OOTP's LTM System

What they won't tell you

OOTP’s LTM System

My latest baseball video was actually supposed to be different:

Initially I was planning on doing a fairly major project. I stuck 32 of the best home run hitters since World War II into 1920 in hopes of getting the “rabbit ball” era to blow up.

What I discovered, however, is that including all of these home run hitters caused everybody’s home run production to fall. And I was actually pretty surprised at what I found when I looked into this.

As most of you already know, modern computer baseball sims usually come with some sort of era adjustment tool or factor.

The idea here is pretty simple. You’d figure that Ty Cobb would probably have a hard time hitting .400 if he had to play in the 1980s, for example. You’d also guess that someone like Barry Bonds would struggle to hit for power in the Deadball Era, just like the best power hitters of that time struggled.

There’s a somewhat hidden assumption behind all of this that the general level of baseball ability has more or less stayed constant over time. That may or may not actually be true. In fact, there’s really no satisfactory way to answer that question.

I wrote a four part series on that issue about 3 years ago:

The truth, though, is that I’m still on the fence as to whether the overall level of play has increased or decreased over time.

But the problem with OOTP is not that the developers think that the modern game is better or worse than it ever was.

Nope - the problem with OOTP is that offensive production (and, presumably, defensive production as well) is limited by the League Total Modifier (LTM) system.

My understanding of this system is a little bit shaky, and there aren’t a lot of great resources out there to explain things. However, what I understand is that the LTM system is designed to keep league statistics as close as possible to certain numbers in order to make the era you’re playing in “feel” correct.

The problem, of course, is that this means there are only so many home runs that can be hit in 1920. And, if you add in a bunch of good home run hitters, the slice of the home run pie the best home run hitters can get winds up shrinking.

This is explained in this old forum post, in response to somebody who had Oscar Charleston playing in the major leagues in 1920. Babe Ruth couldn’t hit 30 home runs in this particular project, and this is how one of the programmers responded:

A well known moderator added to this:

But, of course, this is completely ridiculous, especially if you’re using OOTP for a cross-era play project.

OOTP is the only game I am aware of that uses this kind of system. To my knowledge, every other game will simply “neutralize” the player’s original statistics, and then use an algorithm to convert them to the new baseball environment.

And, of course, the craziest thing about this is that few people even mention it. To me, this is a major problem, and it practically eliminates a lot of the projects I wanted to take on.

The biggest problem is that you would have to change the LTMs by hand as your project advances from one year to the next. There’s no way to simply tell the game to let your league have an extra 400 home runs every season or whatever.

And, of course, having to make that adjustment by hand takes all the fun out of the project. I wanted to see what impact a sudden influx of great home run hitters would have on 1920. It defeats the purpose if I have to input the total number of home runs beforehand.

Anyway, as I said in the video, there are quite a few reasons to be frustrated with OOTP. This particular reason doesn’t get brought up all that often, however. And it’s something more people should talk about.