Post a Comment On: The Game Designer

As mentioned before, Baseball Mogul used to have the problem that player ratings weren’t well-defined. For example, an 85 Contact rating might put a batter among the top 25 players in the league in this category, while an 85 Power rating might not be enough to break the top 100.
There was also a problem of rating drift. When you start a new game in 2011, the MLB average for Contact is 78; ten years later, it has risen to 82.

These problems were fixed in Baseball Mogul 2016 and further improved in Baseball Mogul 2017. Player ratings are now well-defined in terms of what each number means relative to the league. And ratings are constantly adjusted every to ensure that these definitions remain meaningful over multiple seasons.

However, I’ve gotten some questions about how the ratings are actually defined. So, I pulled a couple tables from my design documents to help clear this up. This one shows how Overall ratings are groups into 10 separate categories, each with its own general definition:

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This table shows a typical distribution of players in a 30-team league:

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Players in Database:  The number of players that should fall within this range in a modern database with 30 teams.
Roster Spot(s): The roster spots that players of this caliber generally fill on a major league roster. For example, players rated 77-78 will occupy roster spots #16 to #20 on an average team; they aren’t good for the starting lineup or pitching rotation (a total of 13-14 players) but they have value off the bench and out of the bullpen.