[Syd Thrift]

IMO there's a divide here between realism and accuracy, and that's part of what Markus is touching on. Is it more statistically accurate for Roger Maris to average 61 homeruns every time you replay 1961, even if that means half the time he hits 70 and the other half 50? Yes, absolutely. Is it more *realistic* for a guy who never hit more than 40 homeruns in any other season of his career to hit 61 or more in one year the majority of the time? I would say absolutely not, and if you use 3 or 5 year recalcs or no recalcing at all after the player is created you get a situation wherein a 61-homer performance represents about a 90th or 95th percentile level of Maris' ability. Again, not necessarily as statistically accurate as DMB but WAY more realistic.

Really, any little thing that you introduce to the equation beyond just randomly rolling against batting stats is going to skew the results. In that respect I probably disagree with Markus that it's the most statistically accurate game out there - he probably has some algorithms he sticks in there to account for things like park effect and maybe even playing time in late-inning pressure situations (where hitters are more likely to see top closers and set-up men and pitchers are more likely to see pinch-hitters) but he doesn't TMK play-test these to see how well they actually stack up. On a league-wide level, OOTP does some leveling things which literally do make them reproduce numbers better than DMB or Strat or probably Puresim, but I don't know that that translates to individual stats (in fact, my experience is that it does not).

In the end, I totally agree with the people who prefer fictional.