RBurgh--
I think you are missing the point(s);
1.What we are asking for is disclosure of what factors are involved.
Right now we have no idea why Bonds might hit 40 homeruns or 100-- why would he hit lets say 60 or 70 in half a season and then 20 more the rest of the way.
SURE it MIGHT happen in real life that way, but this kind of stuff happens regularly in the game, and most of us have come to the realization that its because the percentages are being modified.
All we want to know is how.
2. Nev has been playing for a while-- hes always said win or lose, that its all about the results making some kind of reasonably consistent sense; and has always asked for improvements to the game that would reflect better ability to strato-gize (pardon the pun) and make decisions. Have we had any luck with this in the past 3 years?
Nope. I'm not. What you and Nev are asking for according to your above post is a predictable random number generator. But by any definition of random, predictability is not possible. And for SOM to give you their code for the random number generator would let somebody here write a routine that predicted what numbers would come up for the next evening's games. Trust me, you don't want that.
Bad gamblers rely on things like "the law of averages" and "such and so is due". Las Vegas is built on the fallacy of those arguments. They JUST ... DON"T ... WORK.
I have run hundreds of league simulations for various reasons. I would guess that the standard deviation of the number of wins for any given team is about 5 - i.e. about 2/3 of the time the team will come within 5 games + or - of their average over a very large number of simulations. that's about 6.25% of 81 wins, the average number of wins per team. And it takes about 13,000 random numbers in order to make that happen.
Barry bonds generally gets about 720 plate appearances per league. 13,000 divided by 720 is about 18 (son of a gun, it takes 18 batter pitcher matchups to go through each team's lineup once). Statistics textbooks tell us that if the standard deviation of something that takes 13,000 events into account is 6.25%, then the standard deviation of something that takes only 720 events into account is 6.25% x the square root of 18 (which is about 4.25), or 26%. That means that if Bonds is "supposed" to hit 73 HR on his card, about 2/3 of the time he will be within 55 and 91. In half a season, the SD should be 1.4 times 26%, or about 37%. 37% of 36.5 is 13.5. So 2/3 of the time Bonds will hit between 23 and 40 homers. 70 in half a season is (70 - 36.5) / 13.5 or about 2.5 standard deviations away from the norm. That's about a 3% chance. 20 is (36.5-20) / 13.5 or about 1.25 standard deviations away from the norm, so it is about a 25% chance. So the chances of Bonds hitting 70 HR in the first half of the season and then 20 in the 2nd half is 3% of 25%, or about 0.75%. Since Nev has played close to 2000 leagues here, it should have happened to him 15 times.