[Hoiles]

I really appreciate Negro Leaguers being rated as major leaguers in this year's version, so that Hall of Famers like Satchel Paige are no longer AAAA players as in previous versions.

However, looking more closely, anyone notice that Negro League players might have too much of a boost? I imported a 1927 season (single-season replay at defaults) to test this out. For example, Lou Gehrig and Rogers Hornsby are rated as 5 stars when viewed with "Ratings relative to MLB", but respectively, 4.5 and 4 stars with "Ratings relative to NeL". I also ran a 1620 game (or 10 season) simulation of that year's Yankees (often regarded as the greatest of all time) vs the year's St. Louis Stars. The results were pretty close (I don't necessarily have a problem with the Yankees losing the series), but some of the stats look wonky. For example, the Stars' sluggers went haywire on Yankee pitching and outslugged Babe, Lou and Co in HR by a 2:1 ratio. Mule Suttles averaged 66 home runs in the sim, while Babe Ruth averaged 38 home runs (the same year he hit 60 IRL). Obviously we can't know for sure what would have happened in real-life, but assuming that the AL and the Negro Leagues were roughly the same level, that wouldn't have happened.

I also tried this out in other seasons (1920 and 1946) and get similar results. Any ideas on how to tweak this? I noticed that adjust/weaken hitters and pitchers limits don't seem to have an effect when importing from the minor league database. Perhaps the ratings need an adjustment to account for the variation from the small sample size. In any case, it's still a major improvement from previous years, where the same St. Louis Stars would have averaged 30 wins over a full season vs an NL/AL team.