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Looking at the teams' stats, they both have poor defenses (excepting at catcher for both teams, Ron Cey and Steve Garvey). Nobody else rates much above barely average for their position. They were especially poor at shortstop (combined for 85 errors and well-below-average range on both teams).
Both play in good pitchers' parks that for that season were even better than usual for the pitchers. Maybe it was a particularly smoggy year in California?
I would check the defensive ratings on both teams, as defense is generally the weakest part of baseball modeling, including in OOTP, in part because the stats are less precise than for pitching/hitting. I agree w/ the post suggesting there may be too few errors, hence too few unearned runs.
Certainly the Angels results could be due to the pitching injuries; for the Dodgers, Marshall had one of the great seasons of all time from a reliever. Until you can mess with the sliders to get him at least 150 innings, you're not going to get a good result for the club. I mean, he pitched in over 100 games, finished 83, averaged almost two innings per outing (he threw about 2/3rds of the non-starter innings for the team), had a K:BB approaching 3:1, the lowest ERA on the team and won 15 games, saving 21.
That's like having Mariano Rivera setting up for Mariano Rivera. It's crazy. Until you can convince the computer manager to ride that train like Walter Alston did, you're not going to win very often.
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