Originally Posted by Syd Thrift
I don't really do historical-historical games but what I've seen is that they tend not to produce a lot of 80 fielding players, period. The game tries to base it off of actual fielding stats and those just aren't all that informative. Like, generally, I guess, the best shortstops in the league will lead the league in assists per 9 innings, especially if you find ways to account for groundball rate (which I'm not sure is in the Lahman DB) but the real things you'd want to have access to, stuff like "what percentage of handle-able balls did this guy get to" just doesn't exist.
I feel like the real thing to do here is to hand-curate those ratings. I realize this slows things waaaay down, and on top of that nobody's come out with this kind of thing, but it kind of gets to the limitations of what OOTP is compared with, say, Strat-O-Matic and DMB. The game's strength is simply not in doing single-season replays. Frankly I think it does a very good job with them given its limitations and it kind of puts the SOM/DMB model of paying $20 or so per season to shame, but those companies do in fact invest a bunch of extra time in rating players defensively based on their reputation and that means that a SOM Omar Vizquel is more likely to play defensively like real-life Omar Vizquel than an OOTP Omar Vizquel.
It's funny because there's another post where I'm currently being accused of being an OOTP homer but this is a place where you're kind of asking OOTP to do things that OOTP is not really "meant" and to a great extent isn't capable of doing. If you really and truly are interested in single-season replays, frankly SOM or DMB do a better job of it (although to me the graphics are lowkey a big, big item that weighs OOTP back). Even if you want to run, say, the entire 1970s, I think you'll find that SOM or DMB will encapsulate it better, especially if you want to relive anomaly years like Mark Fidrych's (in OOTP/modern baseball terms, he was BABIPed up one year, but SOM will happily make him into an actual stud that one season). Yes, that is waaay more expensive than OOTP as well. If you don't have that kind of money, I'd recommend spending your own time instead to manually re-rate guys based on their rep.
I think OOTP does an A-1 job of doing the "current year + X" style that basically is the only way you can play FM and which is probably the #1 way people play the game too. Because of the work done on the above, it's also very, very good at fictional play, and additionally IMO it handles fictional play using previous eras really, really well. Using it for actual historical play is... fine, but it's *slightly* like going to Walmart and expecting filet mignon except that IMO OOTP delivers filet mignon in the areas it was built to deliver filet mignon.
And I want to be clear here too that I don't mean this in a "lol stop complaining and just do something else" way, I mean I used to play a toooooooon of SOM and DMB and IMO those games do an extremely good job at what they do. I just don't have a lot of desire to play that type of game anymore, at least for baseball, but if I did, that's what I'd use. On a similar level, I play Draft Day Sports Basketball when I want to do fictional basketball but when I want to do season replays I used Action! PC Basketball because, again, of those hand-curated seasons (also because I think Dave Koch's game handles the coaching aspect a lot better but I digress).
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