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I'm saying quite literally that if your goal is for historical OOTP leagues to replicate closer to history some of the results pitchers achieved, it's an impossibility based on the way the game models defense.
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Consider this, Lynch. Historicals are an excellent way of fine-tuning the fictional engine. [B]Everybody wants a proper variance in BABIP in their fictionals, right?
Historicals are like artillery shells and the fictionals would be the target. Each shot "walks us in" to the target.
When I ran the Messersmith test, I was looking for
too-wide variances in BABIP.
I wasn't concerned if San Diego, or Detroit were
defensively imported correctly. It didn't matter. I just wanted a bad defensive team. I'd already run
3 1974 seasons. San Diego and Detroit ended up 5th, or 6th, each time. Bad defenses.
I wanted to see what would happen to a good pitcher's BABIP from good team to bad team. Didn't have to be
Messersmith. Could have been a fictional guy named Jim Lynch. In fact, let's pretend it was:
When Jim Lynch, a top pitcher, hurled for a good defensive team, he almost always finished with a BABIP around .230-.250. His ERA was usually 2.65 to 3.10. But when the same Jim Lynch played on a bad defensive team,
even though his HRs, BB, Ks remained pretty constant, his BABIP destroyed his season. 5 out of 6 seasons, his BABIP was around .300, or above. Because of that, his ERA sky-rocketed, usually around 3.85 into the mid 4s.
So, the question I asked myself is this: Do I believe that a top pitcher's
BABIP will EXPLODE going from a top defense to a poor one? Now, BABIP is very important here,
because HR, BB, K number remained extremely constant in the Messersmith tests.
It was
BABIP alone that took a top pitcher and threw him into the bottom 20% of starters.
Someone brought up Mike Hampton. His BABIP did rise in Colorado, but what destroyed his season was 31 homers allowed versus 10 the previous season. I do see that kind of thing quite often in history.
So far, in my looking, I DON'T see that as a
real life occurence.-- certainly not a
regular one, which it appears to be in X.
So, I'm looking for those examples. And this is the kind of search where you can't go through league stats. You have to take it one pitcher at a time.
If BABIP is accurately divided between influences, then pitchers may become more accurate than now-- even if the defensive import problem remains.
My struggle, and one I've been working on the past few days, is to capture individual BABIP ranges from real life pitchers and compare them to OOTP results. It's slow going.
I sense there's something there, though. Because whenever you see a "good" historical pitcher blow up in OOTP with a 4.50-5.50 ERA,
look at his K's, BBs, HRs. They're probably pretty close to historical. It's the
BABIP that WAY out of the park. And it's that way consistently in sim after sim!
Q: Maybe that's just luck of the draw.
A: I think it's more than that. It appears that Messersmith on a poor defensive team will turn out with a high ERA (same Ks, BBs, HRs) and high BABIP 5 out of 6 times. The influence of defense probably should be less intrusive than that.
If I had to put it in numbers (based on what I see historically, so far), Messersmith, going from a good D to a bad one, more often would see his ERA go from 2.65 up to 3.10-3.50 (
I'm talking 70s numbers, here)
But, all of the questions and challenges I anticipate from you and others are going to be answered by my looking at individual pitchers, real life VS OOTP.
Summing up: Historically good pitchers blow up not because of a huge change in HRs, BB, K's, but because of BABIP. The same effect probably exists in fictionals. The effect seems far more intense in OOTP than in real life under the same conditions. If so, then Marcus, having access to real life BABIP variances, might tweak a bit here, or there, to get a better result. In fact, it might be a simple fix.
That's what I'm trying to check.