[Syd Thrift]

FWIW I have discovered that depending on the position, the player's attributes, and the era you can still have a guy be passable at certain positions even if he's not rated there. For instance, in the deadball era if you have a guy with good hands and okay range but no arm and a poor turn DPs rating, he can still be good enough in the field for a plus bat to carry him above replacement level. In fact, I don't have my game in front of me but IIRC I've seen unrated players even produce positive fielding WARs in this situation.

Conversely, I've seen players from this era have 6s or better at shortstop or third base (I use 2-8 ratings for fielding) who still cost their teams a win or more a season in the field because they're 6+ fielders in modern terms, not deadball era terms. A shortstop who covers a lot of ground and starts a lot of double plays but who also commits a lot of errors is still a good SS in our time, but 100 years ago there were far fewer GIDPs in the first place and a lot more errors to go around.

To the OP, I usually only see ratings completely fall away with older players. Did Mantle miss a lot of time in your league? There's a positional rating you can see in the editor that is based pretty much entirely on recent experience at a given position. If a player hasn't for whatever reason played in right field for 3 years, for example, they might not have enough points in the position rating to qualify for it. The ways to beat this are:

1. Have them relearn the position in spring training. IIRC you gain points in these ratings at the rate of about 1 point per game played at the position, but this is increased to something like 2 or 3 points in ST.

2. Send them down to the minors for a couple months. I *think* the rate at which they learn down there is about the same but having a complete butcher in the field costs less if the guy is doing this in the minor leagues. This is essentially what the Mariners did with Dustin Ackley in center field and are doing right now with Jesus Montero at first base.

3. This is an option primarily if you play God Mode: just say that the guy has been practicing the new position on the side and give him 100 points or so at it in the editor. I use this a pretty good amount for first basemen, as I don't like to micromanage the minor leagues and from time to time want to just allow an aging hitter to be able to play the first sack in his twilight years. Note that this doesn't work so well for defense-heavy positions; a guy with poor ratings is not going to be a good shortstop even if you max out his "experience points" at the spot.

I would kind of like to see some sort of an option for training a guy at a position in his off-time in the game. There would have to be a cost, of course, because otherwise you'd just give everyone extra training all of the time. I think the best way to do this would be to cost the player happiness - you are digging into his free time after all - and make it more effective for players with high Work Ethic ratings than low. It would also be neat to be able to allocate similar time for spending extra time at the batting cage for slump-busting purposes (I think if you tied it directly to player development it could be easily abused though) and for pitchers to learn a new pitch for those Roger Craig types who want everyone in their organization to throw the splitter (which, again, is open to abuse so would need to have some potential consequences).

All that being said, as it stands now the game does a pretty okay job if you follow steps 1 and 2 especially and, depending on how much you want to "game" your, um, game, #3 as well.