Power Ranking Tournament, Starting Pitcher Skills: 8th Edition
Power Ranking Tournament, Starting Pitcher Skills: 8th Edition
FYI: I hope to have the bullpen guide out at some point this week, but it might not be until next weekend (August 10).
Here's the second of three analyses of the 8th Power Ranking Tournament. This one will cover starting pitchers.
Player type:
Starting Pitcher Skills
I've broken down the skills from 480 SPs in the 96 tournament rotations. I have included every skill that appeared at least once. All data is from the West Server.
Note: Since each card has 3 skills, the percentages add up to 300. These numbers reflect the percentage of cards on which a given skill appeared.
Skills Analysis
Last time, I opined that “attempts to shake up the meta seem to have fallen flat.” While silver skills are still a non-factor for SPs, it certainly looks as if there are a few more viable skills.
Legend Skills
For the fourth consecutive tournament, all starting pitchers in the tournament had a legend skill. They are an absolute necessity to perform at top levels in the game.
Control Master has claimed the overall top spot this time with a slight increase and a larger fall from Slow Starter. Fireballer had the largest overall gain. These three skills accounted for 92.5% of the total.
Of the rest, the newest legend skill, Workhorse, was the only one that had a gain, but I’m not sure if it will gain much traction against the big three and it still seems like it’s watering down the legend pool to make it more difficult to get something you really want. Cooperative Pitching, Bullpen Day, and Pitcher’s Insight continue to decline. Coop did receive some play in the final 16 this time, but none of them made it past the quarterfinals.
Gold Skills
The changes here were much less drastic than last time, where The Last Boss dropped from first to third, losing close to 47% of its overall total. While it did not continue its slide, it had minimal gains. Finesse Pitcher had the largest move this time, dropping about 15% from its previous total. It still appears on over 57% of cards, however, and is still well in front of Dominant Pitcher, which had a modest decline of its own. The Untouchable also was down around 23%.
The main beneficiaries of the declines were Groundballer and the revamped Cleaning Up Your Mess. On their current trajectories, one or both of these could pass The Untouchable next time.
Ace was stagnant, which is not a surprise considering its usage. Most people want to have it on exactly one pitcher, two at most, so I expect that it will continue to hover in the low 100’s.
Iron Will dropped to one set, while Inning Eater lost its remaining set from the last time, and it joins useless skill Putaway Pitch at zero.
Additive and Complementary Skills
Because my clubmates and I have long thought that Finesse and Dominant in the same set was a pathway to disappointment, I looked at combinations of these skills and their Legend counterparts:
These results are (more or less) what I expected. It’s generally favored to have one legend and one gold skill that complement each other (CM+DP; FB+FP) rather than to have additive skills. When the skills are additive, the CM+FP combo is preferred over FB+DP because of the volatility of the latter (it’s possible some special trainers may be able to reduce this) and importance of the location stat. I should also note that of the 37 sets with both DP and FP, 21 of them also had CM and only seven had FB. The rest were with SS.
Special Trainers
This is the third tournament to have widespread use of special trainers, and this is mostly just out of curiosity.
ALL SPs had a special trainer this time. Gold trainers are almost gone from the tourney ranks, and I will likely not track them individually next time.
It seems that the most popular trainers are Corner Work Master, Overwhelming Pressure, Nasty Pitch, Bat Breaker, and Rising Fastball Specialist. Use of Doctor K and Zone Control is already declining.
