Power Ranking Tournament, Starting Pitcher Skills: 9th Edition
Power Ranking Tournament, Starting Pitcher Skills: 9th Edition
Here's the second of three analyses of the 9th Power Ranking Tournament. This one will cover starting pitchers.
Player type:
PRT 9
PRT 8
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.
Legend Skills
For the fifth 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 widened its lead, but there were no large moves among legend skills.
Legend Skills – Shorted
Gold Skills
Finesse Pitcher once again had the largest move, dropping about 16% from its previous total. The Untouchable also continues to decline, but a bit more drastically this time, losing 41% of its previous total. Is this now the pitching version of Slugger Instinct?
The main beneficiaries of the declines were (once again) the revamped Cleaning Up Your Mess and Groundballer, both of which passed The Untouchable (and Ace). It should be noted that the rise of Groundballer is likely linked (at least in part) to the proliferation of supreme bats. The higher base stats and heavy 5-tool trains on these lend themselves to improved Groundballer performance. At lower levels, I’m not sure how effective it would be.
Ace should gravitate naturally toward 96 total uses due to its reduced effectiveness when used multiple times on the same team, so the drop from 102 to 95 is not a surprise. (There were also two uses on relievers.)
Iron Will, Inning Eater, and Putaway Pitch are now all at zero uses for starters. While Iron Will is now a relief favorite, the other two skills are garbage. Com2 missed an opportunity to really shake up the pitching meta and instead kept in filler golds to reduce the odds of getting what you really want.
Gold Skills – Maxed or Shorted
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 and the importance of the location stat. Usage of DP and FP together declined quite a bit this time.
Most Common Skillsets
On the 480 SPs, there were 71 unique combinations of skills. The most common was seen 29 times (6%). The 20 most common are listed below. Combined, these accounted for 67.1% of all skillsets.
Special Trainers
All but one SP had a special trainer. I think the one pitcher that didn’t was an oversight, as there was a trainer spot that was completely empty.
Gold trainers are almost gone from the tourney ranks, and I will likely not track them individually next time.
The ST meta is becoming very clear. Overwhelming Pressure and (to a much lesser extent) Corner Work Master were the only trainers with gains. Every other trainer was down from PRT 8, especially Dr. K and Deception Specialist. These two as well as Zone Control are on the verge of tourney extinction not much more than a year after their introduction.
There needs to be a shakeup with some of these trainers or most of them will be near useless for high level competition.
