Vital Historical Feature for OOTP 9 or 10

[Charlie Hough]

One thing that has always bothered me about OOTP is that there is no way to simulate the true transaction model from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Back then, players were typically purchased from a minor league club, and there was no player draft. There was no free agency after a player joined the major leagues, but free market purchasing of minor league players was the order of the day. Unfortunately, you cannot implement this kind of system in OOTP.

If you set up a historical league and turn off the entry draft, then the players are automatically placed on the teams for which they debuted in real life. To properly simulate early baseball, you would need the rookies to be imported into a free agent pool and allow all the clubs to sign them as free agents. Or you would need to have them assigned to minor league clubs first, and then make them available for purchase by major league teams.

There is also no way to set up a historical league, clear all the rosters, and then allow all the players to be signed as free agents rather than have the league hold an inaugural draft.

Markus, will OOTP 9 address any of these concerns, or is this something to consider for a future version? I saw something like this suggested for OOTP 9, but I don't know if it ever made it onto the planned feature set for the game.

[Dr. P.R. Park III]

Well said friend.

[NCBeachBum]

Actually, you can release everyone to the free agent pool with no inaugural draft. Simply hit the button that says something like "Clear roster/Release all players" instead of the one that says something like "Release all players/Schedule inaugural draft."

[Charlie Hough]

Originally Posted by NCBeachBum

Actually, you can release everyone to the free agent pool with no inaugural draft. Simply hit the button that says something like "Clear roster/Release all players" instead of the one that says something like "Release all players/Schedule inaugural draft."

Yes, you certainly can. But the players do not appear in the free agent pool unless you turn on free agency. Once you turn on free agency, the game seems to automatically schedule an inaugural draft. So, while you can technically release all the players without scheduling the inaugural draft, there appears to be no way to set up the game without an inaugural draft and prod all the teams to start signing players.

[zekester91]

Don't know if this would work, but could you have and unaffliated Minor league, have all the new draftees go to that league, set that minor league to allow free agents to leave but not sign from other leagues, set your Major league to sign from other leagues. keep your Majors without free agents, but allowed to sign from that league. There might be some other settings I'm not thinking about, but this would give you players playing in the "minors" that you could purchase thier contracts, without having free agents. you would also have all the players over in that league so you could relese them all there with FA allready on, and no players in your Major league, Don't let your Minors sign players untill your Majors had filled up, then either use ghost players or ficinal players to populate the minors untill they got restocked.

[Charlie Hough]

Zekester, I'm not sure how you could put all of the historical players into the minor league, and I'm not sure if you mean putting those players in the minor league free agent pool or actually assigning them to clubs with contracts.

I would predict from experience that this would not work anyway. I don't think the major league clubs would start signing those players and fill out their rosters in time. When I have tried setting up immediate minor league free agency in fictional leagues, the major league clubs don't seem inclined to sign any of the minor league players, even when they have position needs and the players have reasonable talent. Granted, it might be quite different in this case if all players were placed in the minor leagues, including star players. But I don't think the AI is programmed to recognize this kind of setup and work with it properly.

Simply stated, this is my point in recommending the accurate rendering of early baseball transactions in OOTP. I don't think there is any workaround that would be successful, and even if one could be found, it would be far easier to have the game do this. It's the way baseball operated until the implementation of the draft in 1965, so I consider it a fundamental feature requirement for realistic historical play.

[NCBeachBum]

Originally Posted by Charlie Hough

Yes, you certainly can. But the players do not appear in the free agent pool unless you turn on free agency. Once you turn on free agency, the game seems to automatically schedule an inaugural draft. So, while you can technically release all the players without scheduling the inaugural draft, there appears to be no way to set up the game without an inaugural draft and prod all the teams to start signing players.

I've done it before, and it worked for me. Free agency off, release everyone, and there is still a free agent pool.


Okay, just set up a quick test league in '01, all defaults except for no ST and no FA, and did it to make sure I was remembering correctly. There's a free agent pool of 424 players, and 282 of them were signed by Opening Day, with more still in negotiations.

[Le Grande Orange]

For what it's worth, I'm currently in the process of researching the information necessary to create a detailed proposal which would allow OOTP to more accurately recreate the evolution of the major-minor relationship. This is in conjunction with making the financial system more easily customizable and accurate, since the major-minor relationship and financial aspects go hand-in-hand.

Originally Posted by Charlie Hough

One thing that has always bothered me about OOTP is that there is no way to simulate the true transaction model from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Back then, players were typically purchased from a minor league club, and there was no player draft.

Well, the major-minor relationship was an evolutionary one, and the farm system as it exists currently took awhile to form. That said, even in the late 19th century and early 20th century a few major league clubs had what would now be known as minor league affiliates. It was usually accomplished by the ML club owning outright the minor league club, though there was also the forerunner of the working agreement.

The advance forward for the farm system happened in 1931 when working agreements were made unlimited. Prior to the change, the number of player selections an ML club could make from the minor league club under the working agreement counted against the ML club's reserve limit during the season even though the selections were made after the season was over. Unlimited working agreements meant that those selections no longer counted against the ML club's player limit until the player contracts were actually purchased.

Originally Posted by Charlie Hough

There was no free agency after a player joined the major leagues, but free market purchasing of minor league players was the order of the day. Unfortunately, you cannot implement this kind of system in OOTP.

To truly recreate that in OOTP signing bonuses would have to be implemented. Since, as you stated, there was free market competition for amateur players, the amount of money paid out by major league clubs in the form of signing bonuses escalated as the years went on. So much so, in fact, that MLB instituted rules to try and curb such bonuses. (These attempts included two different bonus rules and the first year player draft.)

[Huckleberry]

Actually, I just got finished with a replay I did starting in 1901 where all historical rookies were imported as free agents. It takes three steps.

1. Modify the Lahman database by deleting all references to the team that a player was playing for. This means on all the stat files (hitting, pitching, fielding, etc.).
2. Enable importing historical rookies.
3. Disable the annual draft.

It worked fine except for one minor problem. When the game rolled into the preseason every year some of the rookie free agents would be signed before I even had a chance to offer them. At first I worked around this by disabling AI roster moves the day before the preseason started and then re-enabling them as soon as the rookies were loaded into the database. Then I decided this could just be considered as mirroring real life back then when some teams had a connection to a young player.

I then enabled the draft starting in 1965.

All of this is to say that it's possible. However, I do agree that it would be nice to simply have a switch to toggle that would instruct the game to import historical rookies into the free agent pool with no draft.

Oh, one more thing. Doing this makes the game very, very, very easy if you're not careful. The AI doesn't know who to sign like we do. At one point my Cleveland Indians had an outfield of Joe Jackson, Tris Speaker, and Babe Ruth. I had to trade away Ty Cobb to make room. Not joking. And you don't even want to know about the rotation. Walter Johnson won 617 games because of the juggernaut. I abandoned the career and started over letting the AI sign rookies before I had a chance as mentioned above. More enjoyable that way but still pretty easy.

[Charlie Hough]

Huckleberry, how long did it take you and the AI to sign all of the imported rookies? Did it take a few weeks? Would it make sense to have a house rule where the human GM does not attempt to sign any players for a certain number of days?

NCBeachBum, I will try again, but when I did this before, I released all the players in the major leagues with free agency turned off, and there was a grand total of zero players in the free agent pool. The only way to verify that the players still existed was to use the game's search function.

[NCBeachBum]

Yeah, I've only done it that way once before (twice, counting the test I did yesterday), but as an almost strictly 19th c. player, I spend the huge majority of my time with FA off... and the FA pool is always still there. Every time I fold a team, their players are released to the FA pool and signed by other teams.

I just cannot imagine why it would ever disappear.

[Huckleberry]

Originally Posted by Charlie Hough

Huckleberry, how long did it take you and the AI to sign all of the imported rookies? Did it take a few weeks? Would it make sense to have a house rule where the human GM does not attempt to sign any players for a certain number of days?

Well, after the first day where some of the guys were signed immediately with no opportunity to offer them it got back to normal. Some guys signed in the first several days, some took longer until Spring Training was about to start. To be honest it acted screwy sometimes. Sometimes I would offer a guy a major league contract and he would sign a minor league deal with another team and I was never notified. It was almost like the issue with the initial database load that signs some of them to teams was delayed.

Not a perfect world, to be sure. But it's the only workaround I could come up with that satisfied me on this issue you brought up. It's important to me, too, that historical replays be as accurate as possible. And rookie free agents is part of that.

[thbroman]

Just a little addendum to this discussion (I mistakenly put a similar request in the wrong sub-forum, so I'll repeat it here

Along with permitting the recreation of the contract system that existed before free agency, I would REALLY like to see the possibility of recreating the entire baseball universe of the 1930s through 1960s, with multi-level farm systems,* independent minor leagues, prowling through the backwoods to find a prospect -- the whole ball of wax, as they used to say. I am not asking this as an historical simmer, but as someone who plays solo leagues & who would like to be able to create a fiuctional universe of this kind. But regardless of my specific interest, it's clear that what I would like to see matches well with what Charlie Hough described in the OP

I know that the new scouting system won't give me a chance to send one of my scouts to western South Dakota or somewhere to look at a prospect, and that's ok. Compromises have to be made. But as a long-term goal, I would very much like to see the game make a fictional, universe of this kind possible.

I am grateful that LGO is putting together a proposal to do this. I vaguely recall having a discussion with him about this very issue sometime in the past, but I can't find the thread now, and it doesn't matter anyway. Is there any way I could aid the effort now? P.M. me, if you think there is!

* - This is already mostly in places, except for the issue of purchasing minor-league contracts and the lack of a realistic way of importing fictional players.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by thbroman

Along with permitting the recreation of the contract system that existed before free agency, I would REALLY like to see the possibility of recreating the entire baseball universe of the 1930s through 1960s, with multi-level farm systems,* independent minor leagues, prowling through the backwoods to find a prospect -- the whole ball of wax, as they used to say. I am not asking this as an historical simmer, but as someone who plays solo leagues & who would like to be able to create a fiuctional universe of this kind.

That's exactly why I want to see the system implemented too. It's taking a historical scenario and using it as the springboard for a fictional league, and it gives the OOTP player more interesting ways to play.

I think it would be interesting to set up a baseball world like the early 1950s where there were many minor leagues, and have a situation where wealthier major league clubs have larger and more extensive minor league systems than poorer big league teams. But the wealthier team has to pay for that larger farm system, so as a GM you have to balance your income against that money-devouring minor league system.

In 1955, for example, the Brooklyn Dodgers had 15 minor league affiliates, including two each in AAA and AA. The club suffered a net loss of nearly $460,000 operating its farm teams (a value equal to about 13% of total revenue), or an average of $30,600 per affiliate. The Boston Red Sox, on the other hand, had just 6 minor league affiliates, which posted a net loss of $183,000 (about 6% of total revenue). So it cost Boston on a per team basis the same amount as Brooklyn, but the overall cost was lower since its system was much less extensive. The farm system size meant the difference between Boston making a profit for the year or posting a loss.

Originally Posted by thbroman

I am grateful that LGO is putting together a proposal to do this. I vaguely recall having a discussion with him about this very issue sometime in the past, but I can't find the thread now, and it doesn't matter anyway. Is there any way I could aid the effort now? P.M. me, if you think there is! .

I vaguely recall that as well. But we can always start a new discussion. And it's always good to bounce ideas off other people...

[Charlie Hough]

Originally Posted by Le Grande Orange

That's exactly why I want to see the system implemented too. It's taking a historical scenario and using it as the springboard for a fictional league, and it gives the OOTP player more interesting ways to play.

Yes, this is even what prompted me to create the thread. I was trying to create a universe that starts in 1901 and is based on the idea that the National League dissolved and the American League never emerged as the other major league in 1901. I wanted to bring in all the historical players and the 1901 structure, then release everyone, reconfigure a new major league, and then have all the clubs sign the players and populate the league. No one would have ever had an 'inaugural draft' in those days.

[thbroman]

Well, phooey . . .
I had a long post about a fictional universe from the 1930s to 1960s that got lost in the forum crashes earlier today. Let me see if I can recover what was on my mind:

First, do you guys think the game has a satisfactory device for generating new players in fictional-historical world that we've been discussing? When OOTP2007 first came out I tried adapting some of those "feeder leagues" to this end. But I wasn't satisfied with the result, partly because of the difficulty of adjusting players' abilities to the appropriate level (I wasn't the only person who had this trouble, as I recall) and partly because it seemed wrong that after a certain time players would just be dumped onto the FA market. I wonder if instead it might not be possible to set up particular leagues as "player generators", meaning that those leagues would be ones that received every year an influx of new players, distributed across their rosters. This would simulate the appearance of new kids in low-level minor leagues, independent leagues, high school, semi-pro and other sources I'm not thinking of at the moment. It would be possible to own a team in one of those feeders and receive randomly generated players, (which come to think of it is what happens in Football Manager, for example). In other words, you would get a few prospects from the random generator if you owned a "generatable team," and via scouting you would be able to locate & sign additional players. The "generate" function presumably would have to be an on/off switch so it wouldn't mess up the historical simmers.

Second, LGO's comments above about the costs of running farm systems got me to thinking about how a robust fictional environment modeled on the period we're discussing could really bulk up the role-playing aspects of OOTP, which were introduced in the last version (somewhat half-heartedly, IMHO). Say for example that you're playing as the GM of the Brooklyn Dodgers and suddenly the team's owner dies. The new owner turns out to be a tightwad who refuses to subsidize your team's operating deficit, which forces you to sell off parts of the farm system. If the fictional world were REALLY modeled well, the prices of farm teams might actually fluctuate with supply and demand, but I know that I'm being a little crazy here.
Or turn the story line around. You're the GM of the St. Louis Browns and your owner dies, leaving you to scramble around for a new one. It takes almost a year to get someone, and all the while you're selling off players and minor-league teams like crazy and bleeding cash and trying to get a couple of loans from the bank, and then out of the blue a wealthy tycoon buys the team and sudenly your situation shifts from being near collapse to one where you have a hope down the road of ensuring that it's the Cardinals, not the Browns, that eventually have to pack up and get out of town!
I realize it would take a LOT of financial design work to come anywhere close to what I'm talking about, but in a more realistic vein it COULD be introduced incrementally by having the GM interact with owners who open or close the money tap depending on circumstance.

Anyway, I hope you can see my point -- such events would make the game really fun and challenging.

Or here's one more idea, again in kind of a RP mode: If a realistic minor-league contract system were put into the game, it would make possible for the first time a real opprortunity to begin a career as a low-level minor-league manager/GM and eventually make your way into the bigs. The reason, of course, is that you would have much more control over your roster by having a say in whether contracts are bought up or not. I'm not sure how this would work when a minor-league team is part of a farm system, but that shouldn't be an insurmountable problem.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by thbroman

If a realistic minor-league contract system were put into the game, it would make possible for the first time a real opprortunity to begin a career as a low-level minor-league manager/GM and eventually make your way into the bigs. The reason, of course, is that you would have much more control over your roster by having a say in whether contracts are bought up or not. I'm not sure how this would work when a minor-league team is part of a farm system, but that shouldn't be an insurmountable problem.

The evolution of the minors from independent outfits to subordinates of the major leagues is a long and interesting one. Obviously it would not be possible to duplicate that exactly in OOTP, but certainly with some clever thinking it should be possible to at least mimic the most important parts of that evolution.

One of the things that has to happen is for minor leagues to get their own finances. That means generating revenue from things such as ticket sales and having expenses such as player salaries. What helps in this regard is that for many years the minor leagues had a salary cap in place which limited how much clubs could spend.

Another area that needs to be done is recreating some of the older transaction rules which existed, since these go hand-in-hand with the financial system. The Rule 5 draft, for example, underwent several important rule changes.

I think it is possible to come up with a coherent proposal which addresses all these elements, but it requires careful balancing to mimic history as closely as it reasonably possible while making the system relatively easy to use (and code hopefully).

[thbroman]

Originally Posted by Le Grande Orange

Another area that needs to be done is recreating some of the older transaction rules which existed, since these go hand-in-hand with the financial system. The Rule 5 draft, for example, underwent several important rule changes.

Oh great! Just understanding the complexities of the Rule 5 draft itself would drive a sane person crazy!

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by thbroman

Oh great! Just understanding the complexities of the Rule 5 draft itself would drive a sane person crazy!

The details may be confusing, but the basics are fairly straightforward. A simplified history of the Rule 5 draft:

It starts in 1892. Major league clubs could draft any player from a minor league club, there were no restrictions. But this led to abuses, as major league clubs would draft more players than they needed and would sell the excess back to the minors for more than what they had paid. To curb this, by 1903 rules were in place which required the major league team to offer the player to other major league clubs first, then to the club he was drafted from, before he could be sent elsewhere in the minors.

By 1900, the draft had become restricted. The first restriction stated that a player had to have two years' of service before he was eligible to be drafted; the other stated that at the highest level of minors only two players could be selected from any given team . This limit was lowered to one player in 1906.

In 1931, several changes were made to the Rule 5 draft. First, the service requirement now varied by level. At the top level, a player wasn't eligible to be drafted until he had four years' of service; at the second level and third levels, three years' of service; in the bottom three levels, two years' of service. The numeric restrictions were unchanged (i.e. only one player could be selected from each minor league club in the top three levels of minors; in the remaining three levels, the number was unlimited).

In 1958, the rules were rewritten. The restrictions were eliminated, and a uniform requirement of four years' of service before a player could be drafted was put in place. In 1965, the service requirement was removed and any player not on the 40-man major league roster could be selected. In 1969, a service limitation was reinstituted which said that a player to have three years' of service before he could be drafted. In 1990, it was changed so that players 18 or younger when they signed their first contract couldn't be drafted until they had four years' of service. In 2006, in connection with the new CBA, the eligibility was changed, with players 18 or under at the time of their first contract couldn't be drafted for five seasons, and players 19 or older couldn't be drafted until after four seasons.


A couple of other items to note: from 1959-65 there was also the first year player draft (not to be confused with the amateur draft). The first year player draft stated that any player, after his first season in the minors, was eligible to be drafted if he was not placed on the 40-man roster. The intent of this rule was to reduce the growing size of signing bonuses being paid to amateur players.

Also, prior to 1965, a player assigned outright to the minors was eligible for the Rule 5 draft, and had to pass through that year's draft before he could be reacquired by the major league club which has outrighted him. (After 1965, the player could be reacquired if he cleared waivers; in 1986 the waiver requirement was eliminated.)

[thbroman]

The most obvious issue that I see in your discussion of the Rule 5 draft is whether a really committed historical/fantasy gamer would want somehow to have the rules evolve over the decades. I suppose that would be possible if the player were able to change the game settings on loading a saved file. I wonder whether that would introduce any problems in the database.

By the way, here's a question that occurs to me: I suppose I would be correct in supposing that even after a player had been drafted, the drafting club would still have to purchase their contract from their minor-league "owner"?

Another contract question: In the 1930s-1950s or so, when players have contracts with minor league clubs in a farm system, what rights does the parent club have to just pluck the player from the team, esp. if he's not already on the 40-man roster? Or if he is on the 40-man roster?

And finally -- where do you get all of this terrific information? I imagine you sitting there in some room with a wall full of books on baseball history, but not the kind of books that one usually sees in Barnes and Noble!