Era Stats

[cbbl]

Has anyone unlocked how era_stats.txt are reflected in game? The first few columns (AB through K) are obvious, but after that it gets a bit....challenging.

Let's take something straight-forward like wild pitches. The era_stats.txt line for 1871 says their were 208 wild pitches that year. But the in-game engine only has modifiers. Other era_stats.txt lines are more complicated ... for example, Wild Pitches per IP Out (for 1871, its set to .03081482)

I'm trying to understand what tinkering I can do as I think about starting a fictional league a couple of seasons prior to 1871.

It's interesting, because, for example the 1871 NA season averaged 10.5 runs per game, but games just a year before (including by teams like the professional Cincinnati team) had games in excess of 100 runs. Now, many of these were against far inferior opponents (like the Union Club of Urbana, whom the Red Stockings beat 108-3), but I'd like to understand a bit more about what a typical professional game would have looked like, and perhaps mirror those statistics in the handful of years before 1871.

[Syd Thrift]

I mean, bear in mind, also, that you had kinda sorta 9 balls for a walk (it was actually that every 3 pitches outside of the zone the umpire issued a warning and after 3 warnings the batter took his base, but it kind of works out the same) so in that respect it's really only the results that are going to "look like baseball" from the time. All that said, I definitely have not gone in and researched that file super hard.

[joefromchicago]

Originally Posted by cbbl

I'd like to understand a bit more about what a typical professional game would have looked like, and perhaps mirror those statistics in the handful of years before 1871.

Well, technically there weren't any fully professional teams before the Cincinnati Red Stockings of 1869, and there really weren't any "typical professional games" before 1871 because there were no games before then where both teams were composed of professionals.

That being said, if you want to get a sense of what games were like in the early days, take a glance through the issues of Beadle's Dime Ball Player. It was an annual publication that usually listed the top teams in the nation and the results of their games. You can find links to the 1860-81 issues at Sean Lahman's database, an invaluable resource for early baseball researchers.

[cbbl]

That's a useful source, Joe. I may have a look.

I, of course, am making things way too complicated by trying to start a fictional league in 1869, which technically OOTP can handle, but I'll need to manually manipulate either the 1871 line in the era_stats.txt file (as OOTP can only import to 1871) or by adjusting league total modifiers.

I've abandoned my San Franscisco-based league starting in 1888 given some things I've run into in OOTP and am opting to recreate the origins of baseball from the east coast, using real baseball progression only as a guide. Aside from the formation of the NABBP in 1858, everything after that will be fictional (for example, I'm having four professional teams exist by 1868 and form the first professional league, the National Union, in 1869. So a truly alternative path.

Of course, I could just make it easy and start in 1871 but ... that's just not my personality. :P