[VanillaGorilla]

I will go back and post on the other thread for players that fit this categorization there.

For this league (just doing a quick eyeball check) HOFers, both RL and from the previous league, who entered as older players and did not put in 10 years of service include:

Maury Wills
Bert Blyleven
Pee Wee Reese
Bobby Mathews
Eddie Murray
Enos Slaughter
Old Hoss Radbourn
Ed Delahanty
Warren Cromartie
Brett Butler
Kevin Brown
Randy Johnson
Ted Williams
Tom Seaver
Harmon Killebrew
Joe Tinker
Rickie Weeks
Jimmy Collins*
Hank Aaron*

Though not in either HOF, Barry Bonds was also created as an older player for the inaugural draft.

I don't see this is any sort of problem with the Random Debut feature. Baseball has to start at some time, and when it does, not everyone is going to be 18 years old. Was there a Roy Hobbs born in 1831 that would have radically altered baseball history? We will never know.

As you can see by this quickly compiled list, you get a number of notable players that will debut as older players when you first create a random debut league. It is just how it is. There were a number of familiar names that are not HOFers in either world that came in as older players that I didn't list.

I get the idea of wanting to see a certain player play his entire career, but for the purposes of these leagues, I just let the players come in when they came in and roll from there. There are so many players of historical significance that you would wind up spending hours and hours redoing the initial player creation before you happened to get one that didn't contain any of them. And if you do that, guess what? Your initial pool is no longer random.

And as you noted, if the initial group of players all came in as rookies, you would mess up the progression of the league in the following years because there would be too much prime talent in the league and not enough spaces opening up for the new rookies joining. It would take maybe 20 years for this to sort itself out.

ADD: Rickie Weeks debuted as a 29 year-old, his 2012 season.