Eureka/Enigma: Are good/bad years same for majors/minors?

[allenciox]

So I try to analyze my players in leagues that have variable improvement to be able to determine what their category is. I have good success for the most part. However, there are a few players that appear to be Eureka or Enigma; but where they might have gotten a significant number of improvement chances in the majors and also the minors for a specific year and appear to be having a positive year in minors and a negative one in the majors; or vice versa.

Does anybody know whether peak improvement years vary for those types as to whether the player is in majors or minors?

Also, it appears to me that there are five types of "curves" for a player to adopt for a year in the majors or minors. A gem curve is much better than average, an above-average curve is better than average, then there's average, below-average, and bust. As far as I can tell:

gem: always has gem years in both
bust: always has bust years in both
gem/minors: always has gem years in minors; bust years in majors
gem/majors: always has gem years in majors; bust years in minors
Young Major leaguer: has below-average years in the down years (don't know about positive years, almost never have players in major leagues before os age 23). By the way, note that the game guide only shows them having down years in majors between os ages 24 and 30, which I confirm in my analysis as well.
Late Bloomer: below average in early years, above average in later years.
Enigma: above average in positive years, below average otherwise.
Eureka: gem in Eureka years, below average in other years.


Is that consistent with the analysis by other people?

[Frunobulax]

I found that variable development can be, well, very variable. It's always difficult with pitchers because the low number of expected conversions makes it difficult to find trends, and batters are rarely mixed majors/minors, even though I often give a batter 15-20 ICs at OS21 or OS22 to see how he converts in the majors.

I had batters that converted consistently 85% of the expected values in the minors (I have a little program that predicts conversion, and is on average close to 100% accuracy for non-vardev leagues) and maybe 70% to 80% in the majors, as opposed to obvious busts converting 60% in the minors and 50-ish% in the majors.
Pitchers seem to be different creatures than batters, as batters always convert something even if they are busts, while some bust pitchers can go 0 for 300 conversions in the majors or minors.

As for enigmas, I think they can have different conversion rates in majors and minors, but it's a rare occurrance. (And probably dependent on the league settings, as there are several settings for the development curve but there is no documentation what exactly they are.)
Check out this guy: http://www.simdynasty.com/player.jsp?id ... rimps=imps
At OS23 he did well in the majors but was pathetic in the minors.

Same for this guy here: http://www.simdynasty.com/player.jsp?id ... rimps=imps
At OS19 good conversions in the majors but bad in the minors. (At which point I had him as bust in minors/gem in majors.) But then his conversions in the majors started to vary a lot, and at OS25 he converted well in the majors but bad in the minors.

But both are pitchers with rather limited sample size of course...

[allenciox]

Actually, I have figured it out. Like Frunobulax, i run a program to try to identify the "type" of a player. The one thing it got confused on was this eureka/enigma thing because sometimes a player would have a good year in the minors but a bad one in the majors (or vice versa) when they played some in majors or minors. It turns out that the answer is right in the game guide: "The minor league table is for the player's actual age, and the major league table uses the player's offseason age, because this is how ICs are converted"

So the issue is that players that had an off-season age different than their "in-season" age (like they age up in the last four months of the year) will often have different ages in minors and majors for purposes of enigma/eureka purposes.

This explains a lot, and is a lesson learned... if you have such a player, and he is not converting well in minors for a year, move him into the majors!

[allenciox]

Oh, by the way, One thing I didn't mention before but I find very consistently, is that you can often identify ageless individuals after OS 33, because they have a huge spike in improvements that year. Occasionally, though I am not sure why, some of these players also show a spike in improvements in their OS 32 year.

[allenciox]

So my assumption from earlier about eureka/enigma players has been confirmed by further testing, which has some interesting implications. They may lead to some counterintuitive but smart plays, like:

1. If you have a player in the minors that might be a eureka or enigma and his birthday is during the summer, consider:
a. If he has been having a good year, check his improvements after his birthday to see if he is continuing to have a good year. If not, you might want to move him down some slots for getting cps.
b. On the other hand, if he is low on the minor league "list" due to poor conversions during the year, you might want to move him up a ways after his birthday to see if his conversion rate improves.
2. If you have a player in the majors whose birthday is in the second half of the year, and he has a really good year in the majors, next year, if you can, move him to the minors at least until his birthday because his current age will be the same as the offseason age of the previous year.

I have tried doing these things with a number of players in these categories, and have seen some good results.