Quote:
Originally Posted by gordyhulten
You've got fewer minors, which may be having an effect, although I'm at a loss as to why.
I've got 24 teams in all levels, down to Rookie, and a 15 round draft, FWIW.
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Huh. That's actually fewer players in the draft than recommended, although now that you can use ghost players that's more of a general guideline than a requirement for a stable league. FWIW, the rule of thumb is 5 rounds per level of minors. The real-life draft is 50 rounds long for the same number of levels that you have but since roughly half of the players drafted don't end up playing a single game with the drafted team (due to high schoolers choosing to go to college instead, teams picking non-baseballers in the hopes that they'd choose a safer sport than football or basketball (Charlie Ward was one of many players chosen by an MLB team), draft and follows that didn't work out, and so on), it more or less evens out.
As for ERAs and so forth going that low, random chance in the form of the kinds of players the CPU generates, who gets hurt, and who gets those one in a million ratings boosts can drop a league ERA by half a run. I like the 1980s as well as anybody else, but when you have a league that is based at around a 4.00 earned run average, it's not all that strange to see it slide down to 3.60 (or up to 4.40, for that matter). The '80s were, in a manner of speaking, a transitory period in baseball between the deadball era 60s and the high-flying 90s. There were years where things seemed to regress (1981 - NL ERA: 3.49) and others where it was almost like they'd time-warped into the 90s (1987).
Now that weather varies from one location to the next, even the locations of the games during the summer months can have an effect on the end of year results. Half a run off isn't totally out of the ordinary. That being said, if multiple people are having the issue in multiple leagues on the default settings, I for one would be happy to regress and look at it. I should add here that as a beta tester I simmed out my fair share of leagues, some of which were manually adjusted to recreate the stats of the 1980s, and I didn't get anything like leagues uniformly seeing their ERAs go down into the 3.5s.