I'm playing an 1800s sim, and I noticed that in the 1877 draft class, there was a player with crazy good ratings - Bud Fowler, fowlebu98 / fowler004joh. The scouts think he's a 95-grade pitcher and an 80-grade hitter (80/20 scale), and the editor agrees. I went to check his real-life stats panel, and his batting and pitching stats looked perfectly normal, a season with the Stillwater team of the Northwestern League in 1884. No MLB appearances.
But then I looked at his Real Fielding tab, and he had 1544 MLB games, all for a team labeled "__NEL__", going from 1877 to 1899. He has a similar set of stats for Neutralized Batting and Neutralized Pitching. See screenshots:
https://imgur.com/a/MCXcPvy
Are these the stats a bug? Are they the source of his astronomical ratings?
A few other notes:
-It doesn't seem like other players in this sim have a similar issue. Only Bud Fowler even has stats in Neutralized Batting and Neutralized Pitching at all.
-As far as I can tell, the phantom fielding stats don't belong to a real player, at least not an MLB one.
-I looked in the database and couldn't find these stats, although it's very possible I was not looking in the right place. It seems like something more than just an errant database entry.
-This is the real Bud Fowler:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bud_Fowler Unclear if him being a HoF member is a contributing factor if there's a bug or errant stat here. But he's not just a random no-name minor leaguer from the 1800s. He's a Hall of Fame minor leaguer from the 1800s!
-Similar stats for Bud Fowler are present in OOTP 26.