Is this "Alternate Universe" doable ?

[Coja]

I'm looking to create a "stable" baseball world. Are any/most/all of these settings achievable ?

IE :

• I want my worlds 1910 MVP to compare to my 1975 MVP - and not have to consider differences in era.
• I don't want a time period where 3 guys pitched whole games every 3rd game.
• I want a closer to be used from beginning to end.
• I don't want a decade of single season HR leaders reaching 70, etc
• I particularly want to avoid the "ERA" differences that we have in MLB history.

1. MLB Team Names/Logos/Uniforms (80s style)
2. Fictional players.
3. 80s style MLB (26 teams, same divisions)
4. AAA, AA, & A for each.
5. 65-70 Feeder Teams. (Did some research, and that's the target for this league size)
6. League statistical averages that stay fairly consistent to 1980s baseball statistics.
7. Sim 50-70 Years before I start playing (I'd like a historical base before I play)
8. Financials to be important, yet completely fair. (IE. I want to make important salary decisions, but - I don't want market size to matter.
   --- I'm thinking maybe a salary cap, that every team can reach - so no teams have any advantage .. but still have contract issues to be concerned with.

[Padreman]

Yes

[Aumakua]

Originally Posted by Coja

I'm looking to create a "stable" baseball world. Are any/most/all of these settings achievable ?

IE :

• I want my worlds 1910 MVP to compare to my 1975 MVP - and not have to consider differences in era.
• I don't want a time period where 3 guys pitched whole games every 3rd game.
• I want a closer to be used from beginning to end.
• I don't want a decade of single season HR leaders reaching 70, etc
• I particularly want to avoid the "ERA" differences that we have in MLB history.

1. MLB Team Names/Logos/Uniforms (80s style)
2. Fictional players.
3. 80s style MLB (26 teams, same divisions)
4. AAA, AA, & A for each.
5. 65-70 Feeder Teams. (Did some research, and that's the target for this league size)
6. League statistical averages that stay fairly consistent to 1980s baseball statistics.
7. Sim 50-70 Years before I start playing (I'd like a historical base before I play)
8. Financials to be important, yet completely fair. (IE. I want to make important salary decisions, but - I don't want market size to matter.
   --- I'm thinking maybe a salary cap, that every team can reach - so no teams have any advantage .. but still have contract issues to be concerned with.

I do a lot of this right now in mine, started in 1900, 16 teams, have a whole layout of expansion through current year. It takes some work to setup the way you want it though (have to monitor everything and make notes for future play through). First time through may need some work but eventually you will get there. I also didn't want 35 win pitchers in the early years who pitched 30 complete games, its pretty easy to find the balance, big thing is setting starters to 5 and set rotation (not based on who is rested...)

ERA differences would happen even with other things not changing, meaning quality of hitters over a 4-5 year span might be better than 10 years later, so not sure you should worry too much about that (even if the baseballs/bats never changed, stadiums never changed, drugs never used, there would still be variances in ERA from decade to decade), but you can do whatever you want in this game...

As far as markets, I believe you can set all teams to have the same market size and media income, also if you set profit sharing (or whatever its called) to a pretty high number that should also even things out (so 50% of each teams revenue is divided to league or given to road team, forgot how that works, might have both settings in game).

[Syd Thrift]

So, you can set your league to always use the same year for yearly stat calculations, and that will keep things, league-wide at least, at a 1984 level. I've never done this with historical players but I predict that if you did you're going to see some issues:

1. There just aren't enough pitchers around during the deadball era to manage 9 and 10 man pitching staffs. To take it to the extreme, some teams used like 4 or 5 pitchers the entire year in 1901. You'd have to figure out a way around that. From 1915 on you can maybe get away with doing so by playing with full minor leagues and allowing the minors to a. generate fictional players that b. never reach the major leagues so that your actual 1915 teams will get supplemented by actual minor league pitching. That's still not perfect but it may be more or less doable.

2. If you have a league that gets player ratings based on their 1-year or, hell, even 3-year stats and you're using like 1984 as your base year, you are probably going to see some *crazy* seasons by Babe Ruth in there. In 1920 Ruth hit more homeruns than half the teams in the league (I believe including all but 2 teams in the NL) and more than the bottom 3 teams combined. If you had a league where the average team hits 100 HRs, a case could be made that Ruth ought to hit 100. I think in practice teams start to intentionally walk players who are that amazing so he *probably* wouldn't get to triple digits, but bear in mind that that's what the early 1920s looked like.

[DCG12]

Syd

He said in #2 of his post "fictional players" so the historical lack of pitchers in early 1900's won't be an issue

[Syd Thrift]

Oh, duh. My bad. Well, if you use fictional players, I've done similar stuff in the past and yeah, IME if you choose a season the stats just look in line. The shape of the game is like modern day baseball too (that is, the ratio of stars to regular everyday players is the same - back then you had a few massive superstars like Ty Cobb or Christy Mathewson who could all by themselves push a team into contention and we don't so much see that today) but yeah, that would work.

I believe QuestDog even has a running dynasty where he's done that with a fictional league starting in the 1870s.

[Coja]

Thanks guys ! For what it's worth, all of it is completely doable.

I ran 3 sims (70 years) to get the settings just right, but am there now . My biggest issue (why I didn't take off running from sim 1) was I started with a historical year. (I started with historical '79 teams - basically, just thought I needed to for logo/uniform generation - but found I could do that myself).

The stats were janky until the "real" players were out. (IE : JR Richard was popping 5-600 Ks per year - which made his "records" untouchable). I finally caught on, and started with fictional.