Quote:
Originally Posted by thehef
I typically would want to do both, by playing a historical sim over several years using 1-year recalc. If doing so, I should see Maris hit in the vicinity of 61 HR's in 1961, just as (un)likely to hit 41 or 51 as he is to hit 71 or 81...
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I think this is where our opinions differ. In the real world, there is obviously an increasing level of difficulty in hitting more and more home runs that does not exist in a computer simulation. This suggests that the distribution of home run totals in the simulation should be bottom-heavy. What I mean by that is that we can all easily imagine a season with Maris hitting only 51 homers (he did hit 61, after all), but no one has ever hit 71 without the benefit of performance-enhancing drugs. So, from that perspective, a sim where Maris hits 71 home runs in 1961 is *much* less realistic than one in which he hits 51.
Mathematically they may seem equivalent but, from the perspective of trying to simulate a real baseball season, they are not.