believe your best prospects should play with your best coaches, regardless of level. Others will give each prospect just a short time at each level, and move players up multiple times per season.

There is not necessarily a "right" answer among these choices and others. The game's developers have suggested (indirectly, at least) the ways you might want to think about dealing with your prospects. I'm going to re-print those comments here so that you have them in one place.

From a developer chat in January 2008: Q: What is the best way to develop a player? What are the pitfalls/factors that help a player reach their projected ratings? Is it possible for every player to reach their potential, or are the players that don't reach their projections a deliberate part of the game design?

A: Lots of factors are at play. Player makeup rating, age, peak age (varies from player to player), coaching staff, performance, level/age relationship (25 yr old at lo a isn't a good idea, for example), injuries and demotions. Most players should reach their projection assuming a normal progression pattern. Remember, some players continue to improve beyond 27 years old, but the display of projected ratings lock in at age 27. If they improve beyond that, their projected ratings synch up to their current ratings.

Q: Does the level a player is at affect his speed of development? Or is it only a product of coaching, playing time, and success?

Yes. Level and age matter and so does repeating a level too many times.

Now, some information from a developer chat in September of 2007.

Q: Does making the MinL playoffs in any way help player development?

Minor league teams that make the playoffs will see a slight boost in development due to the fact that they are playing in more games than those teams who do not make the playoffs.

Here's something from July 2007.

Q: Is there a benefit to having players that are going to make your team play in Spring Training? Do they perform better if they get a certain number of ABs/IPs in the spring...or will not playing much hurt their performance?

A: There is a benefit to playing in Spring Training. As long as a player is playing he reaps the rewards of the big league level coaching staff and sees some development increases because of it.

Q: We know that if you demote a player, there's a risk of a demotion penalty depending on various factors (age, makeup, patience, etc.). if you assign a player for whom you just traded, does the same risk apply? i'm not talking about that player being stuck at the new level for a long time, i'm only asking whether assigning a newly-acquired player to a lower level functions the same way as a demotion. thanks.

A: Assigning a player to a lower level can have the same affect as demoting a player.

Q: I have seen players over the age of 30 gain projected overall ratings after a trade. For instace a player I had went from 75/75 to 76/76 after I traded him. What caused that?

A: Every player has a different peak age, so one can continue improving at age 30 while others won't. If a roster move occurs close to a player's scheduled development cycle, it will occur at the time of the roster change.

In my experience, I have seen a lot of players screw up their prospects' development by disregarding some or all of these answers. I'll provide examples (usually from my own team or guys that I traded away to people who are no longer part of the world).

Pasqual Rodriguez: A very solid RF who played one good season in the majors for me before I traded him away. The owner who got him assigned him to High A and then Low A for some reason. He played exactly one season there before retiring. I have no idea why he thought demoting a guy four levels was a good idea (especially after he had proven that he was capable of playing at the major league level), but the player disagreed and he ended up with nothing to show for it.

David Bland: A short reliever who could have been a nice short arm in a bullpen. He was assigned to Low A and rookie by his new team after playing at AAA and in the majors. He retired after that season.

Jackson McKinley: His ratings weren't great, but he probably would have been a serviceable backup OF for a major league team somewhere (he certainly hit AAA pitching well). He wasn't demoted too far, but if a guy has been in the pros for seven years and is only in AA, he's probably going to retire.

Harold Jones: He rocketed through the low minors, appearing in AAA in his second pro season. Then he sat in AAA for four years, got demoted to AA and retired. I don't remember his exact projections, but they were substantially higher than where his numbers ended up. If you notice-- his "current" ratings actually dropped during a couple of his later seasons.

Hopefully, this will help you decide the best way to develop your young players. Of course, you can always figure out which owners have had the best success in developing players and try to decipher what those teams do.

HBD 101: Player Evaluation

With Ryan being a public world, and a resulting influx of owners who are brand new to HBD each season, this seems like a good place to share some lessons learned from my own experience.

Some of it will be common sense, some might be somewhat well-documented already, but hopefully each new owner can learn a little something that will help them enjoy this incredible game a little more.

• The first, and most important lesson is that overall (OVR) rating means virtually nothing. It can be a very, very, very general measure of a guy's worth, but all 84s are not created equal. In many cases, a player's OVR will be boosted or pushed down by ratings that will have little or nothing to do with their actual performance. Pitchers can see their overall numbers boosted because they're decent hitters, DHs can have good fielding ratings, etc.
• When evaluating a hitter, most owners look at a combination of contact, power, VL/VR splits (how he rates vs. lefties and vs. righties) and batting eye. Everyone has their own ideas on which ratings really make a hitter successful. It's not hard to figure out which owners value which traits. Just go into the trade offer screen for a team, and select "all players" and "all levels" then sort by each column. If you see half of a certain owner's players are all 50+ in contact or power (or any other category), that's obviously something they value. If you look at the top 5 or 10 offensive teams and they all seem to value the same ratings, that is a good indication that those ratings might have a solid link to performance.
• Evaluating pitchers is a little more complicated, in my experience. In addition to stamina (which determines how many pitches a guy can throw in one outing) and durability (which determines how quickly a guy recovers after an outing), many owners will take a close look at a pitcher's control, VL/VR splits, pitch ratings, groundball/flyball ratio, and velocity. Again, it's worth looking at some of the successful teams in the league to see which traits they seem to emphasize.
  
• You may find that some of your pitchers' performances may not match up to what you expect based on their ratings. Hitters are often able to succeed even with one (or more) rating category that's low. For example, a batter with a low power rating could still put up a .410 on-base percentage, or a guy with a low contact rating might strike out 120 times, but also hit 50 HR. That's often not true for pitchers. A guy with great VL/VR numbers might still post a WHIP of 1.60 if his control rating is in the 30s, or a pitcher with a low groundball-to-flyball rating might give up a lot of home runs if he's playing half of his games in a hitters' park.
  
• Evaluating pitchers is even more tricky because of the role that defense plays. A pitcher with great ratings and a high groundball rating might struggle if your infield defense is bad. Similarly, a pitcher with a low groundball rating (who gives up a lot of flyballs) would probably suffer if you put a bunch of catchers and first basemen in the outfield-- balls that should be caught for outs would be falling in for doubles.
  
• Defense is something that a lot of new owners tend to overlook. It's easy and fun to field a team of guys who can hit the ball 500 feet (and power-hitting 1B and DH are generally pretty easy and cheap to sign) but sticking one of them at a middle-infield position or CF would be a disaster. Fortunately, defense is one of the easiest things to evaluate. In the Manager's Office screen, go to Player settings --> Edit player settings. Choose "position players" and then click on any player's position. It will pop up with a screen that tells you the average ratings for a player at every position. If a guy's ratings are at or above those numbers, he will be a good player at that position, whether he has ever played there or not. That means that if a guy's ratings say he will be a good SS, he can also play pretty much anywhere else on the field as well. It's a little mind-numbing to go through your entire organization, but playing guys in their proper positions will help your pitchers' stats tremendously.