Historical mode improvements

[imnotsammysosa]

Really hoping for some improvements to historical, particularly in the 1800s.

Would really love to be able to add my own expansion teams while having the league evolve as normal. As it is now, the game won’t schedule an expansion draft and the teams are made from free agents. Then after a year, they disappear from the game.

While it’s very cool to see what might have been with guys like Koufax, Jose Fernandez, and Lyman Bostock, I can not for the life of me understand the utter 1800s dominance of James Burke and Toad Ramsey. Their careers were short and ended with very mediocre seasons, but both of them are Cy Young meets Walter Johnson for 20 years.

The HOF needs a bit of a retooling as well. When you start from 1871, the AI will induct some highly questionable pitchers in the early years whether you vote for them or not. I also wish that the 1800s HOFers wore the cap of whatever their team was called for the longest time, not just what it was called when they drafted him. For example, I have a Pirates save going, and Paul Hines will not be represented for the 6 or 7 years he was a Philadelphia Centennial or the decade that he was a Pittsburgh Allegheny, but by the couple years that the franchise was the Washington Nationals. Also, managers and GMs should be able to go in the Hall.

The AI is also far too willing to give a pitcher the MVP Award. This should be reserved for truly historic, remarkable seasons. Yet I’ve seen pitchers win the MVP over triple crown winning hitters. It would be nice if the award logic could be tuned by era. As of now, it’s almost always given to whoever has the largest WAR, while for the first 140 years of baseball history, no voter was even looking at such a thing.

Also, better Negro League integration.

Having said all that, I absolutely applaud the work that’s been done on historical in recent years. When I first started playing five years ago, you couldn’t even start in the 1800s without having to do a ton of workarounds. And things have improved every single year. I’m hopeful that we’ll see some of these issues corrected in the next few editions of the best sports game to ever hit the market.

[Syd Thrift]

I submit that the issue with guys like Toad Ramsey or Candy Cummings or whoever are harder issues to fix than they look. Basically, what the game is doing is applying 21st century pitcher logic to 19th century pitchers. The game looks at those careers, sees "oh, here are guys who were overpitched at an early age, then got injured and then washed out of the league" and treats them like, say, it might treat Kerry Wood in recent years: a potentially great player who is very volatile. Of course, the thing about volatility is that often the worst case scenarios don't happen and you wind up with a Toad Ramsey with 350 wins.

What actually happened back then is that guys like Ramsey were used to an insane degree in their early 20s until their arms just plain gave out. Ramsey for example threw almost 600 innings in his age-21 season and averaged around 550 over about 2 2/3rds (the actual seasonal averages pull down to about 500 because he missed the last 3rd of the 3rd year). Even taking into account the fact that guys could "coast" during this time through the bottom of the order and could do things like throw sidearm out of the pitching box that made pitches harder to hit without necessarily messing up their arms as much, that's a *crazy* amount of pitches to throw in a year and it's not hard to see why Ramsey or for that matter the 25 or so other guys who had careers like Ramsey's during this time were mostly washed up by the time they were 25.

Another factor there, and also one that's hard for the game to implement, is that our understanding of arm physiology has *drastically* changed since then. In the 1880s if a guy's elbow went out, you didn't have Tommy John surgery to repair it and let the guy go out as good as new. You didn't even know that the tendon was gone. You just knew that he couldn't pitch, and aside from time off there wasn't really a lot that people knew how to do to repair broken pitchers. If you wanted to semi-simulate that in games, what you'd do is something like make the TJ surgery injury entry, the torn rotator cuff one, and a bunch more into career-enders. That being said, marking more injuries as CEIs doesn't actually IIRC increase the frequency of CEIs (this knowledge may be outdated) so it may be more of a matter of you having to play a career in commish mode and manually retire players with these kinds of injuries.

A robust history of injury effects would be awesome but... it also feels like a crap-ton of extra work without a great deal of added sales, so I'm not sure I'd ever expect OOTPDev to do this on their own.