Player retirement with random era players
 

I like setting up fictional leagues (or historical leagues in which I change the teams to fictional ones - local baseball leagues or regional ones, or industrial or whatever) using random era players for the inaugural and first year player drafts.

Lately, (thanks for the advice on doing this from a previous thread) I edit out players that play at too high a quality level (all time superstars) so I have a plausible league of regional teams with a Max Alvis or Charlie Comiskey or in which Hank Borowy or Mike McCormick might be the best pitcher in the league for a time.

But the issue of retirement seems to make a mess of things - I guess it does not if I am willing to just live with the total uncertainty. But of course if you click "players retire as they did historically" then the 1940s players retire en masse if you start the league in 1960 and play just one season, and if you don't click it, you end up with utterly random retirements - Waite Hoyt was our pitching ace in the latest version and decided to retire at age 26, before most of his best seasons. This left a good team with no real chance of competing.

I know you can unretire the player but now they are a free agent and even if you get them back on the team there are glitches - they sometimes turn into Joe Unidentified and such.

Does anyone else play frequently using the random eras option and if so how do you make it work as you would like and is there a way to moderate retirements or make them more realistic, as in no star player quits (except Sandy Koufax I guess) at their prime age. This make drafting a complete crap shoot. again, I guess I maybe should just decide it is fun to not really know the career trajectory of players but still...