[TomStone123]

Hello... to those of you interested in this thread!

Update... I'm making progress on getting the kind of overall results I want to simulate seasons using the rosters from my book Now Taking the Field: Baseball's All-Time Dream Teams for All 30 Franchises. I made a bunch of changes to league-wide settings, and also various tweaks to individual player ratings... all of which I noted so I could check on impact -- and potentially undo some things before subsequent seasons -- if results were not as expected. I did this as advised by all of you here, a few changes at a time, and played a month or two into a season, and then aborted and tweaked again, etc. Eventually I educated myself enough to start to understand!

No doubt the biggest change I made was to the league-wide modifiers -- a concept I wasn't understanding until after my first season and your advice on how to proceed. Suffice to say, by basing the league-wide modifiers on the 1973 season -- not as extreme as 1968, but nonetheless still a strong pitching-era season -- my issue of too many hits, too many runs, high ERAs, and high WHIP stats of course went away! (I chose 1973 to test for fun because I was born that year.)

There were some very interesting results... the Yankees won the World Series... over the surprising Expos/Nationals! For the most part, the teams you'd expect to do well in an All-Time Dream Teams scenario did... and the expansion-era clubs generally did worse... except the Expos/Nationals did quite well (which is interesting since they just won their first World Series in real-life this year!). Lots of interesting results of individual players... with just one I'll mention now... people like to argue these days about Kershaw vs. Koufax as All-Time Dodgers pitcher... well they TIED for the overall league ERA title with 2.46 each. Ha!!!

That said, I now need to tweak further because this season resulted in far too few HR, doubles, SLG, RBI, Runs... and things like batting average and SB could increase a bit too. (At end of this post are a few comments on league leaders if you are curious.)

Besides tinkering with the league-wide baseline season / modifiers further, here are my remaining questions:
1. Repeat question, sorry... I really wish there was a way to have say 3 SP locked into a rotation, with the 4 and 5 slots be a committee from a pool of say 4-5 guys. Some teams have 3 awesome HOF hurlers, but then a mix of guys rounding out the staff, and I'd like to let them all play. Right now, several fine starters see hardly any action because they aren't in the rotation, and the bullpen is large. I don't want to use a six-man rotation except for a couple teams, as i don't want the top of the rotation guys to get fewer starts. I *thought* I could accomplish what I want by indicating 5-man rotation, but then only listing three starters... but that didn't work... it treated those three as a 3-man rotation and I quickly aborted that season, as guys were going to end up with 400+ innings!

2. For some reason this time the Closers were used a lot (60-70 games each) -- even those I lowered usage of closers from Very Often to just OFten. The rest of the relievers were not used much, even relative to the bullpen depth I have on these rosters. Which settings are most relevant here? Pitcher stamina? Hook for starters? Hook for relievers? Something else? Maybe I really just have too many middle and long relievers on these rosters, so the IP are being spread thin?

3. For some reason (the quick start mixed with my imported players), some rather slow guys have relatively high "Stealing" ratings. I'm talking about guys with very low speed ratings, like 1-5, having Stealing ratings of say 10-16. That seems odd to me. Some slow guys have low number for both, but MANY are weird this way. Shouldn't people who almost never steal bases alway have low numbers for both Speed and Stealing?

4. Not a huge deal I guess... but what generates the “Hold” rating for pitchers? I am seeing a lot of variance here, with some really low and high numbers. And I can't figure out what this corresponds to in real-life, what stats from Baseball-Reference.com I mean?

5. A lament, perhaps not a question... being All-Time Dream Team rosters, some really good players hardly get any playing time, because they are blocked by a total stud -- like Mattingly stuck behind Gehrig at 1B for the Yankees, not to mention the many DH candidates he is up against on their roster. I can list such guys as PH in both the LHP and RHP lineups, but other than saying I want such guys to play every 6th game or the like, there is nothing else I can do to get them more playing time right? Hard to bench the A+++ superstars, so it just means some really good players won't play much I guess.

6. Playoffs... how can I adjust things at the end of the regular season to have the aces pitch, and shift down from a 5-man rotation to only 3 or 4? In real-life managers line up starters as best they can leading into the playoffs... so I don't want to have someone pitch a wild-card or other playoff game on very little rest. But... while it was interesting to see the Expos/Nationals take the NL Pennant, I noticed after the fact that the Dodgers rotation was aligned such that Koufax didn't pitch! Not that Kershaw, Vance, Sutton, and Drysdale are not good, but clearly in a playoff series Koufax would have pitched once or twice! How do I do this?

-------END OF QUESTIONS-------------------

In case you are curious... here were my league leaders:
- Hits leader Cobb had 219, with seven having 200+
- Qualifying BA leader was Hornsby at .352, with ten guys at .320+
- Triples leader was Ed Delahanty with 18, and twenty guys had 10+
- Strikeouts leaders were Bryce Harper (193) and Jim Thome (192) and many others had 130+.
- SB leader was Henderson with 59 (would have been higher except he batted .265 with .354 OBP). A dozen others had 40+ SB, so will only look to bump SB up a little.
- Only five 20-game winners, with Koufax leading the way at 24-6, followed by Mathewson at 23-5.
- ERA... as noted Koufax and Kershaw tied with 2.46, and 11 guys were below 3.00. Only about 15 qualifiers had an ERA over 5.00 -- so far fewer than before.
K - Curt Schilling (PHI version) led with 238 followed by Pedro (BOS version) with 237.

Some stats that I definitely want to see higher as I run these seasons -- and so I'll adjust modifiers / baseline seasons accordingly are:
- HR leader was Jim Thome with 34, followed by Mantle and Ruth with 33. I'd like to see the league leader be more like 45-55. And to see lots of top sluggers, like Mays, Harper, Foxx and others only hit around 15 HR... just looks odd!
- Doubles leader was again Delahanty but with only 40, which is quite low. Lots of great doubles hitters had well below 30.
- SLG Pct... with low HR and Doubles, SLG was very low. Helton led with .565, but only six guys were at .500+.
- RBI leader was Al Simmons with a healthy 135, but then it fell off quickly with only seven with 100+. Presumably with more doubles and more HR, there will come more run scoring and RBIs.
- Runs... Cobb led the way with only 110, with only 9 guys having 100+.
- Walks / OBP: Bonds (SFG) had 110 walks, but only five guys had 100+... and Hornsby led with a .417 OBP, but only seven had .400+.
- Saves... Thigpen led with a modest 36, so I'd like to see a higher leader there.