New league using David Watts' great discovery

[italyprof]

Credit to David, though he is not responsible for any of my mistakes.

So last week David Watts posted a great discovery, one of those things that makes you wonder why none of us thought of this years ago.

Since no one likes to have their favorite players show up at the end of their career: Don Mattingly 1994-5, Henry Aaron 1974-5, etc. knowing they will now not be in the league unless we re-import them as rookies, which is weird and in any case the AI won't recognize as a continuation of their league career stats, David figured out that we can start a fictional league, set the draft to historical players sometime in December, run the season, cancel the whole league history, erase all the players as free agents, and then run a draft in which only historical players show up in their early seasons.

I decided this was the greatest thing since back when there was no designated hitter and so I did so, had a couple of wrong turns and finally got it right enough at least to want to continue a league and team.

I decided to also sim through the first season after just doing the inaugural draft by AI - I had 46 rounds and had the AI give me 64 rounds worth of players so that aside from the disadvantage of a lot of young players years away I would not also have a zillion 20 current 20 potential guys who really could not help teams. Or at least that neither I nor the AI would need to draft because there should be plenty of useful players with multiple seasons of at least mediocre to average play.

After the first season I decided to keep the league stats and not erase the league history a second time, even though the stats for home runs and batting average were pretty inflated. I decided that it would create some all-time records that would not easy to beat but were not insurmountable. I had started the league in 1933 with fictionals, had the first historical season as 1934 and those are the historical stats now, but then I ran a fantasy draft with me running a team - the Newark Eagles in a 24 team league with two divisions each so a 4 of 7 LCS before the World Series.

The 1934 draft I set at 8 rounds, and all subsequent ones are now set at 5 rounds. I have three levels of minors - A, AA and AAA with 15 player maximums and with age limits for the first two so that the league doesn't fill with no longer useful players. As players are released over time, I will cull the free agents, maybe running a draft for 3-4 rounds every few years to enable teams to get the useful ones remaining before I retire everyone else that has been released.

I have set the historical year as 1976, and indeed the whole historical year has been the only real glitch: I had set it at 1978 and got way too many home runs. So I turned it back down to 1976 but I did not notice that the modiifiers had set HRs to around .500 which means we got way too few in 1935 (my team hit around 60 I think). So now I willl try it at 1978 but with the league totals fixed and will manually set all the modifiers at 1.000. I hope this does not do crazy things.

One note: there is no option playing in fictional leagues even with historical players to set how many years you want the recalc period to be. So it is working on some AI default I guess. Anyone know how that works with historical players and what determines the values?

Anyway, my team was awful in 1935, we came in last, though there were some nice signs of life in the pitching staff especially, Mostly almost no one hit at all.

So I had started with a speed oriented team since some of the better players available included Vince Coleman and Wes Parker. But I decided to change paradigms: After drafting Ron Guidry in round one in the draft at the end of 1935 - he is 2-3 seasons away from being a starter in the rotation - we got our hands on Lloyd Waner to play CF, and traded for Norm Cash - we had drafted Gil Hodges in the initial draft and traded him and two other players for Cash and a bench player (there is a famous Bill James articel comparing the two and finding Cash not actually inferior to Gil Hodges). We traded Coleman and Tommy Davis for Ken Singleton and some bits and pieces, and now have as a starting lineup:

Lloyd Waner CF
Thurman Munson C
Ken Singleton LF
Daryl Strawberry RF
Norm Cash 1B
Tony Taylor 2B
Ed Charles 3B
Walt Weiss SS
Pitcher P

Our rotation you will see below in one of the screenshots. I was actually pretty pleased with the rotation, given the youth of most of the pitchers except Connie Johnson, and it is a gutsy rotation of pitchers, and we have some good ones like Guidry in the minors waiting to arrive. A decent bullpen.

So I am hopeful of a winning record in 1936.

Here are some of the screenshots of the league:

[italyprof]

Here are the Standings at the end of 1935 and the all-time records of the league.

[italyprof]

Here are the top batters and pitchers for the 1935 season:

[italyprof]

here is how my team did and how it stands now:

[italyprof]

here is our preseason 1936 roster of position players (the pitchers are as you see in the post above):

By the way, the historical players in this league are all 1920-2000.

Mainly that is because I found in the first few tries at this kind of league - fictional but with historical players - that ALL the best players were from 1900-1919 or from 2000-2019.

I like having some earlier players in my league, but having all the guys from 1910 hit .400 or having all the 1910 pitchers be the best in the league, or having all the 2000-2019 players hit 40 homers was boring. So I excluded them.

[jparker2112]

would you post this as a QS LINK?