Adding players directly to a team (without using inaugural draft)

[KennyV17]

I asked this same question a year ago when OOTP 6 was released and it didn't seem it was possible. I've decided to ask again now that OOTP 9 is out.

I currently run an existing sim baseball league using software other than OOTP. We've created our own fictional teams using real MLB players. I wanted to convert our league over to OOTP. However, I want to keep the rosters that each person has in tact.

Is there a way I can get all of these players onto their respective teams directly without needing to go through the inaugural draft?

[1998 Yankees]

It sounds like a ton of work, but perhaps if you could get those rosters into a CSV text file that could be imported into OOTP . . .

The format would have to be exactly correct and there would need to be matches of team and player ID's in the file to those in the destination OOTP league file, of course. Plus, you would have to create ratings for some categories in OOTP that were not in your old game.

I attached an example text file which is a roster dump from OOTP (truncated to get under the attachment file size limit here). This same file, with edits, could be reimported right back into the same game. Obviously you would have to look up the team and player ID's in a league that you created in OOTP with the same team alignment and roster sizes as your old game.

So if you were to simulate such a file, using Excel perhaps to ease the editing and saving it back as CSV (changing the suffix from .csv to .txt before reimporting), it might just work. Still, I hope somebody else has an easier suggestion.

EDIT: In the file, there is this notice: "//NOTE: Player and team names are purely cosmetical and will not be used when importing rosters from this file!//" This means that even though you imported their data, you would still have to edit the team and player names in the OOTP game.

By the way, there is also an export/import function for stats, and I would imagine the same comments would apply to importing those into OOTP. I have attached truncated examples of those files as well.

All in all, an incredible amount of work but I think it could be done.

[KennyV17]

Yikes! I have to wonder if just going through the inaugural draft and selecting each player that way is faster.

BTW - What happens at the end of a season? For example, we play our fictional league using real MLB players and their 2007 stats. When we start our next season (using 2008 stats), do I have to recreate all the teams again?