Looking for advice on setting up minor leagues.

[OldFatGuy]

Hi all,

All my playing history in 8 and 9 have been with reserve rosters, now getting ready to get serious into X, and would like to give minors a shot. Could someone give me a summary (or link to one) that spells out the pluses and minuses of using ghost players or not using ghost players please? I'd really appreciate any insight from veterans on this issue.

Particularly, with no ghost players (and I'm thinking of a simple 3 tier minor league) being used that changes the math wrt the number of draft rounds required, doesn't it?? I remember reading here that a good rule of thumb for the number of rounds required was 5 plus the number of minor league levels. But wasn't sure if that was using ghost players or NOT using ghost players.

Also, wasn't there some issue wrt not using ghost players and the AI making crazy decisions in order to field a team, particularly when injuries are a problem?? Sorry, my memory is so bad nowadays I'm not sure if I remember reading about that or not. If that was an issue, has it been adequately addressed in X??

In short, if you were going to set up your "dream" league that you wanted to enjoy for years to come, would you set up minors using ghost players or not using them and why? Please, would love, really love, to hear some veterans take on that issue.

Also, if anyone can point me to some more direction regarding setting up independant leagues at time of league creation, that would be appreciated too. I'm having trouble doing that right, and finding maybe a little more detailed explanation than what I'm finding in the manual might help. If nothing else available, cool, I understand.

I want to set up my American Major League Baseball universe with 3 levels of minors (although still thinking about 4 such that rookie-A-AA-AAA), and I want it to have an two North American independant leagues that are roughly AAAA level, (one in USA and one in Mexico), and three foriegn independant leagues of roughly the same talent level (Europe, China, and Japan), with free agents free to sign among ANY and ALL.

Is this dream universe possible? I'm sure having trouble making it work. But I am an idiot, so there's always that explanation.

Once again sorry for length, and thank you for any responses. Any and all help is appreciated. Hope everyone's new year is going great and all is well.

Peace.

[Kelric]

I 100% always, always, always use ghost players. It makes my life as a GM easier (having to keep track of promoting or demoting that 5th outfielder or 12th pitcher is tedious) and the AI still does some crazy things to keep rosters full when they are turned off. Mostly I use them for my own sanity.

In a three tiered minor league system with ghost players turned on, I would use 12-15 rounds of the draft but have the game generate three 'extra rounds' worth of players. So if you run 12 rounds, generate enough players for 15. 15? Generate 18. If you do four tiers I'd run 15 to 18 rounds with, say, 20 rounds worth of players. Either way your best bet is to set your league up, save a backup copy and run a few 100 year tests to check out talent levels and league stats and whatnot.

Assuming you're in Advanced Mode for creating your universe, here's how I would create what you want to do. Set up your major league and it's minor leagues first. As a warning, I haven't done independent leagues in a while so I'm not sure how many rounds I'd give them in a draft, if you even want to let them have a draft. I would guess 3 rounds if they didn't have minors but this is all what testing is for. If you want them to just use leftover players from your MLB league and foreign leagues, expand those league's players created by a round or two each (but not the actual number of rounds in the draft, follow?).

Add a fictional league, this will become your first independent league. In the Structure panel, leave it set to Major League Level. Create your financial settings for it in the Rules tab. Go to the Strategy & Equivalencies tab. Being 4-A level, I'd probably set all of the Player Creation Modifiers to around .900 (Triple-A for MLB in this game is .850, for example). I'm never entirely sure what effect this has, if any, on leagues without drafts. But this is why you run lots of 100 year test sims.

You might want to play with your League Total Modifiers a little as well. For me, I tend to envision independent leagues with less homers, more doubles, more strikeouts, better pitcher stamina, more stolen base attempts, etc.

Do the same for the rest of your independent leagues, changing whatever modifiers and financials you think are necessary. The trick will be balancing the number of rounds of their drafts (if any) so your world doesn't get flooded with players or experience a drought. Financials and LTM will take testing as well.

And with all of that poorly explained, just know that your universe is entirely possible to set up. Just remember to save backups and do a few tests first.

[OldFatGuy]

Thank you for that Kelric. I think I'm sold on the ghost players thing. At first I was pretty sure I wasn't going to use ghost players (just seems too fake somehow), then I became unsure, and now after reading your reply I'm pretty I am going to use them. I think that tediousness you describe is something I'd rather avoid.

And I'm still playing with my league setup. Guess I will have to run a bunch of sims to get it right. I was hoping to avoid that, cause it runs slow on this old 2002 Dell machine. But I'm really struggling to understand how the independent leagues get setup as far as drafting and finances are concerned. Going to give it another go though, but the bottom line is I just really never got to understand that part of the game enough and now I don't know what I'm doing.

I'd like so much to set up 5 independant leagues, one in USA, Mexico, Europe, China, and Japan, to be just below major league level, where sometimes perhaps players DO decide to go play in one of those leagues OR players from those leagues get interest from the major leagues. And I want those leagues to be limited in that they only can draft players from their own "country" (obviously Europe isn't a country so I'm still trying to figure that one out), but can have foriegn players they sign as free agents.

That's my dream universe that I'm really looking forward to playing, and I'll keep on trucking to try and get it right. Thanks for all of your help, and hope all is well with you and yours.

Peace.

[Kelric]

As I said before, your league setup is perfectly doable. It just needs to be tried out with whatever settings you're interested in. I hope I helped out a little bit at least. Good luck. Feel free to keep asking questions if you have some more.