Power Pros Forum

^^This.

It will take a while. It took my guys one whole season to have a slight friendship. That's the shortest it's ever taken me.

I've had guys have the best friendship possible, and their stats grew incredibly fast.

Help! I'm in spring training, which is crucial because I'm using an expansion team so I have a lot of young pitchers that I want to learn additional pitches. I can only get about 1/2 of them to learn the pitches while the rest fail.

What can I do to up the odds?

It seems to take 2 days to acquire or fail, so I think I'm gonna try saving after day 1 and reloading from there, but if anyone has insights into this, please respond. I'd rather spend time on their control and stamina than teaching pitches if it's futile.

I can't guarantee anything here, but this is what your "assistant" (don't know what else to call her) tells you near the start of Season Mode. She talks about learning abilities, but it might apply to breaking balls, too. I think the key to teaching someone a new pitch or ability is to have them practice as a group with someone who already has it. The chances are higher if the 2 players have more friendship between them. Try that out and see if it helps.

I know you're right about abilities, but I didn't think the same thing applied to learning new pitches. I did have groups of players training the same pitches, but it does not seem to help. In my experience (I've played 5 or 6 seasons so far), learning new pitches has worked 98% of the time when a player had less than .3 years of MLB experience.

Basically, I have 2 or 3 pitchers I want to learn a sinker, 4 I want to learn a hard sinker, 2 I want to learn a splitter, and 2 I want to learn a knuckleballer.

Maybe what I should try is to only include the players who I want to learn the sinker, then only train the guys who I want to learn the splitter, etc.

Thoughts?

Well...I'm totally out of ideas. When I set my pitchers to learn the various pitches I want them to learn, only about 40% learn it. I tried having all my young pitchers learn the same pitch, and the success rate dropped! I then tried to have only 4 pitchers training to learn a new pitch, and made sure they were learning the same pitch, but again, only 1 or 2 acquired it.

I guess maybe I have to look at which pitchers usually acquire the pitches and have my other pitchers focus on their control. It's just frustrating because they make such good progress in spring training that I'd hate to waste it.

All right - I think I may be crossing over to "obsession," but I'm finally almost done with this issue. I guess I've never tried to teach new pitches to more than 3 players at a time, and it only "failed" once - at least with a 1st year pitcher, so this totally caught me off guard.

I ran through the 1st 2 days of spring training about 5 times and noted 3 players that never acquired a new pitch, so I restarted and had them trying other things. Then I reran through the 1st 2 days and kept saved to another file when a good number of players would acquire the pitches. The best I was able to do in about a dozen tries was 8 of 11.

Then, I took the 5 players that didn't acquire the pitch and ran some simulations of the next 3 days (which each had a spring training game). The best I could do was 3 out of 5. I'm gonna run this simulation again for 2 days (it seems to take 3 days to acquire the pitch now) and save it, and then run it a few more to see if I can do better than 3 out of .5.