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Originally Posted by Cool Papa Bell
Strat misses the boat...as they so often do...in that the majority, if not vast majority, of gamers out there are not replaying the seasons and expecting the exact same MLB results. What would be the point of that? Gamers are playing in draft leagues, where MLB results are unimportant, or they are doing historical simulations, using a past MLB season and playing and/or GMing for one or more teams.
Before computers, in leagues I played there were always deviations. Since computers, the game as somehow become more statistically accurate? Maybe...or maybe it's like a lot of SOM gamers think, in that the program is manipulating results to come out more accurately on paper. If that were not true, how can the fact that stats are sometimes widely different when comparing rolling the dice totals and computer program generated totals.
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The paper and dice game can't compensate for players who do very little of something, like walk, strike out or ground out less than half as often as the major league average, because half the time you'll be getting your results off someone else's card. Supposedly the computer game makes an adjustment for that, but the gurus at Strat won't say how they can do that without throwing off the frequencies of the other results occuring. Anything that's kept a secret is immediately suspicious in my book.
If you set the playing time limiter to the middle ('try to hold playing time to the player's actual, but don't be anal about it'), you often get extreme overuse of fringe players. My first season with the computer game I drafted four All Star relievers, but the two best relievers on my squad ended up being guys who pitched nine and twelve innings in real life, and 99 and 90 innings for me. My best friend had Piazza as his starting catcher and .220 defensive replacement with maybe ten at bats for his back-up. The computer sent Piazza to the disabled list in mid-May, and despite injuries being limited to fifteen games max, left him there for the rest of the season. His back-up got enough plate appearances to qualify by the end of the season (and batted third), and my friend missed the playoffs by one game. Yeah, Strat isn't totally historical.
Of course, with any random number generator you'll have statisical anomalies, but some of them seemed oddly planned. The year that Sosa and McGuire hit 66 and 70 their S-O-M counterparts had 65 and 71, respectively. The year Bonds hit 72 he finished in the low 50s in our league, though he did lead in OBP.