[NoOne]

It can definitely speed up learning about the game.

i'd stick to modern leagues and do an online experience once you know the basics.. the aI won't teach you much about how real gm's act... but humans will for sure.

make sure the online league doesn't have any esoteric, restrictive rules outside of what can be found in real life.

from a statistics standpoint, this is not a scientific modelling of real life. it's a video game that models real life. some elements are going to adhere to the laws fo probabilty and somethng things may not...

e.g. TCR is not a real life factor. it is a video game function. people do not randomly get better in real life.. you are born with talent and you either devleop it or you do not... when this seems to happen in real life, it's rather caused by a human error in scouting the kid i nthe first place.. we are not omniscient, but if you think people randomly get better without cause "you're" nuts. (plural, not directed at any one person)

dennis rodman grew ~10" out of nowhere in his late teens or something similar like that... he didn't randomly get better at basketball. he grew 10 inches at a really odd time. from baseball: jason hamilton didn't "lose" his talent during his drug-fueled early years.. he was smoking too much meth to be good at baseball. when he cleaned up he didn't randomly get better... he was capable the entire time but never met his potential.

i.e. you don't randomly smoke crack and ruin your life like strawberry and gooden.. you don't randomly choose not to work out etc etc. and you most certainly do not randomly change from an average talent player to a HoF quality player. if you do, you weren't making use of your talent before.. not gaining new talent that is beyond your genetics in the first place.

so, to learn the basics, sure.. but anything beyond that in a professional manner, not so much in an overly sophisticated way. this is just fun video game.

you'll get the gist of baseball, at the least.

you can have fun playing with the stats and setting up spreadsheets/databases to mine the data to your hearts content... this is probably what would most directly help your intent. this game will spit out #'s in a fairly similar way and you can play around with them and manipulate them and form some theories to apply to real life data in ways you cold not do in RL... e.g. you can sim 1000years and work on that data... you won't live long enough to do so in RL, obviously.