Bird,
I have been slowly putting together a dynasty franchise that I will be posting here in the forums when things are ready. I love what you are doing with Bill James's hall of fame book and similarity scores. Kudos with spreadsheeting the players' stats after they retire.
Something that I have decided to do (just deciding on how many years to wait) is to sort of follow RL mlb history and delay the hall of fame (and by nature the first hall of fame vote) by a sizable number of years. I am also torn on whether to allow the AI to have a say in the vote or just take it over myself after I have everything set up and am satisfied with the system I will have in place. I am strongly leaning toward taking over initially and over time let the AI back in about 10 to 15 years after the opening of the HOF and follow it closely with the spreadsheet. If it is reliable then let the AI do the heavy lifting and check every 5 years to see if anyone was missed.
I had the same idea about setting up a spreadsheet and keeping track of retired players and seeing how each player at each position compared to each other. Start doing this at the first 10 year mark and decide how long you wish to delay the initial vote (if you want to go that way). My reasoning for doing so is too many times in the game we see sub par players inducted early on because there is no other players enshrined at their position with which to compare them to and it can be very difficult to get all positions represented early on because it takes some time. Then we start with a weak HOF and the AI compares future possible inductees to the already HOFers and the hall is potentially further diluted. By delaying the vote by 20, 25, even 30 years you can get a good spreadsheet loaded with HOF potentials at all positions and decide on how many to induct initially, whether all or just the top 5 or 6 maybe, and then keep working through them each year after until you get caught up and you can hopefully have a good solid base of all or at least most positions. I am leaning towards 30 years myself.
Now during the "freeze" time what I would suggest especially since you are like me and play each game (which of course takes some time) keep good notes on each player in the spreadsheet (I will probably just keep those notes on a Word file) because we want to remember all about those old players and why they may have value beyond just the straight numbers. You know what I mean. That value can be the tipping point for induction into the Hall of Fame or the hall of the very good.
I need to go for now, I probably missed something I wanted to say so if so I will send another post later. If you have any questions let me know.
. If you are not interested in using this, no problem. I understand there is quite a time delay when you play out your games.
Once you have the similarity score ironed out for your spreadsheet please let me know. If you don't mind I would like to utilize that. Thanks bro, gotta go! Have a good night!