Quote:
Originally Posted by Cooleyvol
Its not advertised as a 'replay' simulation.
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No, but it does advertise "historical simulations" on its website, and that would surely lead many people to think that it provides historical replay functionality. It also claims to be the most "realistic" baseball management simulation on the market. Those who have played replay sims equate realism with statistical accuracy, so that's another source of potential confusion.
Pstrickert raises a good point, though. There are problems with statistical realism for all baseball games, including the hardcore replay sims. I have never played a computer baseball game where I was unable to create major deviations in player performance through my lineups and in-game management.
I remember Bob Brenly hitting .357 with the 1987 San Francisco Giants and Oddibe McDowell hitting at a similar clip for the 1990 Texas Rangers in MicroLeague Baseball. Brenly was purely a statistical anomaly because he hit only .267 in real life. But I was able to get McDowell to such a high average by having him bunt up the third base line and use his speed manufacture a lot of bunt singles. I also developed a pitch selection method that seemed to allow my pitchers to vastly overachieve.
Across any number of sims, including Strat-O-Matic, I have consistently been able to get players to steal vastly more bases than they did in real life, and somehow I'm able to get pitchers to post better statistics than their ratings or real life stats would indicate. A lot of it probably comes down to management style and an emphasis on defense, but I've been able to do it with stock rosters, so it's not a matter of building a fantasy team and creating these deviations.
I've yet to find a baseball game where statistical realism was as good as advertised, but most of them are close enough for me. And my goal is to get the teams to do better than they did in real life anyway, so deviation is the whole point for me.