Financials for a Historical-Fictional League

[sfnate]

I'm contemplating setting up a Historical-Fictional league, ie, real teams, fictional players, following Larry Anderson's excellent "Guide to a Historical Replay".

I've done a fair amount of tweaking to get era-appropriate names/nationalities, etc.

My questions:

- When you set up a historical league, the game imports the correct stadiums and ballpark factors. Is the same true of the financial/market detail? Ie, do the financial numbers generated for, say, the Yankees, resemble reality in any way, or are the numbers completely random?

- I want to recreate the relative power rankings of the teams of 1930 (my start date). Ie, if in reality Philadelphia and St. Louis were the dominate teams of that time, I'd like to duplicate that dominance at the start using fictional players. This would seem to require a couple of things:

1. Hold an inaugural draft and allow the dominate teams of the era to draft first (maybe even giving the top teams all of the early round picks), with the AI cherry picking the best players (assuming the AI knows what it's doing).

2. Manipulate the market/financial data to create/support solid financials for the dominate teams.

Will this work? Does anybody out there have tricks or suggestions for setting up a league like this that faithfully (to the extent it's possible) recreates both the stats and the relative team strengths of the era (1930 onward)?

I'd be particularly interested in any data for finance/markets of the era.

Also, how much of the free agency etc. options do you keep or discard for the era? I know that free agency should be turned off, but what about Rule 5 etc? If anyone has any data on that part of the setup, that would be great.

Thanks much.

[SteveP]

I'll try to help you out with some of this:

When you set up a historical league, the game imports the correct stadiums and ballpark factors. Is the same true of the financial/market detail? Ie, do the financial numbers generated for, say, the Yankees, resemble reality in any way, or are the numbers completely random?

They aren't realistic, and they aren't random. Basically what happens is that teams get players, players get salaries (based on their individual "value"), each team ends up with a total salary load. Then the game generates a financial "reality" for that team which will produce a little more revenue than is needed to support that salary load and the other costs. So, for example, if the Yankees have a mediocre team, they will have a lower salary load, and the game will decide that New York is an average sized town. Or if Baltimore has a great team, the game will decide that Baltimore is a very big town.

Manipulate the market/financial data to create/support solid financials for the dominate teams.

You can definitely do this, both for your purposes and/or to create financial "realities" that are more realistic. I do it all the time. However, IMO it's a good idea to be incremental in your approach to modifying the financial determinants (like city size) from what the game creates. You can get some very distorted results in the way that the AI behaves if you make radical changes all at once. Make a smaller change each season.

Check out this thread for more thoughts on this:

http://www.ootpdevelopments.com/boar...ket-sizes.html

Also, how much of the free agency etc. options do you keep or discard for the era? I know that free agency should be turned off, but what about Rule 5 etc? If anyone has any data on that part of the setup, that would be great.

I haven't messed around with any historicals earlier than about 1950. My inclination would be to leave everything in place, even Rule 5, even in a 1930s league, but I'm not an authority.

On the salary related stuff, I don't turn free agency off. I don't think the game works very well when you do that (IMHO) because frankly the game hasn't been designed to work without free agency. But experiment with it if you want.

What I do is set free agency for majors and minors to 12 years, and arbitration to 4 years. It's alternative history, of course, but it does give you a reasonable balance between having slave labor and having to eventually pay your players something like what they're worth (which is probably a pretty realistic picture of what an owner/GM had to deal with back then).

Hope that helps.

[sfnate]

SteveP, this is very very helpful, thanks for taking the time to educate me!

The info regarding the market/financials is especially helpful--very interesting how it works.

After following the link to the discussion you recommended, I think it may be the case that if I did rig the draft to let the era-dominate teams go first, they would load up on star fictional talent, which would result in a larger salary load, which would cause the AI, after the draft, to adjust the market detail to support that. So in some sense, it would achieve the basic result I want, without necessarily being completely faithful to history.

Thanks for the heads up on making any market adjustments incrementally--I was prepared to go in there and start making some pretty large "corrections", but knowing now that this would generate some odd AI behavior will make me more cautious.

As for the rule tweaking, I think I will follow your advice, ie, keep everything on but adjust to 12/4.

Perhaps OOTP 10 will make some of these tweaks easier to make...

[SteveP]

I have to say that I didn't invent the 12/4 approach, but picked it up awhile back from someone else who was also trying to be helpful to us noobs (can't remember who, though, I'm afraid to say). So, treat this as a "pay it forward."