I just spent a couple days on this and I finally decided I got the results I wanted! Strikeouts are a bit low, but everything else is good so good enough. I'll post detailed instructions on how I did it and the spreadsheet I used. Interestingly enough, the order of when you do everything can matter greatly and whatever you do, don't check the "auto adjust..." box as it will screw everything up!
First, I started with the teams.csv file from Lahman's database. Then I created a year sheet that added all the teams' stats for each year. Next I created a rates sheet to get some per game stats. Then choose your target year. First I went with 1987 as it has the highest SB #s, but then I realized I like 1994 a bit better for the league totals themselves and I can still get the SB #s another way. Then I tweaked 1994's rates to get my ideal #s (line 152) and I went back to the year sheet to calculate the totals from the rates (again, line 152).
Now you open OOTP. Set all the settings you want to set, taking into consideration what to turn off to make testing faster (there are already good posts on that on the boards). Backup the game folder from the file menu (sometimes I find if I do it outside of the game the files get corrupted so do it from within the game). Go into your file explorer and zip that file just to be safe.
Now make a copy of your game folder and add the # 1 to the name. Load that save. Run your inaugural draft. From the left side of the Stats & AI screen, import the target year you want to use. I'm not talking about the drop down with the label "Historical Year", but the one below it titled "Select which settings to import". Change what "General Strategic Tendencies" you want (e.g., if you choose 1987, which had the highest SB/G in MLB history, the game has "Rarely" selected for stealing bases!).
Now go over to the right side of the screen and select your target year from the pulldown labelled "Totals from year". You'd think this would already have the totals from the year you selected, but it's actually the totals from the date in your game (e.g., my game date is 1985, but I'm importing 1987 settings)! If you have your own ideal league totals, enter them now. Click on "Auto-Calc Modifiers". Notice that the settings on the left side of the screen may have changed again, hopefully for the better! Change them now again, if you really want to, but I seemed to have better success with my stats by changing them beforehand (the order drastically changed the SB modifiers on the right side, so much so that I was getting double the already crazy high SBs I wanted).
Again, do not check the "auto adjust" box below as it will change the modifiers during the sim and you won't get the results you want! I have to imagine this feature is broken, whatever its intent original was, but no matter, we get what we want without it. Checking, or not checking, the "lock league totals..." box didn't seem to do anything (the totals never changed either way), even after running sims of successive years.
If there are any modifiers below that you want to change, change them now. From my spreadsheet you'll notice that I want 1.000 SB/G, which is higher than we've ever seen, even 1987's .852 (in 2020 it was down to .492
). To get that you take your ideal rate and divide it by your target year rate which gives you your initial modifiers (line 157). Then you multiply that by the modifiers OOTP came up with (line 158) to get final modifiers (line 159) which you then enter into OOTP.
Doing all this, in this exact order, gets me surprisingly close to all the league totals I want (again, strikeouts are a bit low, but they're not that off, and they're still well above the historical average). Before doing all this I was getting crazy #s, like a .169 BA for the entire league! Admittedly, I'm running a fictional independent league I imported from several versions back, but still, the #s were so far off before they were nuts.
Next, go to the Financials screen and select the year you want to import (you can't do this until after you've run the inaugural draft) and change any other settings you want to change on this screen. I suppose you could run the inaugural draft, do what you need to do on the financials screen, and then run your backup, but I like different drafts for each test.
Now from the Play menu, sim "... until playoffs end". From the League menu select Statistics. Click on the "Team Stat..." tab. Scroll down and then enter the sim's totals into the year sheet in the spreadsheet (you can just re-use my lines starting at 153). Then go to the rates sheet and compare your rates with that of your target year and/or your ideal. If you didn't get exactly what you want, tweak from there. I tried tweaking BABIP, but it just seemed to make other stats more off so I ended up leaving it alone (note that OOTP doesn't include SF in their BABIP or OBP calcs when most sites do!).
To run another test, go back to file explorer, make another copy of your original folder and load that save.
Good luck!
Believe it or not, this process used to be so much more complicated back in the old days (OOTP4-6). The order of when you did things didn't seem to matter as much / changed results, but the modifiers have really helped.
Zip of OpenOffice Spreadsheet:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ixy...ew?usp=sharing