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Alright. Well, I guess it's fortunate that I took today off from work. I have spent a total of 6-7 hours getting all of the minor leagues set up as well as the College League.

I knew that there was a lot that you could edit after the league was already "started", so I left a lot of the details for later. The problem is that the game had some strange ideas about the newly created minor leagues.

MINOR LEAGUE STRUCTURE
The game correctly created enough minor league teams (one affiliate at each level for each Major league team). However, it didn't seem to care what kind of divisions it set up, mixing AL and NL teams in a seemingly random fashion within the structure. You might remember in 6.5 that the minor league structure matched the structure of the Majors. Not necessarily so in 2006. So I did some research on the minor leagues. It was also a good time to correct some minor league team names since many of them were outdated.

In the real-life minors, AL and NL affiliates are also shuffled amongst the leagues, so this didn't seem to be as big of a problem as I first thought. I just figured that I would use the real minor league structure and problem solved. Well, yes and no...

First, the Majors have more teams than we do, so some minor league affiliates simply didn't exist in our league. Combine that with the Tokyo Giants and Homestead Grays and there were some decisions to make. I started with the same basic structure of AAA, with the Independent and Pacific Coast Leagues being subleagues of the Maelstrom AAA system. However, there needed to be some reshuffling to get a decent number of teams in each division. So I ended up with four 4-team divisions in the PCL and three 4-team divisions in the Independent League.

AA was similar...except that there are 3 leagues in the real-world AA system. Unfortunately, there is no way to add a league in OOTP 2006, so I would have to work with the two that I had initially created. I decided to do a simple geographical split, with a Western and Eastern League, each containing a North and South division. This broke with the real-life Eastern, Southern and Texas Leagues.

A became a little bit of a problem as well. MLB has three levels of Single-A: Advanced Class-A, Class-A and Short Season Class-A. Well, most of our teams were from Advanced Class-A, but we had a few from Class-A as well (mostly the Midwest League). Well, even Advanced Class-A had 3 Leagues, so again there had to be some adjustment. I decided to use the California League and Florida State League since there was so much representation with teams from those states. I did a West and East for each and placed teams based on geography as much as possible.

The other issue is that in MLB, each of these leagues works independently, even if they are at the same level. In our world, the AAA or AA or A sub-leagues will play each other for the championship and All-Star games. That said, unlike 6.5, we will have AL affiliates playing NL affiliates. But, there is still no inter-subleague play even at lower levels. So, while not 100% accurate to real-life, it's what I'll call "historical fiction". I figured this would give us the flavor of real-life even though it won't mimic it perfectly.

TEAM SETUP - MINORS AND MAJORS
Well, before I could even setup the structure above, I had to correct all of the minor league team names. Each of them is true to life (apart from Homestead which had some creative liberties taken).

Once the structure was in place, I realized that I had to make sure all of the home cities were correct for all of these teams. The game did a decent job of pulling in the correct city in cases like the "Louisville..." or the "Akron...". However, it was lost with teams like the "Iowa...". For those, I had to manually enter the city names and select the correct matching city in cases where there were cities in multiple states with the same name. I figured I'd doublecheck all team cities to be sure they were accurate. Well, in some cases the game had chosen a matching city in the wrong state. For example, the Ottawa Lynx were not assigned to the Ottawa in Canada, but one in the States. I had to change the home country to get it to pull the right city. In other cases, the city from the correct state had to be chosen. (The Salem Avalanche are from Salem, VA NOT Salem, MA for example).

While I was at it, I figured I'd check out our Major League cities as well. Sure enough, some teams had been assigned to the incorrect city or no city at all. Neither Chicago team or New York team had been assigned since it tried to find "Chicago (A)" or "New York (N)" and not simple "Chicago" or "New York". This was easy to fix (though time consuming to check them all!).

Ahhh...but there was another minor issue that needed fixed as well. The game had generated all of these stadiums for each minor league team. The problem was, I had just changed their city and/or team nickname. Well, in most cases the stadium was named for one of these. So I had to rename all of the stadiums.

Last, but not least, all of the College Teams needed corrected as well. Commish Dugan came up with 8 more colleges to use to round out our expanded MCL. Well, I still had to research to find the correct home cities and nicknames...and then had to put them in divisions based on geography again. On top of all of this, the generic logos needed regenerated for everything I had done to this point since team initials had changed in almost every case. That's another button click on 100+ screens.

So, am I done? Well, I'd still like to have team colors that match real-life (and team logos too for that matter!)...and stadium names that match. But that is minor and can be done at another time.

THE COLLEGE LEAGUE
The basic structure was the "easy" part. There still had to be a way to get player ages in the Maelstrom College League to be accurate. As it was, there were many players in their 30s in there along with players with various amounts of service time.

Using the Export Roster function in League Setup, I got the MCL roster into Excel. Doing a find and replace, I corrected all birthdates to put players between 18 and 22. Sure there might be a real-life exception to these ages, but this is close enough for us. I also zeroed out service time. But that still left another issue...

Originally, Commish Dugan and I figured that we'd have to leave on League finances for the MCL to allow players to be signed by our league. So salaries and income had been adjusted down appropriately. In addition, players were to become FA after 4 years to simulate graduation. However, the game had randomly generated contracts for the players in the league. So some 22 year olds had 3 year contracts while 18 year olds had 1 or 2. This just wouldn't work. The only way was to turn finances off completely. Players could still be assigned to teams when they were drafted using Commish powers. Still some work to be done every season adjusting ages for entering players and retiring seniors that don't enter the draft, but that's not too bad and beats having to edit every player's age manually.

PARTING THOUGHTS
I was happy to see some Major League quality players already in the MCL (game generated) despite the AA level assigned to the league. There will still need to be some manual adjustment to get things to where we would like them to be though. That part isn't done yet.

New Legends still need added.

Oh, I noticed when looking through our options that the game had set average media contracts at $5M. Well, our actual average is around $38M, so I changed that so we don't have any issues in a few years.

Injuries are a little strange. Everything carried over from the prior version. However, since we jumped back to January 1st, players have an extra 3 months of recovery during the off-season.

Hopefully, all of the other things will be cleaned up this week and we'll be ready to roll! Stay tuned!