Smarter cross-era imports

[Derek Hiemforth]

I'm pretty new to this forum, so my apologies if this has been discussed before...

I'd really like to see player ratings and abilities be based on the context of their own era rather than raw numbers. This would make it possible to create "all-time all-star teams" of players from different eras without all of the best hitters coming from the 1930's and 1990's, and all of the best pitchers coming from 1900-1920 and the late 1960's.

For example, let's look at a guy like, say, Jeff Kent. Kent is a very good hitter, with upper-medium range power. He's gonna give you 20-35 HR a year like clockwork, in a time and place (the 1990's-2000's) when the league leaders in home runs are hitting 50+ virtually every year. He'll probably be in the top 20 in the league in HR -- maybe even the top 10 in a good year -- but he's not gonna lead the league.

Now what happens if I import Jeff Kent into a very deadball league? (Say, the AL in 1914, when Home Run Baker led the league in HR with 9, and 5 HR was enough to put you among the league leaders.) Well, what currently happens is that Kent proceeds to still hit around 30 HR's and he looks like a god.

Likewise, if I import Babe Ruth 1919 (where he had nearly 3 times as many HRs as the guy in second place, even though he led the league with "only" 29) into a 2001-based league, what happens? Ruth still hits only 29 HR, and he's not anywhere near the league's best.

I'd love it if it were possible (either by default or by setting a preference) for ratings to take this factor into account. Rather than basing a players HR rating (for example) simply on how many HR's he hit in a certain number of PA, base it on how much better his HR% (or some similar measure) was better than the league average HR%.

That way, you could import Kent into the AL 1914 and he'd turn into a 6 HR guy, and you could import Ruth 1929 into the modern age and he would still be the king of the yard.

[Scott Vibert]

There is a normalized database available already to do cross-era imports.

It was produced by Ankit and is available here:

http://www.ap4e.com/NormalizedDB.zip

It is described in this thread:

http://www.400softwarestudios.com/bo...=Normalized+DB

It assumes all players are "modern" era players.


Here is the readme:

The foundation of the Normalized DB is my version of the DB (httP://www.ap4e.com/AnkitDB.zip). All work to normalize stats was done using that DB.

Simply unzip all the files in this zip into a folder of its own and use it with the game.



Thanks to ScottVib for his work on correcting the errors in the original Lahman DB.

Thanks also to Jeff cato for providing me SQL queries that enabled me to have career average fielding stats for every player for every season a player played.