check list?

[jketchum]

is there any kind of a checklist or cheat sheet for newbies when you start a franchise?

[bubba22plus]

Would this help:

OOTP Baseball Manual - OOTP 10

[Sparrow]

Not that I'm aware of. My piece of advice is don't worry too much about trying to make your first league perfect. The game has a lot of depth and is, at times, overwhelmingly customizable. For many players, this leads to at least a few restarts, as one learns more about the game, and how they enjoy playing it.

Also, if you get stuck on any particular question, the community, or most of them, will be very receptive and helpful. Specific questions are generally easier to answer than ones that are open ended, though you never know when a question will turn into a lengthy thoughtful discussion (or deteriorate into mediocre humor through trolling).

[kq76]

Are you more asking about things you should probably look at when you first take over a team?

If so, well, you should probably do an overall evaluation of your organization. The question you probably want to ask is can this team win a championship with how it's currently configured? If the answer is, "yes, or at least it does with a few tweaks", then you can just start looking into what those tweaks should be (need a better 3B, one more quality starter, etc). If the answer is no, that it needs an overhaul then, well, you have your answer again.

I then make a list of all the positions and roles, including backups, and ask myself if the current players we have at each are candidates to be with the team long-term or not. And if they're not then I look at the minor leagues to see if we have players that have a good shot at filling that requirement in the future. If no, then I target that in the draft or FA. If I decide that we have pretty good depth at a certain position or role then I start thinking which of those players should be shopped to fill a weakness elsewhere.

Maybe the most important thing to decide when you're first taking over a team are the bad contracts. If you have players that probably won't be playing up to their contracts any time soon then it's probably best to immediately look at how you can get rid of them because, in a cap league at least, nothing will keep you down more than some bad contracts. So even if you can't get anything worth of value for them, consider just releasing them and taking the financial hit. If you're a contending team, you might even want to consider somehow paying another team to take the contracts off your hands.

This is interesting. When I think of OOTP checklists I usually think of simly checklists, not first taking over a team checklists. Thanks for bringing it up.