Yankee bias, anti-Red Sox bias

Just wondering, does SOM have a Yankee bias, anti-Red Sox bias? I know it's a New York company and Hal was a big Yankee fan. Just now, I look at Tony Lazzeri's steal rating for 1929, and he's a 4-6 lead, 17-12. Yet he had 9 stolen bases and 10 caught stealings. Should be frankly awful. It's these little things. Agreed, it'd be more helpful if I noted significant card oddities. I always felt Ted Williams did not get the homer calls on his cards, but it's hard to calculate.

On Ted Williams, when you consider he missed five seasons to military service, give him at least 30 home runs every year, and he'd be close to 700. In reality, he'd probably do better than 30 homers a season. Nothing to do with SOM, just saying, what a hitter.

I have been up to the office in Glen Head , by the looks of the photos hanging I think Hal is a Met fan.

Anti Red Sox, hmmm. I know the cards reflect more than the stats the player accumulated, and ballpark is big. But in 1967, Carl Yastrzemski had a season that produced the 3rd highest WAR of all time 12.5. The top 10 are Ruth, Ruth, Yaz, Ruth, Hornsby, Bonds, Ruth, Bonds, Gehrig, Ruth (11.7). All of these other folks, despite being average defenders got monster cards and are priced in the 12-16 million range, but Yaz, a very good defender got a good but not great card that is priced at 9.34 million. And may be overpriced at that. I know Fenway 67 is a huge hitters park, but 67 was also a big pitchers' era. I mean the next closest player was Brooks with a WAR of 7.7. Seems like Yaz got the shaft on his card IMO.

What does WAR have to do with anything? It just measures the weakness of the bench. The weaker the bench, the better WAR rating for a player.

That's not true, badjam. WAR is measured against the league's replacement level player, not the team's.

The real issue is that the 67 Yaz card has such an awful baseline. Ruth's big WAR years were in an era where who teams batted in the .280's, and HR were rare. The league OPS for Ruth's 1921 card was .767, for his 1923 card it was .739. For Yaz's 1967 season it was .654. Since all the cards are run off of the league baseline, Yaz was spotting Ruth respectively 113 and 85 points of OPS.

And a secondary issue is that defense is badly underrepresented in the game model. The difference between a 3e10 and a 1e10 in LF is about 15.5 hits allowed per year. That's less than one PO per every 10 games, or a range factor difference of <0.1. But if we look at all the players who have played 1500 innings in LF since 1900, their range factors are from 0.64 (Brian Jordan) to 1.98 (Randy Winn). SOM simply can't replicate that with their game model. So Yaz's defensive contribution (his RF that season was 1.93) was better than all LF career marks other than Winn, which creates a hell of a lot of DWAR. Around 2 WAR if I calculated it correctly. Ruth's DWAR in those years were respectively practically none and about 1.3 WAR (1923 was the only season where fangraphs has him with any significant defensive contribution).

So Yaz's 1967 season can't be properly simulated in SOM's model. And the biggest reason why is that they simply can't generate more than a fraction of a defensive WAR for any corner outfielder with their simulation, even if he's an e0.

And HAL may well be a Mets fan now, but when he created the game he was a teenaged die-hard Yankee fan, and that persisted for many years. There is a Yankee bias in his card sets. But he tries (too hard) to make sure that successful teams are successful in season replays. As a die-hard Pirates fan, I have replayed the 2015 season several times and the Pirates nearly always win about 115 games. But from some of their down years where they won 70, their SOM rosters would struggle to win 60. And the Yankees have obviously been much more successful than most teams (especially the Red Sox, who were basically little better than the 2000-2010 Pirates for much of their history.