[Syd Thrift]

I think the real issue is that there maybe shouldn’t be as much of an “out of position” penalty because everyone was playing out of position back then. Nobody really knew how to field like modern players and on top of that they used, to put it mildly, substandard equipment. I don’t think gloves were even a thing in the 1870s and to the extent that they might have been, they were, well, gloves in the non baseball sense of the term.

To an extent, though… man, I just think that the further you travel from baseball in 2022, the less accurate the simulation will be. As it is, a base on balls in OOTP 1871 comes on 4 balls, not “9”/3 (the official rules were that when a pitcher threw outside of the strike zone, they were warned; 3 warnings meant a ball was called, and 3 balls put the batter on first. It was also a common strategy in that era to just throw out of the zone and get the batter frustrated enough to swing anyway) and there are just fewer of them.

You can pretend, sure, but perhaps as part of that pretending you go in and give experience to players at all the positions to establish the baseline… and for batters, you set everyone to throw right so they can play on the left side of the infield (lefties did play there albeit with increasing rarity until the 1890s).