Where are you guys/the sim lords finding historical fielding percentages by league? I've been looking for the past 30 minutes and I can't even find the averages for recent years let alone in the 1800s...

http://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/NL/1915.shtml

Scroll down to the fielding section

You can replace NL with AL and you can replace 1915 with any year. So

http://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/AL/2004.shtml should also work

Got them, thanks. But that's only for the entire league, and not by individual position so while helpful I guess that's not the information that the engine is going to be using during the simulations...so does anyone know any way to get those averages sorted by position?

oh that's a good point, i totally missed that.

you can get them from baseball-reference but you have to look at the individual player.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/l/lowelmi01.shtml

the lgFld% column lists the league fielding percentage AT THAT POSITION for the year.

Oh man, ok so looking at that and taking the example that Tzent used in the initial forum with Jason Bartlett. He said that if the pitcher was from 1957, the average fielding percentage for a SS would be .9609 but using the numbers on BBRef you get .9605. And for the Honus Wagner example with the 2005 pitcher Tzent said it would be .97399 and using the BBRef numbers you get .974, which is certainly close enough to be serviceable.

Even so, I doubt anyone is willing to take the time and go through each position for each season and average them if you have to manually go through and find 2 players from the same position, in the same season, one from each league, and then average their 2 fielding percentages. There has to be an easier way to do this. Knowing the best and worst fielding percentages by position and season seems to be an integral part of the new defensive system.

Also, I wonder how the sim is going to be looking at historical fielding percentages for the outfield players. Will the league average for each season be based on the 3 Outfield positions as a whole, or will each position be given its own season average? If you draft Carlos Beltran and play him in right field how is the engine going to deal with that? Which fielding percentage is it going to use? Beltran's fielding percentage relative to other CFs or other OFs overall? And then will it take the fielding percentage from the Pitcher's season's CFs or OFs?

Am I making this more confusing than it has to be?