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The bottom line is that you can't accurately reproduce 19th century baseball if you truly want realism. Even if you can get your league structure and teams correct and you do all the manual labor to set things up and move forward properly, or even if you use a quickstart, the game engine does not reflect the actual rules and scoring procedures for baseball during the 19th century.
Many aspects of the game were completely different, such as rules for balls, strikes, strikeouts, walks, statistics, etc. For example, walks counted as at bats in 1876. They counted as hits in 1887. 9 balls were required for a walk as of 1879, then later 8, then 6, then 5, and later 4.
Sac bunts weren't counted statistically until 1889. The mound was 10 feet, 6 inches closer to home plate until 1893. Foul balls could be caught on one bounce for an out until 1883.
Overhand pitching didn't even exist and releasing the ball above your waist wasn't allowed until 1883. And many of the pitches that were developed in subsequent years didn't exist either.
These and many other rules, rules changes, and aspects of the game dramatically impact the stats in the historical database, and OOTP is not designed to interpret them within a proper historical context.
So, no matter what you do, you will not be able to create a historical 'replay' of 1876 through 1900. Anything you do will basically be a fictionalized approximation of early baseball.
Now, that may not matter if you only care about the macro-level stuff like league structure and teams. But if you want true replay accuracy for those early decades, to my knowledge, it doesn't exist with any baseball sim.
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