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Watching mediocrities become superstar pitchers has driven me crazy when I've played early seasons with recalc turned off, and that's with the standard database. Obviously, you want some variation from reality if you're not using recalc, but I get tired of seeing Bill Stearns, Bob Black and Jim Britt, or even better short-career pitchers like McBride and Spalding, turn into Hall of Famers time after time.
Statistics from the early 1870's are so unlike anything from later eras that the game engine may not be able to make sense of them. I also think part of what may be going on is that pitchers in the 1870's, and to a lesser degree in the 1880's, began their careers very young by later standards and usually burned out very quickly, and this may mislead the player development mechanism into seeing them all as budding Bob Fellers. Bill Stearns didn't have a great career, but if you simply thought of him as someone who was pitching regularly in the major leagues at age 19, he might look very promising.
Changing the pitcher aging speed ought to help considerably, but I could never get it to make a really significant difference. I tried once adding a few years to each pitcher's age but I seemed to overcompensate, handicapping their development so they were all terrible and offense shot through the roof. By trial and error it might perhaps be possible to come up with increases in individual age, aging speed and susceptibility to injury that would produce more satisfactory results.
The much easier way to get tolerably reasonable results would be to leave recalc off but have all the players retire according to real life. No matter how good Witherow was, you'd only have to live with him for one season. I don't know whether that would result in a scarcity of pitchers, though.
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