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This is a summary of the 1984 results for SS from the statistics previously posted in this thread.
What is good is that OOTP does an excellent job of keeping track of the fielding results. The sum of the team SS Zone Rating for the entire league comes out to 0, which is correct.
In the game, SS made 12856 assists, and in MLB that season they made 13126 assists, so this is very good too as it means there is a very realistic distribution of balls being hit toward the SS position.
The average +/- play in OOTP at SS is worth approximately 0.50 runs. It seems that OOTP is also basing the individual play value on both the difficulty of the play (what % of the time does the average SS make that given play) and the base-out situation as well. So a difficult missed play with 2 outs and nobody on base is different than an easy missed play with bases loaded and 2 outs. So I give them big credit in this area as well as this is about all that you can possibly ask for when tracking fielding results. Excellent work.
When you start looking at team and player results, things are not working well. We see that Cal Ripken has an efficiency rating of 1.299, he made an extra 155 more plays than the average SS given those same opportunities and he saved 75 runs for the season. All of that is impossible. I mentioned previously that an efficiency rating for a SS above 1.10 is very extreme at the major league level. We also see that there are players like Ivan de Jesus at .738 efficiency and Jackie Gutierrez at .770 efficiency and there is no way that any major league SS could ever perform that poorly. For reference, Jeter is the worst SS ever by far, and he was maybe a 0.90 efficiency.
If you look at the Orioles and the Red Sox you see that the difference alone in SS defense in OOTP puts them at 125 runs apart for the season, with the average win that season requiring 8.52 runs, the defense from SS alone puts these two teams over 14 wins apart. These two teams were the best and the worst at SS that season, but the difference between them was about 50 runs, so OOTP is off by a very wide margin here. This is not a matter of a slight difference in the way the ZR calculation is being made, there was a difference of 301 team SS assists in the game that season, the real difference in assists that season was 165. So we know OOTP was off by an additional 136 assists, and if OOTP is valuing these on average at 0.50 runs, then that is about 68 runs scored and if we add that to the difference of 50 that these two teams really had that gets us to 118, which is very close to the 125 we see in OOTP that season.
Ripken in OOTP made +155 assists at SS that season, but realistically how many could he have made? I made a database of fielding for 1871-2019 that takes into account Team Defensive Efficiency, Team Pitcher Strikeouts, Team Caught Stealing, and Team Groundball Percentage in order to determine how many plays above and below average each player made. Since historical team defensive efficiency is known, team +/- plays can also be determined for every season. After accounting for these variables, I have Ripken at an astounding +53 assists that season. If we value the assist at 0.50 runs, the same as OOTP, that gives us +26.5 runs saved, and on BBR they have Ripken at +23 runs saved that season.
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