Are you using the DH in both leagues? As for the 1902 limit, I see your point, but I go back and forth on this one because I can't stand the thought of excluding Cy Young, Honus Wagner, Kid Nichols, Nap Lajoie, Cap Anson, Christy Mathewson, Roger Connor, Dan Brouthers, Eddie Plank, George Davis etc etc etc. Those are some all-timers, and it would somehow feel wrong for me to arbitrarily decide they can't play in my world. Yeah, I'm an old softy.
Guilty as charged.
In order to get around the whole deadball era problem, you could set it up so that you auto-calc the stats from a season that doesn't have those issues. I started in 1901 using 1984 for my stats base, strategy settings and PCMs and I've waltzed right through the deadball era with decent results. In the deadest of the deadball years (1908), a 23 year old Dave Kingman socked 31 HR, 112 RBI, and struck out 186 times (all led the NL), and even managed to steal 32 bases (lots of stolen bases to go around when you use 1984
, and he did steal 16 IRL).
"Kong" just hit his 500th HR at the end of 1922. Frank Robinson has 510 and that's it for 500 HR hitters over 22 seasons so far. I had a blip where I was adjusting the HR modifier upwards because there just weren't enough HR being hit, but then I had a season where 18 guys hit 30 or more, including 6 with 40 or more, and decided to leave well enough alone and let the talent in the game determine how many HR there are gonna be. At least that's how I'll do it when I stop tinkering with this test league, and get going on my "real" league.
I have 4 HoFers so far: Zach Greinke, Paul Goldschmidt, Ewell Blackwell, and Thurman Munson. All were short career, high peak guys. Frank Robinson is still going and has been an absolute beast with 6 MVPs, 4 2nd place MVP votes, and 2 3rd place MVP votes to go with 1 ROY, 15 All-Star selections, 13 Silver Sluggers, 2 Gold Gloves, 2 Championships, and 1 World Series MVP. I guess the only question is will he be unanimous or not?
As for my settings, I use 3 yr recalc double weighted, with player development on and all those settings at default. I use the DH in the AL, no DH in the NL, use a 162 game schedule, top two teams in each league make the playoffs. I use the 1984 strategy settings, so my game has five-man rotations, with six-man bullpens, 14 position players on each team. Injuries on "high (realistic modern day)", position player fatigue on "average" seems to yield the most realistic results for me in terms of enough players getting enough plate appearances per season.
I have a custom schedule I made for this league, which I suppose I could take as far back as 1882 in the future if I want to (16 teams in 1882 I think), but I think I prefer to start in 1901 when all the uniforms are as they should be etc. I use a five round draft, and I think I'll start importing 2 non-MLB players (PCL, ***, Negro Leaguers who didn't play MLB) from the Spritze database for every draft with the import historical player tool (I use the default database neutralized stats for my MLBers), as well as an entire round of them for the inaugural draft, so 45 players per team at the start, and 82 players entering with each draft. My Player Evaluation AI settings are set to 10/60/20/10. This post is getting rather lengthy so I'll end it here. The Game, let me know if there are any other settings you want to know about OK?
