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Since all the cool kids are focusing on historical puresimming these days, I figured I'd jump into the fray.
My primary intrest here would be to seed a 24-team associaiton with players -- say from 1901 -- and just let the league play out until like 1950 or so when I'd take control of a team.

One little hiccup, is that I don't know what would happen to the Babe. Wouldn't he just show up as a pitcher? Anyone have any workarounds or database tweaks?

I believe he would just show up as a pitcher. One thing I suggested in the old forums is that when he becomes a fielder, you can use "Force retire" to end his pitching career, then import him as a batter.

Edit: He would have two separate player cards.

Bryan, welcome to the cool kids' club. [:)]

Yes, the Babe Ruth issue is a bit of a 'known bug' - he imports into the league as an amateur pitcher, and consequently never develops any talent as a batter. In different associations, he may go on to become the next Cy Young, or struggle along as a mediocre pitcher, but he doesn't become an outfielder.

The 'workaround' you might have is to delete the existing 'Babe Ruth' player from your game after the 1918 season, and specifically import a new Babe Ruth 1919, manually assigning him to the same team where he will be an outfielder. Unfortunately, your 'new' Babe Ruth wouldn't have the pitching records from the 'retired' Babe Ruth - they would be two different players who happen to have the same name. (Also, I don't know if you can 'delete' yet - if you simply have the first one 'retire', PureSim will complain about the 'duplicate player' when you try to import a second Babe Ruth).

Alternately, you could delete his pitching statistics from a copy of the Lahman database, and just have him appear as an amateur outfielder, which might suit your tastes more, and is pretty much guaranteed to work.

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In general, pitcher/slash players are something that puts a real crimp in simulating the era from 1870 to 1910, as rosters of that time period were so much smaller that most pitchers also played regularly in the field. When deciding 'what position did he play', PureSim opts for the position with the most appearances. So if your guy was the starting pitcher in 40 games, and the starting first baseman in 50 games, he shows up as a first baseman who can't pitch. So most associations based on an import of those seasons have a real dearth of quality pitching.

We might be able to obviate this by modifying a Lahman DB to make more 'pure' pitchers from those eras, or Shaun could adjust the weighting (so that a roughly split fielder/pitcher as I described would become a pitcher, not a fielder), and ideally Shaun could make whatever adjustments are necessary to allow pitchers to have normal batting and fielding attributes (essentially nullifying the difference between 'pitcher' and 'hitter' in the game's interpretation of the world, so that all players are modelled as 'both').

The latter would have the neat effect of letting you put in your fifth outfielder as a pitcher to 'save the bullpen' in a lost cause, have a good-hitting pitcher that you could use as a pinch-hitter on occasion, would model the Babe as a great hitting pitcher, or let you just drop him in the outfield, and would provide the classic OF/P of a bygone era. But, of course, its more work for Shaun, and probably rates well below a number of other features people ask for regularly.

Ok, you can't do as I suggest. Maybe if you have a sandbox created association you can.

ORIGINAL: DandricSturm

Ok, you can't do as I suggest. Maybe if you have a sandbox created association you can.

I was able to do what you suggested in my current career, and I was probably using 8.21. I believe the game reported an error, but then when I looked in the pool Babe was there, as a batter. So it works, but it may display an error.