Too many HBP?
 

I'll try and explain what I'm seeing the best way I can.
I created a fictional Pro/Rel universe with 4 leagues, all set in 1980, and applied 1980 settings for stats and financials. I did not touch any stat or development modifiers.
My top league is of course the most prestigious one, with the most money, and a reputation of 10. Then as you go down, the reputation goes to 7, 4 and 1. The money available decreases as well the lower you get.


When I started to play, I picked a team in the lowest league trying to work my way up. I play out every single game, so by now I'm only at the end of May. I also didn't sim any as I like to build history as I go. It's a long process, but it's what I like to do. That means the teams in the lowest league have talent roughly similar to any other league to start, although that should change over the years due to reputation.

Anyway...playing out games, I realized there were quite a few hit by pitches. We're talking routinely 3-4 a game spread across both teams. That didn't seem right so I went and checked in real MLB stats for 1980 and sure enough, most teams hit batsmen somewhere in the 20s for the entire year. Pretty much every team in my lowest league is well into the 30s and 40s and it's May 23rd.
So I checked my top level league and sure enough, most teams have under 10 at the same date.

Then, I checked the talent, but I don't have the setting to show talent relative to the league checked, so the pitchers in my lowest league that show as being top talent should, for the most part, be good.
The last thing to check was the HBP total for the year, and it's the same for both my top league and my lowest one (647).
Is there another setting I'm missing ? Is reputation affecting things more than the willingness of players to sign in said league ? Or is the game seeing my lowest league as inferior not only in reputation and money and ignores the actual talent of the pitchers ?

I don't know if it's the answer, but I see this in the changelist for 20.6.54:

- Fixed some historical issues with HBP getting out of control

Perhaps you could look into this, whether it's resolved your issue in particular, and report back to us.

Yup, looks like this might fix it (hopefully by historical they mean any league that was created prior to this season, be it true MLB or fictional)
I'll try to report back but since I play out every game, it takes me a while to build up some stats and am always subject to the "small sample size" rebuttal haha.

The issue that was cropping up in the historical stuff that was fixed was more to do with really historical leagues (1890s), many pitchers had no HBP in their real stats, so that caused the HBP modifiers to go crazy (up to like 14), which meant the few pitchers which did have HBP stats ended up with like 200+ per season.

There were some other mild changes which may help in this case. I believe one case was sometimes when we adjusted player ratings due to low PA/IP totals we were doing weird things with the league averages or modifiers. There may be some other things going on here too, so best to test, and make sure to auto-calc in case if there are some issues there.

If there's still issues, you want to dig a little deeper into the league totals and modifiers, and if you feel it still needs another look, feel free to flip us the league files and we can have a look.