Historical contracts... why u gotta be so bad :(
 

A question more for the devs, but maybe a knowledged fan could help me out.

The biggest intrigue of this game is how rooted in reality it is. I could run a simulation of a season without any interference on my end, and the game will be able to pick the actual World Series winner. Or they'll have a player who is still emerging today become an MVP in a couple years, and then it'll happen in real life. You get what I mean.

So why is it that, among the plethora of incredible realistic features in the game, historical contracts are not correct? I understand the game simply does not retrieve this data and that it just generates estimated contracts based on the data it has, but still. A quick reference to bbref.com will yield you with all the historical contract data you could want, something that wouldn't be incredibly difficult to implement into the game.

I understand this data would take up space in the game, and for those who don't play historical leagues it would be wasted space, but a few more numbers wouldn't destroy the file. If anything, it would be nice if there would be a way to import a file containing a given year's contract data. For example, if I wanted to take over the Red Sox in 2004 I could import the contract data for that year and then enjoy the reality. The infrastructure for something like this to happen is already in place with the availability to import a schedule, so expanding that feature to contracts would be very much appreciated.

This aspect of the game is incredibly deterring and I find myself never taking advantage of the fantastic feature that is historical play. If anyone knows a way around this issue, other than manual entry of each players' contract info, please correct me. If not, devs, please consider implementing this in an update!

A lot of this depends on your settings. How you calculate potential and current ability will affect the chances of an average player becoming a MVP. Random talent change and player aging effects can affect this too. Still under historical settings Nolan Ryan may never be the real Nolan Ryan and Mendoza might hit over .200. It usually is pretty close but the game really revolves around trying to get league totals right for the year. Individual variation can and will occur.

Historical contracts
The data on contracts is available but finances are murky at best. So while you might have historical contracts the financial settings for teams would have to be right. That is the tricky part. Really depends on the era. You can get payroll data and try to set that up to setup financials.

The truth is historical play is less played than current year with current players. So for a lot of the years the game just kind of does some guess work to set up financials that somewhat work. Haven't played much with OOTP 21 yet but the finances for reserve clause era always seem to feel like too much making it easy to get the best free agents by just outbidding everyone else.

I play fictional alot just start a real world configuration but with fictional players. This takes a lot of tweaking from 1901 to modern era. If you play before 1901 it is a quasi historical setting. Leagues expanded and contracted back then. So you won't go from National Association to National League to National League + American Association to AA folds NL gets some of the teams to the emergence of the American League and the stabilization of only expansion after that. The game starts off prior to 1901 with a fictional AL and NL setup so the game can just expand. You won't have the Federal league around 1914 either.

I haven't tried pre-1901 baseball in a long time. It can be done but a lot of manual tweaking is needed. You can tweak pre-170's financials but I haven't really found settings that work right for pre-1970's baseball. The draft was also not instituted until later so playing pre-draft and trying to do some semblance of the unstable minors is difficult in fictional or historical is a lot of work. I spent a few years trying to do it with some enjoyment but it never really felt right. For instance player salary caps in the monopoly is hard to do and it takes a lot of manual tweaking for the pre-1970's.

Because of small roster sizes from 1901 to about the 20's it is really hard to do without historical transactions and maybe even lineups. Teams were adding players when injuries happened and even player loans were somewhat common.

I do enjoy playing historical before free agency but I don't think the game was ever optimized for the early years. The historical forum can help set it up but you still really have to tweak roster limits and finances. Honestly, I just kind of gave up because it was less work and more fun to play free agency, draft, and somewhat stable minors later on. Again this is a demand issue there is small but ardent community committed to historical play. So the devs have spent the majority of time on what people play the most.

So a lot of what is feasible to do really depends on what era you are in. In the real early years when the number of players with auto renew contracts (reserve list) was small it is difficult and even harder to really simulate back when teams could just offer a player more to get them to move midseason.

Sorry I don't have a lot of answers here but it really depends on the era and what you want to do. If you don't want to go back too far you can probably find data on salary ranges and real world payroll. That works somewhat but it is work. The game is much more optimized for post 2000s. IIRC, the first edition was late 90's so the game has really revolved around playing in that era and later.