All-Time Draft, Too Much Offense

[bobmum]

Some friends and I did an all-time baseball draft, and I thought it would be fun to import our results into OOTP. Since we were already using 3-year peaks (we run drafts like this for basketball all of the time, so we really think hard about that sort of thing, haha), I imported players with those stats settings into a modern fictional league with a 2024 stats environment and placed those players on the rosters. Specifically, these were the settings I selected as I imported players from a text file (ignore the year import).



Before we started simulating, I took a look under the hood at the player editor and saw things like the following:



In other words, against this level of competition, it seemed that 1996-1998 Mark McGwire would have an OPS of about .775 and hit about 35 HR. That made me think that players had been adjusted appropriately for the context of the greatest players of all time. However, I got very concerned when I saw that the Preseason Predictions foresaw the leaguewide ERA being on the order of 6.50.

As it turned out, the Preseason Predictions were close to correct. For an example, here is what McGwire actually produced:



Now, the next-highest HR total was Frank Thomas with 53, but we also saw both Dan Brouthers and Ty Cobb hit over .400 (actually over .410). And it wasn't just a case of the stars absolutely mashing the ball. Twelve of the thirteen teams had at least one player with an OPS exceeding 1.000 (my own team being the only exception), and the leaguewide average OPS was just under .900. The leaguewide ERA was itself just under 6.50.

For further context, this was the team with the worst offense leaguewide:



while these were the pitching stats for the team with the best defense (and the league's runners-up):



These team stats graphics should also help you gain a feel for the level of talent we are talking about; the player pool is not exactly unbalanced between offense and defense with the all-time greats, yet the offensive environment makes it look like everyone is playing in pre-humidor Coors Field!

I signed up for this forum and am asking for help because I am wondering what other settings I should have considered changing so that things are less wacky for future all-time drafts. I am planning to re-run this particular roster set as a test run. Factors that I have considered:

• Most teams only used 11 pitchers, and even though I turned injuries off, we still had modern fatigue. Starters were regularly throwing up to 130 pitches, and you can see how badly relievers were taxed, so maybe there are some fatigue-related effects and/or overly cautious pitching because relievers were almost always inheriting runners.
• I did not examine the League Totals section of the League Modifiers because they quite frankly scare me witless. However, I can totally imagine adjusting those to be useful.
• There shouldn't be any weird park effects; most of the teams had pretty generic, automatically generated stadiums, and of the real stadiums that got used, I don't think the Fenway Parks of the world are strange enough to cause this level of inflation.

Please let me know what else I can explore testing to create a normal-seeming modern statistical environment with such an elite talent pool. I can readily imagine things still tilting a bit toward offense since batting stats seem more reliable in terms of stable multi-year peaks (and, although this might be an ignorant argument, there seem to be more elite hitters in a given year than elite pitchers), but this is absurd. Please also feel free to ask for any additional context about our draft and the simulation.

P.S. How does one import an image into this forum directly without a link? It seems like people do it all the time, but when I set this post to preview, it seemed like all of the images were being posted as their Imgur links rather than pulling the picture from Imgur.

[LansdowneSt]

To insert an image, hit "Go Advanced" below the text box you type in, then scroll down to Manage Attachments. Click that. A window ill pop up that will let you navigate to and upload up to five things per post.

[bobmum]

Thank you! Let me try to fix that so that the post is more readable!

[LansdowneSt]

I'm going to guess that after you stacked the league you didn't recalculate the modifiers to actually get the 2024 run environment. If so, the modifiers were expecting a 2024 player talent pool. Once you draft the league, back it up or save it as a QuickStart so you can go back and, assuming it is something as simple as that, save some time and reload the ready-to-go version post-draft and find the step you missed.

[bobmum]

Originally Posted by LansdowneSt

I'm going to guess that after you stacked the league you didn't recalculate the modifiers to actually get the 2024 run environment. If so, the modifiers were expecting a 2024 player talent pool. Once you draft the league, back it up or save it as a QuickStart so you can go back and, assuming it is something as simple as that, save some time and reload the ready-to-go version post-draft and find the step you missed.

Thank you! I will try this. I did save a few different Quickstarts, but I might not have the ideal moment.

[bobmum]

Originally Posted by LansdowneSt

I'm going to guess that after you stacked the league you didn't recalculate the modifiers to actually get the 2024 run environment. If so, the modifiers were expecting a 2024 player talent pool. Once you draft the league, back it up or save it as a QuickStart so you can go back and, assuming it is something as simple as that, save some time and reload the ready-to-go version post-draft and find the step you missed.

Thank you - this worked!

[jcard]

If the league comprised both great hitters and great hitters, why should the output be so distorted in one direction if auto-calc is not performed? In other words, why would similar shifts in both hitting and pitching skill contexts result in so significant a statistical swing in one direction (here, offense)?