Deadball pitchers

Deadball pitchers dominate multi-era leagues and wreck offensive strategies that rely on homerun hitters. This has been the case for AGES in the sim and it really skews leagues when a guy like Addie Joss can pitch 300+ innings and only give up 4 HR. even when facing legendary sluggers from future years.

The core balancing problem here, as I see it, is that those homers don’t actually turn into something else. If you believe that Ken Griffey Jr won’t hit barely any home runs against Joss because he’s hitting a dead ball and that ball won’t go out of the park, he should instead be hitting more doubles, triples, and fly outs, things that would happen if you hit a dead ball very hard. But the sim doesn’t translate the missing homers into anything and power hitters just languish against dead ball pitchers. It makes playing across eras feel really imbalanced and I know many people who hate playing with deadball pitchers.

This is a long-standing issue with the sim and there could be several different ways of solving it, but something really should be done about the dominance of the dead ball era.