I have no idea how it happened, but I managed to delete a retired player from my league shortly after inducting him into the Hall of Fame. Possibly coincidentally, his picture had been reset shortly beforehand and I don't remember either doing that or deleting him - however, I have no evidence that it was caused by a bug of any kind so I have to assume that it was something I did.
Anyway, before I had realised, his ID had been taken by a new player at an international complex. Unfortunately, I also took a backup of my game before realising. This left me with a 16 year old starting pitcher as a multiple all-star and hitter of the year! I have changed him back to the former player as best I can, using an old picture from a previous saved version of the game, ratings at the time he retired etc taken from archived .csv files and history taken from old almanacs.
The problem I have is what to do about his stats - I considered just exporting stats, adding his information from the .csv files and importing again, but having researched that it seems that his postseason stats, and those of other players, might be lost if I did that (
from this thread, admittedly relating to OOTP 13 so it may not apply in 14).
Are there any other options to get this player's stats (and awards/leaderboard appearances ideally) back without losing any other data? Could it possibly be done by setting him up as a historical player and putting him back into the game that way? At the moment, although his profile says he is in the Hall of Fame, he doesn't show up there - presumably because he has no stats at any level.