Strategy Settings in Historical Games

[David Watts]

Thanks so much for posting these strategy settings.

I'm trying them out, but with a twist.

Started in 1950. I'm using 1 year recalc. I've decided to turn on the option for players to miss seasons according to history.

I'm using free agency instead of the reserve clause.

The biggest thing I'm having to adapt to is, having injuries turned off. Never played that way. But, in the end I think it will be interesting to see if the very high fatigue and the meanness of 1 year recalc is equal to having OOTP randomly injure folks throughout their careers.

One thing I'm wondering about is, how will the lack of injuries effect the careers of pitchers? The pitcher leaderboards? Will there be a lot of fringe pitchers that never see the field, because they are blocked due to all pitchers staying healthy? I was thinking one solution would be to use 6 man rotations with always start the highest rested. Thought this may limit starts and give the 6th guy maybe 10-14 starts over a season. Didn't like what I was seeing, so I went back to a 5 man, start the highest rested.

Decided to have a draft instead of letting players go to their original teams. Kind of fun to watch 1950 play out knowing the bad teams are in a race for Mays and Mantle. Right now the frontrunners for the services of those 2 are the Philadelphia A's, the Chicago Cubs and the St. Louis Browns.

[JaBurns]

Thanks to everyone for there hard work on these different settings, different mods (weather, hints, park factors, etc, etc) you guys make me think, usually confuse at the start but make my experience far more enjoyable in my personal leagues. Thanks again.

[Reed]

I normally play 1901 to 1960. Last year using 1 year recalc that league wide batting averages were good but a lot of individual players had 400+ batting averages so I started using 3 year double weight and that seemed to tone down the individual batting average. Have not tried 1 year recalc with OOTP 20.
My other setting 200/150 weaken/adjust hitters. 30/15 weaken adjust pitchers, injuries off. Fatigue normal (but your schedule/time between off days will play a BIG factor in fatigue. Players miss seasons according to history.
I know some say with Recalc on, you might as well just look at baseball reference but sine players hit 20-35 point higher/lower than in real life, it is like a mixture of real/fictional. It is amazing that players with 10 year+ careers will have their. OOTP career stats close to their real life stats.
I do notice in my league home runs consistently run 4-9% below real life but I am ok with that.

[Dezi_36]

Originally Posted by Garlon

I have not seen issues with rosters and teams not having a player for a position. Teams generally have extra players on the reserve roster. If you use the default expand league in OOTP you will not have enough players in the 1800's, that's why I suggest using only 4 teams from 1871-1875, and then 8 from 1876-1881.


My import is currently 5-yr recalc with 154/77 for batters and 14/12 for pitchers. I may consider moving these up though to maybe 200/154 and 19/17 .

I believe you get better results with fatigue set to Very High, you will see more realistic OPS of the best players.

I'm just getting started with OOTP, I have a project I'm running that was going to be just one season related to something a buddy and I were talking about a few years ago. I started it in another platform, but never finished it. That said I might run it a few more seasons...or I have another ideal floating around my head.

All that said, can you explain what the 'recalc' is, better yet what you mean by 154/77 and 14/12? Or point me to a place where I can find a good synopsis? Thanks!

[Syd Thrift]

Recalc is, well, how you want the game to recalculate a player's ratings from season to season. If you do 1-year recalc then Roger Maris will have a big bump in his HR rate in 1961, whereas if you have 3-year on, it'll be higher than the rest of his career between 1960 and 1962 but the spike won't be as high. 3-year is probably more accurate in the sense of how things "really would" have played out (a Roger Maris who has ratings set to 61 HRs hits 70 about as often as he hits 50, which looks wildly implausible given that nobody had hit 60+ since 1927; it's much more likely that he got "good dice rolls" and overachieved in '61 a bit) but it's less volatile.

I believe the 154/77 and 14/12 refer to the minimum PAs and IPs a batter or pitcher has to have before their ratings get reduces. This is to prevent the Rudy Pembertons of the world (I remember I his Strat card that one year in the 90s was amazing) from getting ratings that would have them get like 300 hits in a season.

[Bill Veeck]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

Recalc is, well, how you want the game to recalculate a player's ratings from season to season. If you do 1-year recalc then Roger Maris will have a big bump in his HR rate in 1961...hits 70 about as often as he hits 50, which looks wildly implausible given that nobody had hit 60+ since 1927; it's much more likely that he got "good dice rolls" and overachieved in '61 a bit) but it's less volatile.

I always use 1-year and that does lead to some "exaggerated" results. I always thought that anything beyond 1 year was somewhat unrealistic, but you cite an excellent example in Maris hitting 61 in 61. He obviously had "Good dice rolls" that season in real life.

Using 3 year recalc he'd be expected to hit 36 (39 actual) in 1960, 47 (61) in 1961 and 46 (33) in 1962. (the numbers are adjusted for PA in the 3 years). HR/PAs would be 7.8%, 10.3% and 5.6% for 1-yr recalc vs. 7.3%, 7.9% and 7.8% for 3-yr recalc.

The point being that if you believe, as I do that there is a significant amount of "good dice rolls" factored into real life, by using 1-yr you are adding another layer so he could easily hit as few as 52 or many as 70 in 1961 using 1-yr while he's usually going to be between 40 and 54 using 3-yr calc.

If he hits 70, you probably say to yourself, "that was unrealistic." However for 1-yr recalc it certainly is to be expected as is 52. After thinking about this for a bit, it still gets back to what you are looking to design.

The only thing I am sure of is that it's not unrealistic to get individual player results - or for that matter team wins - that fluctuate more than most of us would think.

[Bill Veeck]

not sure I added anything to what Syd said. He summarized it well