Quote:
Originally Posted by No Pepper
This is great news, thank you for doing this. And for telling us about how you use OOTP to set this up. Which brings me to my questions.
Are you filling new team rosters with the "fill team with fictional players", using an "expansion draft" or some other method? What do your reserve rosters look like?
I'm enjoying this so far.
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Glad you're enjoying it. It's been fun for me to see how things are coming together. I've never done a historical replay of any sort before, so I'm sure there are things I could be doing differently, but I'm having fun with it.
In terms of player movement, I tried to look around a little over at baseball reference to get a rough idea of player movement. To be fair, "a little" is pretty accurate. I didn't spend much time on it, but I came away with the idea that players could jump teams pretty freely. I didn't want guys who were really good for one team getting completely lost. I have financials turned off and no minors, and at the moment, I have roster size at 15.
When a team folds, I keep that team around until the offseason. OOTP still allows that team to make trades (set on the lowest frequency setting), so sometimes a folded team has made a trade. In the offseason, I use the league structure editor to remove the folded teams and add the new teams. The teams that get removed have all their players released into the FA pool. Now with financials off, there's no bidding on these players, but teams do sign them. I'm not sure exactly how OOTP decides which team gets which player, but it's worked out alright. I did feel that the Marylands were a bit too strong, so I sent some of their players to the White Stockings after they had been signed. I just don't trust OOTP's handling of historical finances enough to try it that way. I'm not prepared to deal with any headaches and the rest of this is still pretty new to me, so I've got enough to keep track of. Like I said earlier, I'm having fun with it and I think adding financials in might make it a bit of a chore. Anyway, some of the existing teams have picked up the FA's, and the new teams have picked up enough guys to field a 15 player team.
It's worth pointing out that when the league went from 9 to 11 teams between 1871 and 1872, I did create another 40 random FA's (2 additional teams, 15 players on the active roster, and 5 reserve) that teams could sign. I wanted to make sure that the new teams had enough players to choose from to pick up, and they did.
As of June 1, 1873, here's how the reserve rosters look in terms of number of players:
25 - Baltimore Canaries
4 - Baltimore Marylands
27 - Boston Red Stockings
22 - Brooklyn Atlantics
6 - Elizabeth Resolutes
29 - New York Mutuals
29 - Philadelphia Athletics
5 - Philadelphia White Stockings
7 - Washington Blue Legs
The trend you see above is that the new teams have only a handful of reserve guys, while the returning teams have quite a few. Brooklyn was a new team last season, and had quite a bit fewer players on the reserve roster than they do now. I think what's happening is that teams aren't really releasing guys so much as they're stashing them away when they sign new guys. It's also worth pointing out that there are currently 157 guys sitting unsigned in the free agent pool. Some of them look like they're as good or better than guys on a roster somewhere, but for whatever reason, they haven't been signed. At any rate, there's plenty of guys for teams to pick up if they need a replacement.
I did not use the expansion draft because that's not really what it was like. Essentially, all these teams existed as amateur clubs, and whether or not they paid the $10 fee to join the NA, they were already somewhat established. They didn't get any opportunity to draft from the existing teams.
When the league went from 11 teams to 9 teams between 1872 and 1873, I just let the folded teams release their players and the new teams sign from the FA pool. I didn't worry about the quantity of players since we had 30 fewer active roster spots to fill league wide.
In terms of talent on the reserve rosters, I do see some guys getting stashed there that could play for other teams. Offensively, most of the guys are 1-2 stars. There are a decent number of 2.5* guys, and only a couple of 3* guys. The one 4* guy that I saw is a 3B with ratings that don't seem to justify being 4*. His contact is only 6 (I use the 1-10 scale), and the stars of the league are all in the 9-10 range with 8 being a good hitter and 7 being a regular. 6 contact is pretty much back-up or starter on a lousy team, so I chalk this guy up to weird star ratings. There are some 7-8 contact guys, but for the most part, they're with teams where better players are preventing them from getting on the active roster. On the pitching side, it's really hard for me to tell how good the reserves are. Movement and control for most pitchers is in the 10-10+ range. Successful pitchers have either a 2 or 3 stuff, and some are ok with a 1 stuff. It's the era I'm playing in that makes the ratings a challenge to understand. My feeling is that the quality of pitchers on the reserve rosters is comparable to the distribution on offense.