Historic Interleague Trading Options

[OldGiants]

I'd like to see the ability to recreate the old trading, roster size and deadline rules instead of having to go by July 31 with complete interleague trading all year long.

Things that come to mind:

1) Interleague trading without waivers was only possible in December (or from about a month after the WS to just before Christmas, if I remember correctly, and I doubt I do). That was the original reason for the winter meetings. I'd like to be able to toggle interleague trading to "off season only" in order to replicate this in historic leagues.

2) The trading deadline was always June 15 when I was growing up.

3) Early season rosters were 28 until cut down on May (1 or 15th, cant' remember) Then three more guys went back to minors.

Also, there were seasons in the 1980's when the rosters were 23 and 24. Owners wanted to show the Players Union who was boss by eliminating jobs.

4) Getting waivers on players.

When a player is out of options (3 historicall) you could not send him down without 'waiving' him out of your leage. That is, every other team in the league had the chance to buy him for the waiver price, say $100,000. If no one claimed him, you could send him down. Otherwise you had to keep him, or sell him to the worst team putting in a claim.

Teams didn't put in claims on everyone, because if you did, the others would do it to you, too. So teams usualy only claimed players they really wanted, not to make trouble (with exceptions, of course).

This could be more trouble than its worth, but combined with a no-interleage trading feature, and an earlier trading deadline, could make for interesting strategy in on-line leagues. Basically, you'd try to get waivers on a player early in the season, then hang on to him until later when a contender suffered an injury. You could then trade/sell him to that team after the trading deadline. Makes these guys much more valuable and lets those out of the race extort young talent from the good teams in return for a veteran.

[Le Grande Orange]

I'd love to see more roster size options as well; in fact several folks have asked for that to be customizable.

I'd like the option to mimic ALL the roster size rules that MLB has followed over the years. The rules as they are currently (25 man active roster on opening day, up to 40 starting Sept. 1st) began in 1968.

Prior to that year, the rules were quite different. Depending on the year, rosters could have 35 or 40 players, reduced to 25 players on either May 15, June 15, or thirty days after opening day, and going back up to 35 or 40 players on Sept. 1st.

Also, for several years in the 1930s and 1910s, instead of being 25 players, it was 23, 22, or even just 21 players available for the bulk of the season.

These kinds of restrictions would allow for A LOT of strategic and managerial challenges for OOTP players.

Of course, it would also require a lot of work on the AI to handle these alternative roster limits. However, once the AI is able to handle the current 25/40 player situation well, it shouldn't be that hard to then make it able to handle 40/25/40 or 35/22/35 roster sizes. The early large size rosters are in effect spring training but during the regular season, giving teams the chance to try out promising players from training in real games, and then send back down the ones who can't perform satisfactorially. A lower mid-season size simply means the team cuts a couple of extra guys from the bottom end of the talent scale, within the needs of each position, of course. The late season increase wouldn't require any changes.

The roster limits are one of the more interesting things that was quite different in earlier years, and that has yet to be incorporated into OOTP. However, most players seem to be more interested in adding current day rules rather than adding rules from baseball's past...