Our draft league uses players from both leagues. Does that mean we should use the Neutral Era for league play?
The neutral era represents the 20th century average in several ways … overall level of offense, composition of offense (rates of doubles, triples, homers), pitcher durability, and error rates at each position. There’s nothing wrong with using the neutral era for your league…some people do this just because they don’t like the offensive explosion we’ve seen in the past few years. But there’s no need to use the neutral era just because you’re using players from both the AL and NL. After removing pitcher hitting stats from the NL, the AL and NL stats have been virtually identical almost every season in recent memory. That means your league can use either the NL era or AL era from the current season and get essentially the same results, because Diamond Mind automatically adjusts for the effects of the DH. If you use the Neutral Era instead of the “2003 A” or “2003 N” era, you’ll get less offense, fewer homers, more complete games, and more errors. In short, you’ll get “20th century ave
