Random Outlier HR King

[gaceves94]

Hi everyone, long-time reader but first time poster here on the OOTP forums.

Running a historical replay simulation starting in 1879.
- Advanced settings: 5 year totals, projection based on peak years of career
- Ghost Players included to fill out minor league rosters when they become available later on, but not allowed to make Major League roster.
- No changes to hitter/pitcher settings (default to era).

For the first 30 years, everything seemed to be fine. That was until 1913, when I was very surprised to see a rookie named O. Swain (no first name) hit 46 home runs! For context, nobody else in the league hit more than 10.

At first I thought he was some super-human ready to take the league by storm, but he settled in with an average of ~20 homers per year the next 4 seasons.

So I have a couple of questions:
1) Is this O. Swain a real person? Haven't been able to find anything about him from Google or Baseball Ref. If he isn't and is a ghost player, how could he make it to the bigs?
2) Has anyone seen an outlier of this magnitude? The real life 1913 home run champ, Gavvy Cravath, only hit 19.

Thanks in advance!

[Charlie Hough]

Are you having the game import historical rookies, or is it potentially creating fictional players as rookies? Also, are you having the game use each year's real life statistical totals to determine statistical output, or are you letting it evolve on its own?

A ghost player or more likely a fictional player somehow made it into your game and into the major leagues. And one of two things seems to have happened:


1. Your league totals have changed to allow much higher home run totals

and/or

2. This player's power rating was extremely high relative to the rest of the league for 2013, resulting in him hitting so many home runs and getting such a huge share of the home run totals for that season.


What were the power ratings for all the other players in your league in 1913? If they were generally much lower than his, that could explain the problem. But you should also compare your league's home run totals vs. real life in 1913. If you're using league total modifiers from 1913 and you got a wildly different result, that is definitely a problem and may need to be reported in the bugs forum.

As for whether there is a historical precedent for something like this, there definitely is. Brady Anderson hit 50 home runs in 1996 and rarely hit anything other than 15 to 20 before or after that. But let's take a look at an example that's closer in history.

Babe Ruth suddenly hit 54 home runs in 1920, whereas the next-highest total was only 19. But that was in 1920 and not in 1913, and he went on to hit 59 home runs in 1921 as well, before dropping to 40+ for most of the next 11 seasons when he was healthy. But he also hit 60 in 1927 and 54 in 1928 among those years.

There were a number of reasons that contributed to this, including the introduction of a livelier ball, ballparks getting smaller, a left-handed Ruth being able to hit in a highly favorable Yankee Stadium at the time, and so on.

But theoretically it's possible for a player to suddenly have a massive year in home runs but never quite repeat it. The issue in your case is how it's ended up happening with a fictional player and during a season when the league's home run totals modifier probably shouldn't allow for that output.

[SB1985]

Not sure about o swain but I researched 1913 and found an article about a cy swain and it noted that he hit 39 homeruns in 1913. Maybe the same player may not. Hope that helps

[ayaghmour2]

Looks like O. Swain might actually be Cy Swain. It seems out of the park has separated his 1913 season in to two parts. The actual in game Swain seems to have his stats with Sacramento for the year while O. Swain has Swain's stats from Victoria that season:

Link to Cy Swain: https://www.baseball-reference.com/r...d=swain-002cha

Link to Sacramento's Roster: https://www.baseball-reference.com/r...gi?id=84b549e9

Link to Victoria's Roster: https://www.baseball-reference.com/r...gi?id=b0d80510

[Charlie Hough]

Originally Posted by SB1985

Not sure about o swain but I researched 1913 and found an article about a cy swain and it noted that he hit 39 homeruns in 1913. Maybe the same player may not. Hope that helps

Yes, but he didn't do that in the major leagues. He hit 34 of those home runs in in the Northwest League at a significantly lower level of competition. It was the equivalent of today's AA minors. The OP must be using an option to use historical stats from the minors and allow those players into his game. But the game should be adjusting his ratings so his minor stats aren't being converted into ratings that are equivalent to MLB quality.

[ayaghmour2]

Originally Posted by Charlie Hough

Yes, but he didn't do that in the major leagues. He hit 34 of those home runs in in the Northwest League at a significantly lower level of competition. It was the equivalent of today's AA minors. The OP must be using an option to use historical stats from the minors and allow those players into his game. But the game should be adjusting his ratings so his minor stats aren't being converted into ratings that are equivalent to MLB quality.

Personally, I've done a ton of historical sims and he'll always have a ton of power (usually most in the league) because they game sees the Victoria part as 34 AAA homers (the game lists him as AAA, so just slightly worse then MLB) in 500 at bats. It's enough to avoid being weakened, so the O. Swain is a juiced up power hitter as I'm guessing there is no one even near that HR/PA in the early 1900s. His pure home run power rating is likely so much higher then the next best that literally every home run (at least statistically) would likely be hit by him.