Running a Fictorical League from 1871

[fhomess]

I've gotten a few questions about my Baseball Saga dynasty recently, and it seemed like it would be worth posting my responses for everyone.

I don't like historical leagues with real players, but I do really like historical leagues with fake players - just can't get into the idea that the real guys aren't doing what they should've been doing in real life, or are now playing for different teams. I also wasn't real happy with how historical leagues are configured pre1900 in OOTP9, so I decided to just create a fictional league and work on all the settings myself. That said, it was quite a fair amount of work, which is the other reason I only got through 7 seasons. So essentially what I like are fictorical leagues. Fictional players in a league that follows MLB history, and that's what the Baseball Saga was. I wanted to create a league as close to MLB history as possible, just with different players. That said, I made very little use of any of OOTP's automated historical features. They're nice, but there's nothing they do that you can't do manually.

One of the problems with the OOTP historical leagues is that OOTP doesn't handle leagues with odd numbers of teams in the scheduler - which results in you not being able to create a league with an odd number of teams. You have to create it with an even number of teams, then go into the league editor and add or remove one team. At that point, you can import the as-played schedule if you want. The other problem is that in the 1800's teams folded midway through seasons. This is reflected in the schedules I created, but it may not make sense based on team record when you're playing out your seasons. I took the approach of making sure that the teams that were going to fold during the coming season had some storyline behind why they folded so that I could still have the historically accurate teams. I know others have talked about folding the same number of teams, just choosing them based on who's doing well and who's not.

If you're using fictional players and want to use FaceGen, NoPepper created an excellent FaceGen pack for the National Association (1871-1875). When I got to 1876 and found that wasn't going to cover it anymore, I went ahead and created a FaceGen pack for 1876-1900 - that was one of the side projects that grew much bigger than I ever expected. I think both are available on AllSimBaseball.com - and I seem to recall including NoPepper's stuff in my pack so it was a one stop shop, but I can't be sure of that anymore. I also released a large FaceGen backgrounds pack, which includes a number of 1800's appropriate ones that look great in sepia or b&w and are the ones I used for that league.

As for league totals settings there's a couple of approaches on this. I wanted to try to get as close to the real league totals as possible, so I set my league settings and then ran test leagues several times, tweaking them until I was happy with them. They're all in my dynasty thread after each season summary. This league is the only time I've ever done anything like that, so your mileage may vary a bit - I'm not 100% sure how portable they are to other leagues.

I began the league with all fictional players and an inaugural draft. Obviously, that's not how it started, but that's the easiest way in OOTP to do it. You do want to make sure you've got your player creation modifiers right before you start the league. I seem to recall having a little trouble with it initially, but I honestly don't remember exactly what or what I might've done about it.

For expansion/contraction, I just disbanded teams when they folded, releasing all their players into the FA pool. I did not hold expansion drafts, just let teams sign players from the FA pool. This resulted in teams sometimes scooping up talent in bunches, and I occasionally had to go in and rebalance the rosters a little. One team might sign all the stars and then another team would have only scrubs. It's kind of up to you how much you care about this. I didn't do expansion drafts because that's not what happened. Talent flowed around baseball depending on who was offering money. There was no central organizing body in the NA, which is part of why it failed to last more than 5 seasons. You do need to make sure that all teams have enough players. I think I had teams at 15 players in 1871, and was gradually going to expand to 25 men by 1900, with most of that expansion coming later in the 1890's.

You can fold an entire league. Just remember that the first league you create is always league 100, and that if OOTP isn't sure what league to display, it defaults to 100. I got mighty confused a few times when opening up the game and seeing players and stats from 1875 after I had created the National League as a new league in 1876. I had reserve rosters and no minors. The postseason was turned off. With teams playing a wildly different number of games, the team that shows atop the standings doesn't always have the best winning percentage, but OOTP will award the championship to the team that had the best winning percentage. Standings are in order of W's and L's with other teams listed by GB. There were also some strange cases where OOTP would schedule a 1-game playoff to determine a winner, even when it was clear to me that one team was the winner. I forget the exact conditions, but it was a certain scenario and I reported it, so hopefully it'll be fixed in OOTP10.

[jduteau]

Thank you very much for posting this! I have read all of your Baseball Saga a few times and I keep wanting to do something similar. My problem is that OOTP has so many options and variables and I don't understand them all and I get bogged down trying to make sure I have everything right.

It seems to me that OOTP is best (from a historical league perspective) run with two scenarios. One is like your Baseball Saga where you have the real teams but fictional players. The other would be fake teams but the real players. The real teams with real players just seems hard to do in OOTP and if Babe Ruth plays for the Cleveland Indians, that would just seem wrong.

Anyways, thanks for giving us a little glimpse into what made the Baseball Saga tick.

Jean