[TomStone123]

Hello!

Long message here, but I hope it will be worthwhile for some of you OOTP players to read and respond to!

My name is Tom Stone, and I'm author of the book "Now Taking the Field: Baseball's All-Time Dream Teams for All 30 Franchises", which was published earlier this year from ACTA Sports. Some of you might have seen it... as this year I've done 50+ radio interviews, I was on MLB Now on the MLB Network in February, I presented at the SABR convention in June, and spoke at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown in July.

A current project I have is to run simulations of entire-seasons of the 30-man rosters for each team from my book, to see what would happen. I get asked this in interviews all the time, usually in the form of "The Yankees would win the most, right?" I've always hedged, and said surely the Yankees would do well, but many other teams, particularly those with strong starting pitching, would also do well. I am starting interviews again this month on radio, and want to have some real answers here based on sim gaming, and I've chosen OOTP 20 as my primary platform. I also hope to get back on MLB Network to discuss the sim results, so all of this could turn into some very nice publicity for OOTP!

That said, I am a NEWBIE to OOTP, so I need some help. What I've done so far is start with the All-time teams quickstart that comes with OOTP 20. I then modified all the rosters to match the ones in my book (plus some additional relievers, as my book was light there). I then ran a full season... and the results were very interesting!!! Yes, the Yankees, Red Sox, and Cardinals did well, and many of the expansion era teams not so well. But the final world series matchup? It was the Twins/Senators vs. the Phillies, with Philly taking it in seven!

Before I run the sim again... and again, and again... as I really want to get a nice range of results from this to report on in interviews/etc.... I have a number of questions about things I think I need to setup in my game. There were MANY things that made sense from season 1, that seemed reasonable and within the realm of possibility. But some results seemed rather odd, off in ways that I am hoping I can tweak so they don't occur again. But I don't want to mess with the way things work either, so that is where I NEED THIS COMMUNITY's HELP PLEASE! :-) I have read the relevant sections of the manual, learning about the different player ratings, etc. -- but again, I am new, so have questions for you all.

So with that lengthy background (sorry), here goes:
1. Are there any factors that I should make sure are turned off, so that each season I run each team has everything equal -- besides the talent of their players, their home ballpark, etc? I see things like Team Chemistry / Morale? Does that impact player results? I kinda don't want such extra factors involved in my simulated seasons.

2. Based on how players were created (from the quickstart I used plus some players I needed to import), some have stats in their history from previous real-life years, and some do not. How do I delete those real-life season stats, so that I can run reports and see only the accumulated stats from my simulated seasons? After ten seasons, I'd love to see aggregate numbers as that will help to average out the kind of blips from oddball seasons I get.

3. The biggest statistical anomaly from my teams is seemingly too many hits / too high of a batting average. What could I tweak to lower this? The overall league average was .290 which is rather high, though I'm OK with Tris Speaker batting .395 as the league leader. The league leader in hits was George Sisler with an amazing 271, and 8 players had 240+ hits. Some teams had no batter with over 200 hits, and that is fine. I think one issue is that some teams have SO MANY good hitters in these lineups, that they are getting a LOT of at-bats because they are scoring a lot of runs and just batting around the lineup a lot -- even against the really good pitching that these All-Time Teams also have. So what levers in the sim can I pull to even this out a bit?

3a. Conversely, pitching WHIPs are way to high. Only two qualifying starters had a WHIP below 1.20: Pedro at 0.99, and Curt Schilling from Phillies at 1.15. So many good pitchers on these all-time team rosters... all the Hall of Famers... while I realize they are going up against great lineups, I would think more than just two would have a WHIP below 1.20 (and I don't think Walks is the cause, it is too many hits).

4. Related to this, too many runs are being scored, so pitching ERA numbers are far too high. The overall ERA was 4.86, which is like the PED-era. Only three qualifying starters were below 3.00: Pedro 2.25, Mathewson 2.50, Gibson 2.93. Those three being best is fine, but only three below 3.00 is my concern.

5. Perhaps one issue is that the number of strikeouts also seemed a bit a low. There were only 5.61 per game, which compared to real-life baseball would be the lowest since 1989. Only seven SP had 200+ Ks, with only Pedro having 220+ (253). Granted, I'm using 5-man rotations, so I can't expect to see a lot of 250+ K seasons, especially against great hitting lineups -- but again, the results just seemed low to me.

6. Speaking of innings pitched, not many had over 200 IP. No one has any pitch count settings... so what setting do I need to tweak to have starters stay in games longer? Or will that likely make the ERA situation even worse?

7. On a related issue, how do I tell the sim to not just use the five starters and never use an "emergency starter"? Would that only happen if I turn on injuries? It was just odd to see every single team have all five SPs pitching 33 or 32 games, with none of the extra starters doing anything except long relief. I see I can have a six man rotation, but what I'd prefer to do is stick with 5-man rotation, but in some cases have the 4th or 5th guys skipped in favor of a 6th or 7th guy to give them a start here or there. I say that because I don't want Walter Johnson or Bob Feller getting fewer starts because of a 6-man rotation. :-)

8. There were some starters and some relievers who were just awful! Why would that be? Do I just need to look at their rating numbers and raise some of them if they look too low? I realize this is just one simulation season, so I don't want to overreact. But some really good starters and relievers had ERAs well over 6.00, and over 7.00 in some cases, which just seems wrong. Again, part of that is too many hits/runs per above, but it seemed to really impact some pitchers more than others.

9. I'll note that there are NOT too many HR being hit. The league leader, Barry Bonds, only had 38 -- so if anything that is a bit low. Perhaps the many good pitchers' movement ratings are such that not a lot of HR can be hit? But I'm not concerned with the HR numbers really -- it is more the large number of total hits, and ultimately runs, that is the issue.

One issue though with HR... is that some guys with very little (historical) power hit way too many HR. Like Nap LaJoie had 25 HR and Pete Rose had 25 HR also. Those are not realistic results. Does the Gap Power setting impact HR at all? Or does that only impact doubles and triples? I might just need to lower those guys', and a few others', power ratings. Many others who shouldn't hit a lot of HR were fine -- like Tris Speaker hit 3 homers, things like that. But there were some really odd exceptions I don't want to see happening.

10. Lastly, the SB success rate % seemed really high for this first simulation season... it was 79%. Is there anything I can adjust to lower that a bit across the board, or is it just a factor of the runners ratings and the catchers ratings in each instance? Some guys had like 50 SB and 2 CS, so those extremes really jacked up the overall %... and almost no catchers had a better than 30% rate at throwing runners out, even though the league has all the greats like Ivan Rodriguez, Johnny Bench, etc.

Thanks for reading... and if some of you can chime in with advice I'd really appreciate it! I hope to get some really fun results doing this, and to be able to raise some good publicity about OOTP during my upcoming interviews, etc.

Best,

Tom Stone