Another thing you may have noticed above is that almost nobody on any of the four rosters above is a big guy by modern standards. No one is over 6' 2", or over 220 lbs. In fact, the tallest guy in the whole league is 6' 3", and the biggest guy is the aptly named Bertram Bull, a 6' 2" 235-pound reserve first baseman for West Brom.
This is by design, too. When OOTP fills a team with fictional players, it acts as though it's 2013, even when the league is set in the 1800s. This creates a situation where you have pitchers who are 6' 10", and hulks who are 6'6" and 275 lbs. That wasn't happening in 1888. So I brought down the sizes on all the players who were created.
So, how did I do that on a bulk basis?
First thing I did was download the entire database of major league players from Baseball-Databank.org. It's in a .csv file that's easily importable into Excel.
I then grouped the players by decade born, and determined the average height and weight for all players born in the decade, from the 1980s back to the 1850s.
Then, using the 1980s as the base for average height and weight, I determined the factor by which to adjust both measures based on the year the guy was born. The factors I used were:
Code:
Height Weight
1980s+ 1.000 1.000
1970s 1.000 0.963
1960s 0.995 0.915
1950s 0.995 0.902
1940s 0.989 0.900
1930s 0.989 0.896
1920s 0.979 0.882
1910s 0.979 0.875
1900s 0.968 0.849
1890s 0.963 0.831
1880s 0.963 0.838
1870s 0.952 0.832
1860s 0.947 0.820
1850s 0.941 0.812
According to this table, the average guy born in the 1850s was only 94.1% as tall and 81.2% as heavy as the average guy born in the 1980s. So when OOTP gives me a guy for my league who born in 1858 and made him 6' 7" and 255 lbs., like
this guy, this adjustment brings him down to 6' 2" and 207 lbs.—a lot more reasonable of a player size for a really, really big guy playing in 1888. Skeptical? Take a look through a
typical roster from 1888 and see if it doesn't work.
Finally, the process itself of implementing this adjustment was a bit of an interesting hack to figure out. There are lots of players to change, so what I did was create a table of years between 1847 and 1990 and assigned these adjustment factors to each birth year; developed a VLOOKUP in excel to look up the player's year of birth versus the year in my table; and pulled the corresponding factor from my table to adjust down the height and weight appropriately.
I have to export the rosters each season to Excel to make this adjustment, and to make sure I am not adjusting the same players every year, I developed an IF statement looking for his number of pro years. If pro years equals "0", it makes the adjustment; if it's "1" or more, it doesn't, because I already made it when they were rookies themselves.
For you Excel geeks, here's the formula I use for height:
=ROUND(IF($X17="",0,IF($X17>0,Q17,Q17*(VLOOKUP($K17,$ES$19:$EU$172,2,FALSE)))) ,0)
Weight is the same, except for different dependent cells.