[Syd Thrift]

I do a "real" league with all fictional players, set in the past (currently 1970), and with transactions that mirror real life as closely as I can. Pre-free agency financials are really, really wonky so I need to inject cash into teams a fair amount, and otherwise I control all the teams as GM and play out games from the 7th inning on. This is all about you doing your own thing of course but I like the slightly slower pace this brings.

For me, too, specific to this era I have the defaults set to 4 man rotations. The game wants you to use 5-man but IME it's easier to run 5 man rotations with league strategy set to using a 4-man than the reverse (and there are a few noted instances of teams even dropping to 3-man rotations during this approximate time period). I'm successfully seeing starters leading the league with 38-40 starts instead of the 33-35 you get with the 5-man; IME using the as-played schedules forces most teams to adopt a 4 1/2 man rotation in July and August during this time period due to the sheer number of games being played (it's not unusual to see teams with 30+ games on their schedule in August and 28+ in July in spite of the All-Star break; factor in double-headers in that mix and you'll find yourself needing to carry or call up a spot starter to handle the inevitable situations where no starter has 3 days rest or the one guy that does threw 130 pitches in his last outing and is still gassed).

Otherwise, because, well, this is my game, I have TCR bumped up to 120, aging down to 0.8 (because a. I think players age out too quickly and b. I also think that a lot of older players who can still play IRL get booted for reasons beyond their talent level, and since I'm GMing I just act that way), and also I bump development up to I think 1.2 so that my league isn't all 30+ year olds. I *think* it's still a year or two older than it "should" be but it's fine for what I'm doing.

Otherwise, TBH I like not being attached to actual players' history. Yes, it's true that if you turn off auto-recalc, your Tony Armas need not bear any resemblance to real Tony Armas, but the comparison still exists in my brain. The one thing I think this misses is personality, implied or otherwise, though I'm working on adding scouting report stuff to the english.xml file that should add a bit more flavor. I'm making a point to add a lot of conditionals so that you have more "player X could be great if he could just get his head into the game" or "player Y is a dead pull hitter and pitchers can get him out with fastballs on the outside corner".