Development

The Development Tab is new as of Out of the Park Baseball 25. This tab consists of the Developmental Sliders, shows not only OSA Development Reports but player ratings, Team Coach relationships to the player, and an Overall and Potential Ratings graph showing when your players overall and potential ratings raise and drop.

PLAYER DEVELOPMENT FOCUS

Players throughout the year will have routines, and standard things they do to practice, get better, and maintain themselves. They will work with coaches who can guide them and help them with these exercises on a daily basis. Before this version of OOTP, this was generally captured in the coaching influence on standard player development. However, players do not all have the same routines. The power hitting DH is not going to get a coach to hit him groundballs for hours; he's going to have a coach helping him in the cage instead. The players only have so many hours in a day. The new player development focus sliders (found on the Development tab on the player screen) allow you to split up their finite time into the areas of their game that you want them to spend time on with coaches. This essentially allows you to micromanage how coaching influence gets applied to their different ratings.

Quick overview of in-game mechanics

• This is not functionally related to the development lab. Since the development focus builds off of the existing development system, it is always there and influences the player at all times.
• To adjust a slider, you need to take out of one rating slider to put into another. I.e. you need to get the time from somewhere.
• When all sliders are at the middle state, this is just the same as the old coaching influence of past games.
• When you give more to a rating, not only will it improve development, which includes current ratings as well as talent increases, but it also influences how well a player who has already maxed out his current ratings will maintain it and even fight off the aging curve if he's getting older.
• However, since you need to take the time from somewhere, the aspects of his game that a player neglects will suffer opposite to the above.
• Being 10 points below the halfway mark is actually more detrimental in terms of the probabilities than it is beneficial to be 10 points above the halfway mark

Tips

• It is a subtle passive system, on the scale of coaching influence, so it may be hard to see a clearly noticeable impact. I would personally spend about as much time on setting player focus as I would spend on getting good coaches. I would probably set it for my major league roster, for top prospects, and for a few intriguing guys. However, you can set it for your entire organization if you would like.
• Once you set a player's focus manually, don't forget to tick the lock checkbox to prevent the AI from changing it. The AI control options can be found in the manager settings, and you can give the AI control over setting the focus for your minor league players, major league players, or both.

Developmental Training Plan (Developmental Sliders)

In this section you have different sliders for different positions. For position players they are all the same, BABIP, Avoid K's, Gap, Power, Eye, Running, and Defense. For pitchers, these sections can slightly change due to the pitches that the pitcher may know. The Static sections for pitchers are as follows, Movement, Control, and Stamina. After these 3 sliders on pitchers, it will then be populated with the sliders of the pitches the pitcher knows and each pitch will have it's own slider.

Each slider consists of 50 points. You can remove 1 or all 50 points to use in another slider to help that player focus more on that part of their training and help speed up the process for the player to learn that aspect of their skills. Later in a players career these same sliders can help fight off the effects of ageing by helping to prevent skill regression. It will not stop regression but it will help slow it down.