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If you want to play 2007, download Cubbyfan's roster, unzip (your machine should be able to do this automatically), and drop the folder ending in .lg into your Saved Games folder.
If you want to play an older (pre-2007) season of baseball:
The Lahman database is a database of every player who stepped on a big league baseball diamond since 1900 (or thereabouts), with a complete statistical record. The game does a great job of converting the stats to ratings, though there are a few settings to get right depending on how you want to play the game. First, get the comma separated version of the database (.csv version) from the link 98Yankees provides above. It doesn't matter where you put it, but you'll need to know where it is; the game will ask for the path when you create a game from it. I'd recommend running the historical league wizard when you set up your league; it's surprisingly easy. Two decisions that will greatly affect gameplay: you'll need to decide how the game determines potential ratings (most seem to use future career); and you'll need to decide whether to use recalculation of ratings (which will adjust player ratings to keep their performance year-after-year in line with what they really did- which might sound great, but you'll know when Brady Anderson is going to have that big year, and the AI teams won't). My recommendation is to run a few test leagues first before getting deep into a league- make sure you like the results your settings are producing before committing a lot of time to a league.
As for the settings 98Yankees highlights above, the game is able to adjust the league parameters from year to year to mirror the historical progression of real baseball. You can use these options regardless of whether you use real players or fictional players, provided your league starts at some point between 1900 and the present (not much point in bothering if you start a league in the 2000s, really). So, if you enable the 'Import Adjusted Financial Settings', say, salaries will grow in the same way as in real life, along with ticket prices, revenue, etc. If you leave this off, your average salaries and revenues won't change; some teams will get bigger budgets, some smaller, but the amount of money in your league won't change with time. You can have team strategy (use of relievers, frequency of bunting and stealing, etc) evolve as it did over history, or not if you want to 'freeze time'. The League Totals Modifiers will determine the overall statistical profile of your league- they affect how many HRs are hit, how many singles, etc, so to mimic the deadball eras and such you'd need to check the option to adjust these as time passes. Lastly, the Player Creation Modifiers will only affect how the game generates fictional players, so you'd only need to concern yourself with this setting if you wanted the game to generate fictional players that were similar to real players from a certain era. If you're using real players only, this setting won't matter.
All that said, I don't play much historical, so hopefully an expert will stop by and fix any mistakes I may have made.
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