Front Office Feuding – A Lack of Friendly Frolics in SSG MLB?

Perhaps you are a big league front office executive, or a manager, coach, trainer or scout; and like pretty much all of the players you preside over on a daily basis, you may well have battled, scraped and fought – tooth and nail – your way through minor league establishments to reach the giddy heights of MLB.  You have ‘made it’ and should be justifiably proud of your achievements.  Which means you and the fellow colleagues that you have so much in common with should (surely?) be mightily happy with your current lot in life…

Perhaps not.  The latest incarnation of OOTP has exposed the character traits of all the non-playing staff with indications of the type of people that each works favourably with along with the personality types that can clash, and it makes for interesting reading.  Apparently, if you are winning games everyone can co-exist in relative harmony even if there is little affinity in the front office or the dugout, however on a deeper delve it seems that, in the main, everything is far from rosey, even if you are stacking up the wins.

Overall, as a collective, non-playing staff in SSG OOTP can be categorised into one of five groups: ecstatic, happy, content, unhappy and feuding.   Guess what, at the time of writing, 22 of the 30 teams fall into that final feuding category.  A deliriously happy few (five in total) are floating on the clouds of an ecstatic existence while the middle groups of happy, content and unhappy can count just three teams between them.  This leaves a huge proportion of the baseball bigs feuding like there is no tomorrow.

Why the melancholy in the majors?  Why are the bigwigs so beligerant?  In an attempt to get a handle on what is going on, we can examine each staff member’s character type against the traits that they work well or poorly with.  Example serves better than description so lets take a look at a handful of teams to see if we can work out what is occurring.

Baltimore Orioles

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By tallying up the “works well with” numbers and the “struggles with” numbers we get 32 and 0.  It just so happens these are the highest and lowest values in the entire league.  Therefore, we would expect Baltimore brass to be ecstatic.  But they are not.  They are feuding.  This is a .500 type team that has welcomed the expanded playoff format, and as such things should be looking up, but despite the apparent cohesion of characters, the team is still fighting internal squabbles.

Washington Nationals

Here we have a perennial 90+ win team that generally tops its division and when it doesn’t is a very close 2nd.  Its “works well” column totals 10, and “struggles” totals 6, for a net position of +4 – surely this should lead to at least a contented workforce?  But no, the cohesion is graded as unhappy.

Arizona Diamondbacks

Over the last half-dozen years the D-backs have, at most, won 77 games in a season.  They are on a definite up-turn, with a 17-16 record currently this year, but generally speaking this has been a struggling franchise, so one may expect all sorts of animosity in the club house.  But, it seems, no – here is a team that is ecstatic in its interactions.  It has a “works well” metric of 11 compared to 10 for “struggles” so barely keeps it head above water, and there is nothing there to indicate why everyone is so happy.  Perhaps Arizona tequila is the answer?

Analysis

What does all this mean?  Is it a vagary of development from OOTP 21 to 22 where the new software has introduced a new function but it hasn’t been calibrated back to the pre-existing cohesion rating?  Maybe OOTP 23 will show more sensible conclusions?  For the record, the table below shows the time-at-writing position of all teams in the league.

Freel free to contact Jacko on Discord with any comments on this, or indeed any other, SSG OOTP matter.

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