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I went through all of the teams and modified many of the players defensive ratings and was pleased to see that the replays were noticeably improved. Pitchers like Hunter, P. Niekro, etc. who never did as well in the sims, now performed much closer to RL. Instead of showing individual stats, I thought it might be interesting to show how well the teams did in the standings compared to both RL and to an unmodded set of sims, even though I realize that without the rest of the data, the standings alone can be rather misleading - I'll give some examples of this below.
The 2 pictures at the bottom show the wins each team had in RL, the avg. wins over 10 season replays, the number of times each team took 1st place and the final columns have the number of wins in each of the 10 seasons.
It's important to note that although the first set of 10 sims (the unmodded ones) appear at times to be better, upon closer analysis, they are not. For example, you'll notice that the Yankees did much poorer in the defensive mod sim compared to RL and compared to the unmodded sim. This can be explained in large part by roster differences. Rudy May and Dick Tidrow who both performed well for NY in RL weren't on the team in the sims. They had a combined 40 starts in RL and did much better than the two who pitched in the sims. The unmodded sim had a record that was closer to RL, but for the wrong reasons. Their defense was too good (defensive ratings were too high), which made up for weaker pitching (the two missing pitchers).
As another example, look at the Angels. They do WAY better in both sims compared to RL. Perhaps part of the reason the Angels did so poor in RL was simply bad luck. If you look at the Angels Pythagorean W-L for that year, it was 77-85, 9 games better than the RL record and closer to the sims. Furthermore, two players (3B&1B) that didn't start for the real Angels, performed much better than their real counterparts who did start.
In other words, once you fix the defensive ratings and account for roster and starting lineup differences as well as injuries (I had injuries off), the performances are actually pretty good. Although I'm not personally that into accuracy (I like more variation), it would be interesting to see how true to life things would play out if trades and player usage were taken into account as well.
I did many other sims besides the ones listed here and in the unmodded ones I occasionally seen things like the Padres and Cubs winning the World Series, while that never happened in over 40 sims with the modded teams. Still, if you look through the (modded) standings, you'll see some seasons working out in a rather implausible way.
One last thing I'd like to add. I didn't have to spend too much time modifying the defensive ratings and since I know so little about the players, I pretty much just went off of the basic defensive stats. In other words, it looks like the game should be able to be improved to rate players better and this in turn will help make the results more realistic. Someone else with more knowledge and more time could do a much better job I'm sure. Improving the defensive ratings will benefit all historical simmers, not just those few of us who like replaying a single season, so hopefully Markus will be able to make some improvements here.
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