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Originally Posted by seth70liz76
Just out of (self) interest--are you using actual totals, or totals born out of research and hard work?
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Uh.... neither one. For 1871, I used the totals that shipped with the game - I didn't alter them at all, other than to proportionally reduce everything to a base at-bat total of 100,000, to make the numbers a bit easier to work with.
For each subsequent year, I have a spreadsheet that I've devised that basically looks at the fictional totals for one year, and the desired totals for the next. So, if one year the league bats .300 and the next year I want them to hit .270, the spreadsheet will tell me to increase the league hit totals by 10%.
It's not quite as simple as that for a couple of reasons which I could get into here but won't.... but that's the basic concept. Each year, I just plug my numbers into the spreadsheet and it gives me the totals. So far, I've mostly found that I'm getting a little more hitting than the actually MLB did for these years.
There are a couple of reasons for this:
1. Because the average 1871 player age is around 22 or 23, I'm still seeing things adjust every year as hitters are on the upward slope of their careers. This should level off within a year or two.
2. Some teams occasionally run out of pitchers and have to use position players, which tends to lead to more hitting.
I actually don't mind the extra hitting too much at this point, because it compensates for the fact that OOTP doesn't give as many errors as it should even with the reduced 1870s fielding percentages. Also, because OOTP tends to move toward a universe like modern baseball where players aren't at the extremes like they were in the 1870s, this gives me the chance to have some players batting in the .400s like they did back then.
Overall, the difference is slight though. In reality, the batting average in 1876 was .280 I think, and the last time I checked my league was hitting at a .289 clip for the year.