How Can You Even Out the Eras?

matttb324 · 04-22-2023, 07:03 PM

Well, after learning my lesson about backing up the league more often, I think I am going to start over at 1901 and try again this time with more backups and less mistakes.

I want to build on the concept I was working on, which was to try to even things out between the eras. For instance, starting in 1901, I want to use real players, mix them up and have them play 162 games each year. Black players would play from the start, a handful of clubs would play on artificial surface and everyone in a modern stadium, I will have free agency from the start and pretty much any other way I can even things out, I will do.
But here are my questions:

1. What, if anything, can be done to even out the eras? For instance, what things could I do in the game to bring up averages in the 60s, bring them down in the 30s?
2. Is it possible to kind of normalize home runs. For instance, could Dead Ball HR leaders like Frank Baker be in the 40s or 50s for homers?
3. Can I move Dead Ball and later teams to a 5-man rotation and get managers to use relievers more or would the lack of players on the roster just mess this up?
4. Can i normalize strategy a bit so teams run and bunt about the same in the 50s as in the 10s and 80s?

I doubt I'm the first person to think of this (I even read a book years ago that evened out all baseball stats through the eras) but I would be very curious to see the numbers if the eras were more evened out.

Sorry for all the questions and thanks in advance!

thehef · 04-22-2023, 07:22 PM

I am absolutely not the expert on this, and I'm pretty sure there are at least a few gamer-posters here who are. That said, I would start by experimenting with "Totals from year:" on the League Settings > Stats & AI panel. If you wanted your 1935 season to play out - statistically - like 1965, you'd select 1965 here.

In this example, you might also want to change - on the left-hand side of the same panel - Historical Hear (under League Strategy, AI and Stats Modifiers), and Select Which Settings to Import (under Import Settings) to 1965.

Again, I'm not the expert, but this is where I'd start for some testing and experimentation... Most surely, if I'm not correct here, someone with more knowledge in this area will point it out

matttb324 · 04-22-2023, 09:29 PM

Thanks for your response.
I was playing around with those and found this tool... it seems like what it does it to take all stat expectations from a given year, not sure if that is correct?

luckymann · 04-22-2023, 09:46 PM

Before starting - do you have any backup of the other league at all? You might not need to cut the whole thing, there may be an auto-save you can use?

Presuming that is not the case or you just want to make lemonade and start over, I'll look at your questions individually.

First, the league totals. What I have done that works pretty well is to collate various eras' totals for each of the stats sought in the LTMs and then divide by the number of seasons totalled. Or, even better, have it reset to a fixed rate like 100000 AB.

This will give you an average figure to use.

So if you wanted to cut out the deadball and PED ERAs to give you some sort of cross-sectional total to use, go 1925 to 1994. BBRef should allow you to group them and give you the totals or you can do it in a spreadsheet. Then just divide by 70 and that is your yearly total.

Enter that into the LTMs on the day before OD and check the Lock Totals and Auto-Calc boxes. This will be the total used every year.

The big challenge with this is getting the BABIP right - just go to THIS link and, again, select all of the seasons you want to include and it should give you an average. This being unweighted means it'll be off a bit but it should work OK.

You might want to do a few different ones and switch them in and out as you see fit to mix things up. While the AI engine provides some variance, it may not be enough for your tastes. You play it your way.

With regard to strategies and the like, just figure out what settings you want to apply. Turn off the auto-adjust option in the STATS & AI tab. Enter the settings.

Sadly, this area can be a bit tricky, although having the locked stats can actually tend to help here. On OD, the game will try and change the strategy settings and also the non-stat-related league totals (EG sac bunts, steal attempts). So just keep a record of the settings handy and cross check it after you have reached Opening Day.

One key here is to never underestimate how closely all of these different settings work together. So plan it out properly and get the stats / LTMs and settings aligned as much as possible in a logical sense if you want good results. For example, don't have STEALING BASES set to RARELY then STOLEN BASE ATTEMPTS set to a contradictorily high figure.

Trust me, the more thought you put into all of this at the beginning, the more you'll get out.

(and, though I'm sure I need not tell you this now, BACK UP YOUR DAMN SAVES, BOY!)

Let me know if this helps, or if you need more info.

Good luck.

G

luckymann · 04-22-2023, 10:02 PM

For the ancillary add-ons such as modern stadiums etc. The answer is ABSOLUTELY. Just go to the mods board and you'll see a bunch of historical and fictional stadia and team graphics you can choose from, download and use.

Now, into the darker arts, I'm afraid...

If you have auto-expand and auto-evolve unchecked, whatever world you create will remain in place.

But... (there's always a but...)

For Negro Leaguers to automatically start coming in ahead of time, you need to either have Historical Minors invoked, which means you can't have auto-expand OFF and then get ALL minor league players from history and all of the chaos involved with historical minor league evolution.

or

You have to import them manually, which is not for the faint-hearted.

My advice to you is perhaps this.

Only take on some of these challenges now. Play out a save with a "compromised worldview". Learn from it, make note of the things you want to keep and the things you want to change. Amass some knowledge playing around with these other facets of the game. Keep putting together your plan.

Then at some point you'll know when it is time and you are ready and have figured out the way to go forward with the full universe exactly as you want it.

If you try and take on too much, too soon, you are almost certain of messing it up and losing valuable time and effort. That will - as I'm sure you are feeling right now - prove discouraging and disheartening.

So just keep working toward the bigger picture with a series of less ambitious strokes is how I did it and recommend anyone else do likewise.

G

matttb324 · 04-22-2023, 10:17 PM

Thank you for that really thoughtful response, I'm gonna screenshot that and use it as reference as I create this. I appreciate it. I'm not really discouraged. I have a three season old backup but it kind of got me thinking of trying again and doing it better.

One question though, the picture I posted above in this thread, that's not a quick fix for some of the spreadsheet stuff you are describing, is it? Seemed like it was allowing me to pick a year for the environment I want and then tailor output to that era? Do I have that wrong?

matttb324 · 04-22-2023, 10:41 PM

Just to clarify what I am asking...let's say I picked 1982 as a relatively balanced year in terms of pitching vs hitting (not sure that's the best year to pick but just as an example). So if I go to League Totals on the Stats & AI page and select 1982, then run the auto-calculate modifiers before Opening Day, and click Lock League totals and Use Pre-Calculated Modifiers, would I then get 1900 players playing like 1982?...guys hitting 30 or 40 home runs, pitcher ERAs in a 1982 range? Similarly, if I ever got to 1999 or something would I see home run totals in more of a 1982 style rather than Steroid numbers?

luckymann · 04-23-2023, 12:07 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by matttb324

Just to clarify what I am asking...let's say I picked 1982 as a relatively balanced year in terms of pitching vs hitting (not sure that's the best year to pick but just as an example). So if I go to League Totals on the Stats & AI page and select 1982, then run the auto-calculate modifiers before Opening Day, and click Lock League totals and Use Pre-Calculated Modifiers, would I then get 1900 players playing like 1982?...guys hitting 30 or 40 home runs, pitcher ERAs in a 1982 range? Similarly, if I ever got to 1999 or something would I see home run totals in more of a 1982 style rather than Steroid numbers?

Sure, that is pretty much how it works, although it comes at things much more from the offensive perspective so ERA and pitching metrics are more reactive than proactive.

When you come up with the year you like, just choose it from the dropdown. I like to do this the first time on the eve of OD and then lock them. Just select the year, then after the calc is done then lock it. Then check the auto-calc option underneath the stats table. When you proceed to OD, that's when another autocalc is done using all of the club's rosters and when the other settings can tend to shift about as I mentioned in my previous post.

You can usually tell if things have gone wrong in two ways.

The Modifiers on the RHS are really high; or
The stats shown in the Preseason Predictions are way out of whack.

Now, I'm prone to OC tendencies, so what I do each season is - on the eve of OD before it rolls over, I close the save and save a copy of the .lg folder as "ABC (name of league) AT OD YYYY". I just roll that over each season. (I do the same on the eve of recalc at the end of each season for my historical saves as well, but that's just me.) This gives you a QuickStart of sorts to go back to each season if things go wrong.

Make sure you cross check the BABIP as the one provided is often a little off for some reason.

That should do it. As I said earlier, get your settings and LTMs aligned as much as possible to avoid countermanding orders.

Just take your time the first few goes and before you know it this will all be second-nature to you.

G

matttb324 · 04-23-2023, 07:58 PM

That is extremely helpful, thank you. I'm going to follow your advise and give it a try.

luckymann · 04-23-2023, 08:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by matttb324

That is extremely helpful, thank you. I'm going to follow your advise and give it a try.

My pleasure, let me know how it all goes.

G

FuzzyRussianHat · 10-06-2023, 05:43 PM

Sorry to bump an older post, but I was curious if OP (or anyone else) has had good success with such a concept? I've been toying around with a historical league from 1901-onward that evolved differently from real MLB (with a lot of similarities to what Matttb324 posted wanting to do) and want to have the stats/strategy be largely consistent for all of history. But I've yet to find the secret sauce especially with making the dead ball era not be so dead. Maybe the player ratings in the database are so skewed to the era that even with roid-era year totals and modifiers that you still get more dead ball type stats. I've been playing with different settings and sim tests without much success thus far but am still intrigued by the idea.

luckymann · 10-06-2023, 08:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by FuzzyRussianHat

Sorry to bump an older post, but I was curious if OP (or anyone else) has had good success with such a concept? I've been toying around with a historical league from 1901-onward that evolved differently from real MLB (with a lot of similarities to what Matttb324 posted wanting to do) and want to have the stats/strategy be largely consistent for all of history. But I've yet to find the secret sauce especially with making the dead ball era not be so dead. Maybe the player ratings in the database are so skewed to the era that even with roid-era year totals and modifiers that you still get more dead ball type stats. I've been playing with different settings and sim tests without much success thus far but am still intrigued by the idea.

What I have done along these lines is to combine and then average out the stats for certain eras or even the entirety of baseball history, then just enter them in as required by the autocalc and check LOCK TOTALS. The engine makes all of the requisite amendments to player numbers and the like, so nothing needs fixing there. The one tricky thing is getting the right BABIP. Once again, I just straight up average it out over those seasons as per BBRef (Advanced Pitching).

Before you start things properly, run a sim for 5-10 seasons and see if you like the results, or makes changes and do it again if you don't. Rinse and repeat until you have your dataset.

Now this will still allow for some variance and outliers but, generally, less and fewer and keep in mind that the game will always be trying to bring your league totals back to these numbers.

Hope that helps.

G

FuzzyRussianHat · 10-07-2023, 06:00 PM

Your advice has helped some, I think I've played with it enough now to know how to avoid adjustments that completely break things/make things crazy unbalanced. I've gotten the dead ball era to play more active, but the range from around 1901-1915 still plays much lower offense and there's a bump into the 20s even with stats locked and the automatic strategy updates turned off.

Home runs seem to be the big difference. Even with a stat base from a more modern year or a steroid era year, home run totals remain low. The historical simulation accuracy for example shows even bumped up by 200%, it still stays low and you won't get league leaders much above 20 home runs over 162 games. But once guys like Ruth come in, the team totals and league leaders look relatively in line with what you'd expect from the stat base. I'd assume the way the players are rated in the database means that's probably the best I can do. My efforts to change just the home run totals/modifiers I've found either changed little or managed to completely break the entire stat base.

luckymann · 10-08-2023, 09:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by FuzzyRussianHat

Your advice has helped some, I think I've played with it enough now to know how to avoid adjustments that completely break things/make things crazy unbalanced. I've gotten the dead ball era to play more active, but the range from around 1901-1915 still plays much lower offense and there's a bump into the 20s even with stats locked and the automatic strategy updates turned off.

Home runs seem to be the big difference. Even with a stat base from a more modern year or a steroid era year, home run totals remain low. The historical simulation accuracy for example shows even bumped up by 200%, it still stays low and you won't get league leaders much above 20 home runs over 162 games. But once guys like Ruth come in, the team totals and league leaders look relatively in line with what you'd expect from the stat base. I'd assume the way the players are rated in the database means that's probably the best I can do. My efforts to change just the home run totals/modifiers I've found either changed little or managed to completely break the entire stat base.

Yeah, you'll never be able to get these pre-1920 guys mashing because they simply weren't that sort of hitter.

FuzzyRussianHat · 10-11-2023, 07:49 AM

In playing with this concept more, I did find a sort of workaround for the deadest part of the dead ball era. The key isn't fiddling with the stat modifiers, but the ballpark modifiers. I bumped each park's home run factors up by one (1.034 became 2.034, for example) and with the 1987 stat base, was able to get nearly perfect stats for much of the 1900s. You'd have the league leader in the 40s and a few behind him in the 30s with team home run totals and other stats looking like how I wanted them. Before that, the 1987 stat base with normal ballpark modifiers meant you could never get guys with more than maybe 20-25 home runs in a season.

The big thing though is you have to change it back to more normal numbers in the 1910s once actual sluggers come in. Otherwise, Babe Ruth hits triple digit dingers and other top contemporaries are regularly in the 60-70 HR range.

04-22-2023, 07:03 PM	#1
matttb324 Major Leagues Join Date: Apr 2019 Posts: 325	How Can You Even Out the Eras? Well, after learning my lesson about backing up the league more often, I think I am going to start over at 1901 and try again this time with more backups and less mistakes. I want to build on the concept I was working on, which was to try to even things out between the eras. For instance, starting in 1901, I want to use real players, mix them up and have them play 162 games each year. Black players would play from the start, a handful of clubs would play on artificial surface and everyone in a modern stadium, I will have free agency from the start and pretty much any other way I can even things out, I will do. But here are my questions: 1. What, if anything, can be done to even out the eras? For instance, what things could I do in the game to bring up averages in the 60s, bring them down in the 30s? 2. Is it possible to kind of normalize home runs. For instance, could Dead Ball HR leaders like Frank Baker be in the 40s or 50s for homers? 3. Can I move Dead Ball and later teams to a 5-man rotation and get managers to use relievers more or would the lack of players on the roster just mess this up? 4. Can i normalize strategy a bit so teams run and bunt about the same in the 50s as in the 10s and 80s? I doubt I'm the first person to think of this (I even read a book years ago that evened out all baseball stats through the eras) but I would be very curious to see the numbers if the eras were more evened out. Sorry for all the questions and thanks in advance!

04-22-2023, 09:46 PM	#4
luckymann Hall Of Famer Join Date: Nov 2019 Posts: 13,556	*Before starting - do you have any backup of the other league at all? You might not need to cut the whole thing, there may be an auto-save you can use?* Presuming that is not the case or you just want to make lemonade and start over, I'll look at your questions individually. First, the league totals. What I have done that works pretty well is to collate various eras' totals for each of the stats sought in the LTMs and then divide by the number of seasons totalled. Or, even better, have it reset to a fixed rate like 100000 AB. This will give you an average figure to use. So if you wanted to cut out the deadball and PED ERAs to give you some sort of cross-sectional total to use, go 1925 to 1994. BBRef should allow you to group them and give you the totals or you can do it in a spreadsheet. Then just divide by 70 and that is your yearly total. Enter that into the LTMs on the day before OD and check the Lock Totals and Auto-Calc boxes. This will be the total used every year. The big challenge with this is getting the BABIP right - just go to THIS link and, again, select all of the seasons you want to include and it should give you an average. This being unweighted means it'll be off a bit but it should work OK. You might want to do a few different ones and switch them in and out as you see fit to mix things up. While the AI engine provides some variance, it may not be enough for your tastes. You play it your way. With regard to strategies and the like, just figure out what settings you want to apply. Turn off the auto-adjust option in the STATS & AI tab. Enter the settings. Sadly, this area can be a bit tricky, although having the locked stats can actually tend to help here. On OD, the game will try and change the strategy settings and also the non-stat-related league totals (EG sac bunts, steal attempts). So just keep a record of the settings handy and cross check it after you have reached Opening Day. One key here is to never underestimate how closely all of these different settings work together. So plan it out properly and get the stats / LTMs and settings aligned as much as possible in a logical sense if you want good results. For example, don't have STEALING BASES set to RARELY then STOLEN BASE ATTEMPTS set to a contradictorily high figure. Trust me, the more thought you put into all of this at the beginning, the more you'll get out. (and, though I'm sure I need not tell you this now, BACK UP YOUR DAMN SAVES, BOY!) Let me know if this helps, or if you need more info. Good luck. G __________________ HISTORICAL DO-OVERS A'S RED SOX DODGERS CUSTOM SAVES ECLIPSE LEAGUE MOON SHOT LEAGUE EVERYMAN LEAGUE GULF LEAGUE USBA Last edited by luckymann; 04-22-2023 at 09:47 PM.

04-22-2023, 10:02 PM	#5
luckymann Hall Of Famer Join Date: Nov 2019 Posts: 13,556	For the ancillary add-ons such as modern stadiums etc. The answer is ABSOLUTELY. Just go to the mods board and you'll see a bunch of historical and fictional stadia and team graphics you can choose from, download and use. Now, into the darker arts, I'm afraid... If you have auto-expand and auto-evolve unchecked, whatever world you create will remain in place. But... (there's always a but...) For Negro Leaguers to automatically start coming in ahead of time, you need to either have Historical Minors invoked, which means you can't have auto-expand OFF and then get ALL minor league players from history and all of the chaos involved with historical minor league evolution. or You have to import them manually, which is not for the faint-hearted. My advice to you is perhaps this. Only take on some of these challenges now. Play out a save with a "compromised worldview". Learn from it, make note of the things you want to keep and the things you want to change. Amass some knowledge playing around with these other facets of the game. Keep putting together your plan. Then at some point you'll know when it is time and you are ready and have figured out the way to go forward with the full universe exactly as you want it. If you try and take on too much, too soon, you are almost certain of messing it up and losing valuable time and effort. That will - as I'm sure you are feeling right now - prove discouraging and disheartening. So just keep working toward the bigger picture with a series of less ambitious strokes is how I did it and recommend anyone else do likewise. G __________________ HISTORICAL DO-OVERS A'S RED SOX DODGERS CUSTOM SAVES ECLIPSE LEAGUE MOON SHOT LEAGUE EVERYMAN LEAGUE GULF LEAGUE USBA

10-06-2023, 05:43 PM	#11
FuzzyRussianHat Hall Of Famer Join Date: Dec 2020 Posts: 3,013	Sorry to bump an older post, but I was curious if OP (or anyone else) has had good success with such a concept? I've been toying around with a historical league from 1901-onward that evolved differently from real MLB (with a lot of similarities to what Matttb324 posted wanting to do) and want to have the stats/strategy be largely consistent for all of history. But I've yet to find the secret sauce especially with making the dead ball era not be so dead. Maybe the player ratings in the database are so skewed to the era that even with roid-era year totals and modifiers that you still get more dead ball type stats. I've been playing with different settings and sim tests without much success thus far but am still intrigued by the idea. __________________ Baseball: The World's Game fictional world reports Continental Baseball Federation world reports (8-tier promotion/relegation sim and college feeder)

10-07-2023, 06:00 PM	#13
FuzzyRussianHat Hall Of Famer Join Date: Dec 2020 Posts: 3,013	Your advice has helped some, I think I've played with it enough now to know how to avoid adjustments that completely break things/make things crazy unbalanced. I've gotten the dead ball era to play more active, but the range from around 1901-1915 still plays much lower offense and there's a bump into the 20s even with stats locked and the automatic strategy updates turned off. Home runs seem to be the big difference. Even with a stat base from a more modern year or a steroid era year, home run totals remain low. The historical simulation accuracy for example shows even bumped up by 200%, it still stays low and you won't get league leaders much above 20 home runs over 162 games. But once guys like Ruth come in, the team totals and league leaders look relatively in line with what you'd expect from the stat base. I'd assume the way the players are rated in the database means that's probably the best I can do. My efforts to change just the home run totals/modifiers I've found either changed little or managed to completely break the entire stat base. __________________ Baseball: The World's Game fictional world reports Continental Baseball Federation world reports (8-tier promotion/relegation sim and college feeder)

04-22-2023, 07:22 PM	#2
thehef Hall Of Famer Join Date: Jun 2006 Posts: 5,345	I am absolutely not the expert on this, and I'm pretty sure there are at least a few gamer-posters here who are. That said, I would start by experimenting with "Totals from year:" on the League Settings > Stats & AI panel. If you wanted your 1935 season to play out - statistically - like 1965, you'd select 1965 here. In this example, you might also want to change - on the left-hand side of the same panel - Historical Hear (under League Strategy, AI and Stats Modifiers), and Select Which Settings to Import (under Import Settings) to 1965. Again, I'm not the expert, but this is where I'd start for some testing and experimentation... Most surely, if I'm not correct here, someone with more knowledge in this area will point it out

04-22-2023, 09:29 PM	#3
matttb324 Major Leagues Join Date: Apr 2019 Posts: 325	Thanks for your response. I was playing around with those and found this tool... it seems like what it does it to take all stat expectations from a given year, not sure if that is correct?

04-22-2023, 10:17 PM	#6
matttb324 Major Leagues Join Date: Apr 2019 Posts: 325	Thank you for that really thoughtful response, I'm gonna screenshot that and use it as reference as I create this. I appreciate it. I'm not really discouraged. I have a three season old backup but it kind of got me thinking of trying again and doing it better. One question though, the picture I posted above in this thread, that's not a quick fix for some of the spreadsheet stuff you are describing, is it? Seemed like it was allowing me to pick a year for the environment I want and then tailor output to that era? Do I have that wrong?

04-22-2023, 10:41 PM	#7
matttb324 Major Leagues Join Date: Apr 2019 Posts: 325	Just to clarify what I am asking...let's say I picked 1982 as a relatively balanced year in terms of pitching vs hitting (not sure that's the best year to pick but just as an example). So if I go to League Totals on the Stats & AI page and select 1982, then run the auto-calculate modifiers before Opening Day, and click Lock League totals and Use Pre-Calculated Modifiers, would I then get 1900 players playing like 1982?...guys hitting 30 or 40 home runs, pitcher ERAs in a 1982 range? Similarly, if I ever got to 1999 or something would I see home run totals in more of a 1982 style rather than Steroid numbers?

04-23-2023, 07:58 PM	#9
matttb324 Major Leagues Join Date: Apr 2019 Posts: 325	That is extremely helpful, thank you. I'm going to follow your advise and give it a try.

10-11-2023, 07:49 AM	#15
FuzzyRussianHat Hall Of Famer Join Date: Dec 2020 Posts: 3,013	In playing with this concept more, I did find a sort of workaround for the deadest part of the dead ball era. The key isn't fiddling with the stat modifiers, but the ballpark modifiers. I bumped each park's home run factors up by one (1.034 became 2.034, for example) and with the 1987 stat base, was able to get nearly perfect stats for much of the 1900s. You'd have the league leader in the 40s and a few behind him in the 30s with team home run totals and other stats looking like how I wanted them. Before that, the 1987 stat base with normal ballpark modifiers meant you could never get guys with more than maybe 20-25 home runs in a season. The big thing though is you have to change it back to more normal numbers in the 1910s once actual sluggers come in. Otherwise, Babe Ruth hits triple digit dingers and other top contemporaries are regularly in the 60-70 HR range. __________________ Baseball: The World's Game fictional world reports Continental Baseball Federation world reports (8-tier promotion/relegation sim and college feeder)