UPDATE: Baseball Mogul Player Ratings

Back in April, I announced changes to the Baseball Mogul rating system for Baseball Mogul 2016.

To summarize:

1) Player ratings had crept up over the years (to the point that the average major league pitcher had an Overall rating of about 83).

2) Furthermore, this rating creep varied by rating. For example, a pitcher in Baseball Mogul Diamond with an 83 Control was in the top 40% of major leaguers. But a pitcher with an 84 Power was actually below average.

3) Because of these problems, Baseball Mogul 2016 featured a new system that defined 75 as the average across all ratings, and standardized the way in which ratings were distributed (the degree to which they clumped around the average value).

(This change had other benefits, such as more accurate historical simulations, and more realistic results in league that combined players from different historical eras.)

4) However, this meant that virtually all player ratings went down by 5-7 points in Baseball Mogul 2016, whether you were starting a game from scratch or resuming a game from a previous version. This came as a shock to many of you, eliciting some complaints that the player ratings were "broken".

Because of item #4, the most recent official patch (Version 19.17) included changes to the Player Rating Scale options (available in Options, on the Tools Menu). These are the four options that are now available:

Rating Scale	MLB Average	Notes
50-100	80	Current default for Baseball Mogul 2016 (version 19.16 and later). The default rating scale for Baseball Mogul Diamond.
25-100	75	Default rating scale for Baseball Mogul 2016 (before Version 19.16).
20-80	50	Scale used by professional scouts (described on FanGraphs).
1-20	13	20-point scale provided for fans of Football Manager.

This means that if you started a game in Baseball Mogul 2016 before version 19.16, you will see a big jump (about 5 points across the board) when you resume this game with the current patch. If you would like to go back to the system with an average rating of 75, you can change this setting in the Options Dialog:

I'm sorry for the above confusion. I personally prefer the rating system centered around 75 (a "C" on the traditional academic scale). But I didn't foresee how annoying this would be to people who had become accustomed to having a team full of players with ratings in the 80s and 90s.