Real World Baseball

[Prodigal Son]

(Mod: Please move to the Rosters, Photos and Quick Starts sub-forum. Thanks!)

RWB Beta quickstart file released! Find it on PadresFan's website.

Full Majors with team names, logos and uniforms, full minors, three feeder leagues (NCAA, NCJAA Junior College and HS) and two foreign independent leagues (Korean and Japanese) with real team names. Starts in 2008 with fictional rosters.

An overview of the Real World Baseball game world:

-Icy's Major League setup with full minors
-David Yellope's "Foz's College Rosters"
-Prodigal Son's National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA) Baseball League complete with 24 real top junior college baseball programs from across the nation
-Prodigal Son's High School All-Stars Baseball League, representing each state's all-state baseball team
-Nippon Professional Baseball League (NPBL) w/real team names
-Korean Baseball Organization (KRO) w/real team names

Future Projects:
-Real NJCAA colors and logos
-Real NPBL (Japanese League) colors and logos
-Real KRO (Korean League) colors and logos
-Balance & playtesting, possible expansion of HS league to account for higher talent-producing states

Project Description

I started this project from the base of David Yellope's Foz's College Rosters V2 file, which has 112 NCAA teams set up as a feeder league into Icy's well-known MLB setup. My goal is to add junior college and high school feeder leagues to provide MLB with a varied draft class.

The junior college addition is intended to provide another age point into the draft as much as it is to actually represent junior colleges. A draft pool made up of just college and high school feeder league players will consist of players who are almost exclusively one of two ages--18 and 22 most likely depending on how one sets it up. The junior college league (NJCAA) will feed players into the draft who are 20 years old, rounding out the draft class ages nicely. Between birthday variations, there should be a nice distribution of players from ages 18-22 in the draft with this setup.

The draft class will consist of roughly 50% from the NCAA, 25% from the NJCAA and 25% from high school. Real drafts are technically more high school-heavy than that, but that is skewed by high school players who are drafted but attend college instead of signing with a professional team. I feel the 25% of high school players that this setup will actually send to the professional ranks is a good representation of real life. The 25% of junior college players who will be 20 years old in the draft will represent junior college players, yes, but also those players who are older than the norm upon HS graduation, who leave college early or who are drafted out of independent leagues, etc.

As the world expands, it is also important for me to take into consideration sim times and file sizes. I will be trying to capture the spirit of the different levels of competition without including hundreds of high school and junior college teams. For high school, this means creating one high school team per state and treating it as a representation of that state's all-state baseball players. Think of it more as an AAU type of league for the best of the best.

For junior college, this means making a league with just some of the top JC's in the country, many from JC Division I but with some from Division II and III. I have this league put together with 24 teams pretty nicely distributed geographically. Twenty-four teams seems small, but players only stay in the league for two years, so that's the equivalent of a 48-team HS or four-year college feeder league in terms of how many players it puts in the draft. At some point, I would like to set up the JC teams with correct colors. And maybe logos if they don't take up too much space.

All players who enter the major leagues will have stats from another level of competition in Real World Baseball. Most will enter via the draft and have high school, junior college or four-year college stats. Others will be scouted and signed from the two Asian leagues. This is a great setup for any player wanting a more immersive experience and who doesn't like draft classes to be created and would instead rather follow draftees starting as freshman in HS or college instead of just seeing their names pop up in the draft pool out of nowhere. This setup would also be ideal for a player looking to play a league with a 1-5 talent scale or stats only, as you can follow amateurs for at least two years of real performance before they enter the draft pool.

[Prodigal Son]

Ok, I've got this all done, and this is a scout's dream league. I added in professional Japanese (set at International level of competition) and Korean leagues (set at AA level of competition) with their proper team names. Those competition levels might be low, but I don't want to have too much talent in the world. I figure good scouting can still find some quality players in those leagues, but the overall talent in the world shouldn't be so high as to inflate the major league ratings too much.

If anyone wants to host it, let me know.

FWIW, I named the 50 HS all-star teams after generic state traits, using a list of state nicknames to cull a lot of them. You can always rename them if you don't like the Alabama Dixie Dogs or Nevada Aces.

[Prodigal Son]

The 30-team MLB is set up to have a 35 round draft, so there needs to be 1050 players each year being fed in. Here is where they will come from each year.

NCAA - 112 teams / 20 players per roster / four-year eligibility = 560 players in each draft class

NJCAA - 24 teams / 20 players per roster / two-year eligibility = 240 players

HS - 50 teams / 20 players per roster / four-year eligibility = 250 players

Total: 1050 players

[Prodigal Son]

This is working beautifully so far. The MLB teams signed a handful of Japanese and Korean league players right away, and there is a slow trickle of them coming in. I found earlier through playtesting that setting the leagues at International level (Japan) and AAA (Korea) made them too good and put too many of them in the bigs compared to real life. So I knocked them down to AAA and AA levels of competition, respectively (note that they are not affiliated, they are just set at that level of competition), and now they still put out some pretty good players...just fewer of them.

The 1902 draft (I started in 1901) looks very nice. There are players in the draft from 17-22 years old, and they are distributed as desired. Each player has stats from his college, junior college or high school career. Would be nice to have a few guys in the draft that were 23-25, but I'm not going to worry about it.

This league is now set up so that every player who joins a major league team will already have baseball experience in the in-game world, complete with statistics and history entries. And the world is set up to feed the majors both through the draft (mostly) but also with the option of scouting and culling from the two Asian leagues (via free agency or trade), which are both competitive enough that there seem to constantly be a few players overseas who are coveted by some big league teams.

I'm going to sim about 12 years and take over a team. Maybe start at a lower level of the minors, HS or college ranks or overseas and really immerse myself in the game world, then hopefully get a promotion to the bigs!

[PadresFan]

Originally Posted by Prodigal Son

If anyone wants to host it, let me know.

I'd love to host it. Can you put it up on a file share site like rapidshare so that I can grab it?

[kleric]

Can't wait to try this thing out!
Thanks for all the hard work!!!

[STEELCITY637]

Wow this seems great cant wait to try it out.

[STEELCITY637]

Does the league always start in 1901 or can I change it to start in 2007.

[Rainey]

Wow, can't wait till this one is ready! It sounds great!

[Prodigal Son]

Originally Posted by STEELCITY637

Does the league always start in 1901 or can I change it to start in 2007.

It looks like it's going to have to start in 2007. It gets buggy for some reason when trying to start in 1901.

This league has caused a number of bugs to work through, actually. Not sure why. I'm wading through them right now. At the moment I'm figuring out why players in the league are either 0, 1, or 50+ years old!

As soon as I get the kinks worked out, I'll find a place to host it.

[Prodigal Son]

I updated the initial post to be a better resource, and I will continue to update it with the project details as things advance. I will use posts to update bug fixes, etc.

It looks like I've got all the kinks worked out. *fingers crossed*

I'm going to save this as a quickstart because that will eliminate the need to fiddle with league setup options after the start up. (To correctly create HS and college leagues, one has to set creation ages across the entire age range at league creation, then change them after the initial player pool is generated so that only "freshmen" are created in subsequent years). The quickstart will actually start at the first day of the 2008 offseason. I had to trudge through the 2007 season to work out some bugs with scheduling and also some funny draft things. But it's smooth sailing from 2008 on out, so we'll just start the league there! If you're like me, you're going to sim 20ish seasons anyways to get some history.

There will be a few minor adjustments to league totals modifiers. I moved home runs down a little because I'm not a big fan of guys hitting 58-65 home runs every year, as those years represent just a tiny portion of big league history and look to be already in the past. So expect league leaders to have 39-49 home runs per season in Real World Baseball. Other than that, the leagues play pretty darned similarly to real life, based on the league totals after the 2007 season compared to real life totals from the 2006 season.

[Prodigal Son]

edit: Rapidshare link removed; please download the file from Padresfan's site now.

[Prodigal Son]

edit: Be sure to unzip this to a folder entitled Real World Baseball.quick in the mydocuments/sportsinteractive/data/quickstart_games directory. The league should then be available to load with the in-game quickstart option.

Have fun!

[STEELCITY637]

Thanks cant wait to get started.

[PadresFan]

Downloading now... will be on my site by the time Ohio State and Florida are done duking it out!

[kagnew35]

Tried to load 3 times and it keeps hanging up, freezing my commputer

[Prodigal Son]

Originally Posted by kagnew35

Tried to load 3 times and it keeps hanging up, freezing my commputer

That's no fun. If anyone else tries the league, let me know if you have the same problem.

As for yours, make sure you unzipped all of the contents into a folder within the quckstart_games directory. So you'd want to create a folder named Real World Baseball.quick and then unzip everything to there. I may have screwed up the zip file and not have put them all in a folder. If you find there are a bunch of files in your quickstart_games directory, you may want to delete everything in there except the three leagues that come with the game (fictional five minor, fictional single and standard MAL).

[kagnew35]

Unzipped to quicksarts and it appears, load it and it seems to be fine but once hung up at jerseys_washington nationals, other 2 times at teams 121

[Gamblin79]

After I load Real World Baseball quickstart a message comes up saying I need to create a user manager in the game menu. Ok, no problem. So I hit ok and go to the game menu but there is no option for creating a manager just create new game and all the other basic options at startup. What am I doing wrong?

[STEELCITY637]

No problems here. When I looked at the league there was already a manager in it. So I just created myself and deleted the other manager.

Great Universe cant wait to take control of the Pitt Panthers.