Baseball Mogul: Identifying "Real" Players

"Chris V." recently wrote the following review for Baseball Mogul 2019:

My biggest complaint is the historical rosters having players you’ve never heard of having all these high ratings. For example, I just started a 1989 season for the Dodgers and there is a catcher named Homar Rojas. His ratings in commish mode are as follows: contact 77, power 81, gap power 90, eye 69, speed 67, arm 89, range 77, fielding 66, bunting 80, health 83. There are many more examples like that. It almost feels like the programmers are sneaking their names in here and making themselves really good. Make them save that for their own create a player game.

That ruins the game for me so for that, I give 2 stars.

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My response:

Chris,

Thanks for the detailed review. Homar Rojas was a real prospect with the Dodgers, making it to Triple-A but never reaching the majors.

'80' is the major league average, so a player that is rated as 72/77 (like Rojas) is probably a borderline major leaguer. However, I do agree that his ratings may be higher than his minor league record warrants, so I'll take another look at the algorithm that projects major league performance from minor league stats.

For the record, I didn't sneak any players into the game with my name and "really good ratings". Starting with Baseball Mogul 2019, all players in any new game should be real historical players. If you want to check if a player is real or fictional, click on their name in the Scouting Report. If the player is real, this will take you to their page at Baseball-Reference.com.

Also, you can click 'Download Player Photos' in Advanced Options (on the Tools Menu). After doing this, the Scouting Report for many historical players will include their real-life photo.

Clay