Hey all,

I've took a long hiatus from SIM League Baseball and was quite surprised when coming back regarding normalization. I don't like it very much, <more like I don't like losing>, but know it's part of the learning curve.

Without asking 1,000 questions, is there somewhere that I can be directed that will be able to help me out.

For instance, I was quite surprised to learn that ERA, park distance and park factors were not important.

I guess I don't understand why they would add all of these elements only to cause further confusion for newbies such as myself.

With the exception of the fielding normalization, the other elements have always been here (well, at least as long as I've been here). The difference is that now they're all searchable and fully built into the pricing. It's not like the old days when 1894 pitchers and 1900s hitters were dirt cheap and performed well beyond their pricing.

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I just don't understand this normalization stuff. How are you supposed to tell who is going to perform better or worse than their actual stats? I feel like I'm drafting my players blindly, where before I knew what I was getting.

The # stats are helpful in that they give you an idea of how a player will perform against average talent (typically what you'd find at a $60m cap), comparing a players real life stats to the # stats will give you an idea if a player is more likely to perform better or worse than his real life stats indicate. If his # stats are better than his real life stats he's more likely to perform to or above his real life stats. If his # stats are worse than real life, then he's more likely to not approach his real life stats.

Now, of course, the specifics of the league you're in will cause this to vary somewhat (like don't expect anybody to outperform their real life stats at $255m, and expect everyone to overperform at $40m)...

Players perform better or worse than their actual stats depending on how the year they are coming from stacks up against the average year. Hitters from 1927 are going to perform worse, because hitters dominated that year. Hitters from 1918 are going to preform better, because hitters sucked snowballs that year.

League average hitters from those year don't perform quite the same though. A league average hitter normalizing downward from 1927, will perform a bit better than a league average hitter normalizing upward from 1918. They seem to take into acount RL stats as well to some degree. Their exact method of normalization is hard to put your finger on (I've never read where anybody had it down pat), but you can get the general idea pretty easy.

The 'Performance History' link we now have for every player, is an excellent tool for predicting what you will get from a player, especially hitters. Someone will come along and contradict this statement, but you can take my word for it, its quite accurate. A relief pitcher with 8 uses, including one where some bozo let him get a 27.63 ERA, will of course be skewed, but other than that it is there for you to take advantage of.

I'm starting to understand this better after doing a little reading. So this is actually searchable when looking for certain players. The # sign will give you the adjusted rate, correct?

For instance, Hugh Duffy is .440, but under AVG.# it lists his BA as .411 which is the adjusted average?

If that's the case, why even search for batting average? It will just confuse managers, especially newbies?

I would venture to say most people don't use avg as a seach criteria unless perhaps you are building a team from a single year. For example if you were building a team whereby everybody in the league has to use the same year (say 1975) then avg might be a quick reference to use to compare hitting abilities. If however you are building a team in an open league where players from any year are permissable then you will want to refine your search so you can compare hitting abilities using the avg# criteria as that is a better indicator as to how well your hitters would fair against players from many different years or eras. Same with pitching stats. ERA means little when your pitcher is facing players from many different years or eras so you might want to look at the era# stat for a better indicator. There are many different stats to use other than avg, avg#, era, era# and they are explained in the "stat legend" at the bottom of the draft page.

Assuming you are building a team for an open league $80Mil you will find the performance history that Boogerlips suggested a very useful tool.