[IatricSB]

BigTrain and I had a private message conversation about DIPS where I explained why I don't think it works well for the past. Here's a bit of it...

I'm confident in getting realistic results as a whole for the league with the help of era settings. But the variance between pitchers seems to be less now than in past version of OOTP5. With OOTP5, it was important in the deadball era to look at Avoiding Hits and Avoiding Walks. Homerun ratings were valued to a lesser extent since there weren't many being given up as a whole anyway.

With OOTP6 and DIPS, Stuff (Avoiding K's) is an important rating. With present day pitchers, you see a wide range of stuff with guys getting ratings for the most part between 3 and 10. In the deadball era, the majority of the pitchers import with stuff ratings of 3 or 4, so there isn't a lot of variety. So you end up with only two of the ratings (Control and Movement) to distinguish between two pitchers. So you see a lot of pitchers with ratings of 4/7/7 or 3/7/6, or 4/6/7 for example and as a result, there is not as big a difference between the elite pitchers like Addie Joss and some of the mediocre pitchers. The end result seems (at least in my experience) to be that I get historically accurate league results with career ERAs falling in a much tighter range than they used to.