[obaslg]

I've started responding to this a few times, but I don't know how to give it to you concisely. I think it would be extremely hard to do this by editing, since you'd have to edit every player's rating at every position.

While we've thrown around ideas for how things should be different, I think it would take much more work to come up with the exact system. The big things to institute, IMO, are:
1) Ability in general should not be distributed in a bell curve (i.e., a lot of players with average ratings, few with bad ratings, and few with good ratings), but should be distributed in a decline towards the top (i.e., lots of players with low ratings, fewer with average ratings, and even fewer with high ratings);
2) No player who starts with a MI rating or C rating should have a low rating at that position - I would probably set a minimum at 50 or something;
3) Each player should be able to play a less challenging position (e.g., a SS moving to 3B) pretty competently, and better than many players already playing that position;
4) #2 above wouldn't necessarily apply to switches from IF to OF and vice-versa, and wouldn't apply to switches to/from catcher.

I think #1 is the most important, and should apply to all ratings in the game (and it may be - I haven't checked). While the distribution of baseball ability may be a bell curve over the entire world population, professional players represent the far right side of the curve, so among them the distribution is in a decline as I described. That just makes sense when you think about it, but Bill James has also "proven" that it's the case in reality, and he called it one of his 10 most important baseball discoveries.