How Bad Can You Be?

Yes, if you have enough experience you can look at a card and do a good approximation of how desirable that card is. But that does not make a ratings guide or other method of detailed counting of the card of no value

Nobody ever said ratings guides or other methods of counting cards had no value. Holiday excitement must be affecting some people's reading....

I would compare it to watching several pitchers throw a baseball. I can tell who the hard throwers are just by watching. But there is no way anyone will convince me they can always tell who throws hardest from just watching if they are close to the same velocity. So if I were a scout I absolutely would want a radar gun reading. Same in Strat. I can tell by looking a Hank Aaron card is better than a Tommy Aaron card. It is the ones that are only slightly different that you want more precision.

This is a major reason why I don't use ratings guides. I have always enjoyed reading cards/scouting as a major part of the game, and I have always enjoyed honing my skills at doing so. I, and many other managers, don't want a "radar gun reading" provided to us by a ratings guide. We don't care if we get it exactly right. We want to read, interpret, and evaluate the cards on our own. If maximizing winning is more important to you than the pleasurable challenge of reading/interpreting cards for yourself, then ratings guides are for you. For those of us who prefer the pleasurable challenge of reading/interpreting cards for ourselves over maximizing winning, they are not for us.

Is it possible to be worse than .500 without TRYING to be?

Had a thought that took me all the way back to beginning of this. For every manager who finishes a game over .500 there is one who finishes a game under. Few leagues have very many newbies in them. At least not in most leagues I have participated in over the last several years.

So suppose the entire league is filled with managers who have been around at least a little while. Suppose that they have even been around long enough to read these boards and are at least somewhat motivated. And suppose further they have bothered to read the secret formula and similar threads.

Given that how reasonable is it to expect the majority to be above that .500 line?

Is it possible to be worse than .500 without TRYING to be?

Had a thought that took me all the way back to beginning of this. For every manager who finishes a game over .500 there is one who finishes a game under. Few leagues have very many newbies in them. At least not in most leagues I have participated in over the last several years.

So suppose the entire league is filled with managers who have been around at least a little while. Suppose that they have even been around long enough to read these boards and are at least somewhat motivated. And suppose further they have bothered to read the secret formula and similar threads.

Given that how reasonable is it to expect the majority to be above that .500 line?

I guess given that, shouldn't we all be .500 for the whole league?? Has that ever happened? I've seen it come close in a single division, but not a whole league.

I suppose in a way that is what I am asking Ninerspahn. I have been in some leagues where the top teams were in the low 90s. But I have been in many more where there were no apparent newbies to be taken advantage of, everyone had tons of experience based on the old ratings, yet top to bottom were not necessarily competitive.

I suppose another side of the coin is if a league is full of "vets" who all should be hitting .500 if trying is it blind luck if someone wins upper 90s. If someone wins low 80s, makes playoffs and then runs the table is that an aberration or merely the equality/parity playing out?

If everyone was exactly equal in terms of personnel and skill, you would still have a lot of variance. In other words, a league of 162 coin flips would not end up with a lot of .500 teams.

To demonstrate this to myself, I used an Excel spreadsheet to set up a "league" of four teams with a 50 percent chance to win any given game. Each team had 81 "home" games where they called the flip and 27 "road" games against the other teams where the other team called the flip. I'll run five "seasons," and report the results. So, pick your favorite number from 1 through 4 and see how your team does! Remember, every team has a 50 percent chance to win each game.

Season 1
Team 1 85-77
Team 2 79-83
Team 3 87-75
Team 4 73-89

Season 2
Team 1 72-90
Team 2 79-83
Team 3 81-81
Team 4 92-70

Season 3
Team 1 83-79
Team 2 90-72
Team 3 68-94
Team 4 83-79

Season 4
Team 1 73-89
Team 2 92-70
Team 3 85-77
Team 4 74-88

Season 5
Team 1 91-71
Team 2 82-80
Team 3 77-85
Team 4 74-88

Total
Team 1 = 404-406 (.499)
Team 2 = 422-388 (.521)
Team 3 = 398-412 (.491)
Team 4 = 396-414 (.489)

I think the only thing this proves is just how much luck there is in any given season!

Luck is involved, but that spreadsheet, informative as it was, didn't actually show how much is involved. That does show the probability for variation in results. However, that is prior to other variations, such as respective skill levels of all players in each league. There are many more such variations involved affecting the allotment of league wins. They all have to be considered to truly determine how average and/or regular players succeed past .500 or fail below it and how they do so.

I think we might be answering two different questions going in two different directions.

I like to say the element of luck in the SOM world boils down to one run games. One swing of the bat, one key throw to the plate, one 5% X-chart result. One run games usually settle, what, about 25-35% of all games played? So is it three parts skill to one part chance? Whatever it is exactly, doesn't matter at all. The distribution of "luck" will be equal to all participants. If you flip a coin forever, you are guaranteed to eventually flip an equal number of heads and tails.

There are plenty of "fun with math" websites which demonstrate the crazy results from coin flipping. If you played one season a day at 50/50 odds, you could expect 81 wins +/- 13 (ie, the square root of 162). So seasons between 68-94 and 94-68 would be the reasonable expectation. You would likely have to go quite a few seasons before the winning percentages all tightened up to .500. So coyote is exactly right in the short run. There would be a lot of variance.

But in the long run, managers can and do pull away from the pack. If all the Bill James stuff is correct, and I believe it is, everything follows from run scoring. Score more offensively, allow less runs to be scored against you defensively. If the average team scores five and surrenders five, and the very best managers are only scoring 5.2 runs and surrendering 4.8, you could probably go a pretty long time unable to distinguish between the skill and the chance. But over time, someone consistently posting better fractions will eventually move away from the crowd.

So the question becomes, how do you teach someone to win a whispering contest?

Interesting stuff, I'm not sure how many of you play or have played the board game either currently or prior to finding the online game, but I came to the baseball board game in a roundabout way. My first strat game was the football board game which I find vastly superior to the baseball game, and the reason, luck.

I played several seasons in a face to face keeper baseball league of 8 teams using only 22 of the MLB franchises, (with a few guys from the forbidden teams grandfathered in or exempt because of trades), very similar to the format I use for my keeper leagues here in the online games, and the one thing I could never escape was no matter how good any team looked on paper, it all came down to dice rolls. Even teams that were stacked with all stars and with the best managers, would loose simply if they had cold dice. It drove me nuts.

Whereas, in the football game, because of the guessing game between the offensive play caller and the defensive play call and the movement of defensive players, affected the games, almost as much, if not more, than the dice, it felt like manager skill, preparation, in game adjustments all had a much more profound impact on the outcome, than the dice rolls. It gave the game more of a chess feel, if you will. Because that was my first Strat-O experience, when I branched out into baseball, I found it very lacking and mostly a game determined more by chance. I know some of that is by design, after all "anything can happen in a short series" which we've seen in real life.

I will say though, because the online game's dice rolls are more invisible, or at least not right out in front of the results, cause you have to dig to get them, I enjoy the online game MUCH more than I ever did the board game, though I do wish I could get HAL to make some of the moves I would make as a manager, which I suppose kind of undermines my point of the game feeling like's it's mostly the result of random outcomes.

And on a completely unrelated note, I also think that's why the Football online game failed. The board game requires a hands on approach on a play to play basis that the online game could never replicate and that lack of control and /or being able to get HAL to make adjustments from series to series or even play to play made it much less than the board game experience.

I like to say the element of luck in the SOM world boils down to one run games.

it all came down to dice rolls. Even teams that were stacked with all stars and with the best managers, would loose simply if they had cold dice. It drove me nuts...Whereas, in the football game, because of the guessing game between the offensive play caller and the defensive play call and the movement of defensive players, affected the games, almost as much, if not more, than the dice, it felt like manager skill, preparation, in game adjustments all had a much more profound impact on the outcome, then the dice rolls.

Both J-Pav and Niners bring up interesting points. Niners is right that SOM baseball appears to rest on the whimsical results of dice rolls. However, that is only if one forgets players have well or poorly prepared for those dice rolls. MLB baseball is a probability manipulating game effectively guised as a baseball simulation game. So, the skilled probability manipulators are most able to prevent the whimsy of the dice rolls from countering the degree of probability they have constructed. That is the individual skill factor battling against the inevitable luck factor of the dice.

Now, while J-Pav is right that that luck-factor is present in 1-run games, it is far from only involved in one-run games. Since the dice rolls can go any way on any roll, luck is theoretically present in every roll. However, if we called every dice roll result "luck," then the term would be useless. For most of us, luck is involved when the result of the dice rolls, or other random decisions, goes against likelihood. This occurs in many aspects of the game and in all types of game scores. For example, here are some possible "positive" results rationally ascribed to luck:

1. Drafting 6-7 players usually taken 1st or. 2nd and getting all of them
2. Drafting low in waivers and getting a player usually drafted 1st
3. Drafting a team perfectly matched for your division.
4. One's low starter e.g. Niese beating an ace like Kershaw
5. Hitting a ballpark hr on a 1-7 or less
6. Your opponent not hitting a ballpark hr on a 1-13 or higher
7 A player with injuries on 7-10 and less never getting injured in a season
8. Players pitching or hitting well against their weak sides for a season.

There are also obviously inverse "negative" luck results that also happen throughout almost every manager's game and season. Sometimes close games have hardly any such "luck" involved, and sometimes games decided by 5 runs or more are littered with such "luck." So, instead of seeing luck as the invasive determinant of low-scoring games, we should see it as a regular element of all games and all seasons for all managers. It is not something that disturbs or alters our individual contributions to the game results. It is what best measures how solid those contributions are. It is what good managers prepare for best, and what not-so-good managers prepare for not so well.

I absolutely agree with J-Pav that better managers in the long run will pull away from the pack.

However, if you ever had a team that just couldn't seem to win and you couldn't figure out why...it just might be bad luck. Look at the variance you got with a coin-flip over 162 "games." The variance percentage-wise can be even more severe over say a 40-game span.

I think some managers ignore this possibility and feel they have to do something if they are losing, so they start dumping players. Usually, this makes things worse since the 20-percent drop penalty will usually weaken a team. However, once in a while a team will suddenly get "hot" (read that as "lucky") after some player moves, and thus the dream of turning around bad teams through the "skillful" movement of players is kept alive for future teams.

Of course, it's entirely possible you do have a bad team to begin with, and that's why you are losing. It's one of the things that keeps the game interesting.

Sorry if I got off topic a bit!