Historicals: Fielding Modifier Problem from 9 to X

[risp2out]

(This is a repost of something I put in over on the Historical forum.)

A warning to all of you who may be interested in 1870s historical play.

This weekend, I've been doing my first 1871 Historical in X. I did a couple in 9 and quite enjoyed getting familiar with those players and that time period. I really liked experiencing the feel of the game with all of the errors that were committed.

But, in the X game, I'm getting very few errors. Too few. The fielding percentage numbers are around .980. So, I checked my OOTP9 games and found a much more reasonable .830 (arguably still a little bit too high, but close enough for government work.) So, I did a little investigation and I see that in OOTP9, under League Totals, there was a line for "Fielding Errors" that is gone in OOTPX, replaced it seems with Position Modifiers (where fielding can be modified position-by-position.)

This seems cool, but here's the PROBLEM: in 9, Fielding Errors was automatically modified in the early 1870s to 7.245 when starting an 1871 historical. In X, the game doesn't make any modifications to the Fielding Errors by position. This are similar problems with other modifiers - Passed Balls, Double Plays, and Starting Pitcher Endurance being the most obvious for 1870s simming.

Now, obviously, I can go into X and modify all of these myself, but that's work I didn't have to do in 9 and I'm going to have to remember to do it for every season. Having the fielding modifiers by position is cool. A trip to Retrosheet may be in order before I tweak and begin again. But, for ease of game play, it would be cool if historical games modified the percentages automatically like they did in 9.

Can this be fixed in the patch? All of the relevant modifiers are there in 9 (except that Fielding Errors will have to be entered by position now).

A LITTLE FURTHER RESEARCH: I just noticed that the era_fielding document is different in X than it was in 9. In X, it now has Fielding % by position, something it didn't have in 9. I wonder if the Fielding % info is not getting processed by the game.

A LITTLE FURTHER FURTHER RESEARCH: I made 1871 leagues in both 9 and X last night. In 9, errors were automatically adjusted by the game for the the year 1871 itself. Further adjustments were made for 1872. In X, no adjustments occured automatically in 1871. In 1872, the game appeared to kick in the adjustments automatically. I tried this with a 1920 Historical start in X, too. Same thing. Is there any way for the the game to make the appropriate adjustments automatically for the first year of your Historical league?

[SteveP]

The first point is that the game does not automatically create correct modifiers for anything (HRs, Ks, BBs, etc) in the first season. So errors are just another example of the same thing. If you have all the modifiers still set to 1.000, you have unadjusted (therefore inaccurate) modifiers.

There is a way to get correct modifiers for a first season, but you have to do it yourself. Even then, depending upon your technique, you may get correct modifiers for everything else, but not for errors (don't know why -- it's a mystery). So you have to do a little calculation work and manually adjust the modifiers for errors. After the first season, all the modifiers are adjusted automatically.

Note: there is bad data in parts of the fielding DB (double decimal points in various cells). That could have an impact on fielding modifiers even when they are calculated automatically. Don't know if this will be fixed in the next patch. But you can fix it yourself if you haven't done that already.