[patrick_raasch]

first of all, i gotta say great game (although my wife may say otherwise!) first real substantial playing i've done since season ticket baseball....alright, onto my questions.....

i've created a new league from scratch roughly based on the majors. the majors are exact as they should be, but i compacted down the minors to just one AAA/AA/A/R league with divisions set up to mirror the majors alignment. i'm trying to create a somewhat equal playing field, making everyone have the same media contract, using a soft cap of 120% and a luxury tax. rosters are 25 for ML, 30 for AAA/AA/A and 45 for R. now for questions.

1 - After simming one season to see how things play out, it looks as though on the Rookie league, they do not set up the roster properly. i've seen teams with about 6-8 pitchers and tons of fielders. is there something i'm missing to make this even out

2 - As for salaries, i've got superstars set to $14M, but in the first offseason, there are 2 over $20M per season and another handful approaching that. is this normal? (such as an ARod or Manny type contract?) I'm assuming salaries will stay semi-controlled since there is a cap that teams have to deal with.

any other advice on setting up a league for the first time would be greatly appreciated.

[Jaxxvain]

Originally Posted by patrick_raasch

first of all, i gotta say great game (although my wife may say otherwise!) first real substantial playing i've done since season ticket baseball....alright, onto my questions.....

i've created a new league from scratch roughly based on the majors. the majors are exact as they should be, but i compacted down the minors to just one AAA/AA/A/R league with divisions set up to mirror the majors alignment. i'm trying to create a somewhat equal playing field, making everyone have the same media contract, using a soft cap of 120% and a luxury tax. rosters are 25 for ML, 30 for AAA/AA/A and 45 for R. now for questions.

Just wanted to mention that I thought the minors had a note that you were not supposed to set roster limits below 35. I set no limits in my solo games and the game seems to keep all but one roster at 25. I guess all the over flow goes to the same level.

Originally Posted by patrick_raasch

1 - After simming one season to see how things play out, it looks as though on the Rookie league, they do not set up the roster properly. i've seen teams with about 6-8 pitchers and tons of fielders. is there something i'm missing to make this even out

This is a known bug. Only work around I know of is to handle all the minor league transactions yourself.

Originally Posted by patrick_raasch

2 - As for salaries, i've got superstars set to $14M, but in the first offseason, there are 2 over $20M per season and another handful approaching that. is this normal? (such as an ARod or Manny type contract?) I'm assuming salaries will stay semi-controlled since there is a cap that teams have to deal with.

Yeah, this happens in all my leagues. I think those settings help the game decide the initial salaries to start the league, but then things can vary greatly after that based on revenue, and the quality of players.

Originally Posted by patrick_raasch

any other advice on setting up a league for the first time would be greatly appreciated.

Other advice would just be to try anything you like no matter how strange and post your results here. I play a 20 team, 30 games per season schedule where games are Friday, Saturday, and Sunday so I use 3 man rotations. This format allows for me to play out every game and still finish a season in a reasonable amount of time. Only one team in each 10 team league makes the playoffs, so each game of the season is very important and intense. Check the mods >> schedules section for this and other great schedules.

[patrick_raasch]

in regards to the rookie league issue, is the rookie league the only one that is affected by this??? if so, would i be able to set up a single a league as my rookie league??? or is it more so an issue of being the lowest level minor league with a larger roster that creates the problem?

[Jaxxvain]

seems to happen at the lowest level, most of the time.

recently I have seen it happen to my Double A though, so it could be driven by age perhaps. (I have AAA, AA, and Single A in my universe).

[Bobbo]

I recently started a league w/ an initial draft and the game didn't seem to generate enough pitchers. Many teams had no pitchers below AA, and some actually had 8 catchers on their rookie league rosters. I'm not too worried, because I think eventually the game will have to even things out.

[cbbl]

The reason you want your minor leaguers to have roster sizes of at least 35 is because there is no minor league DL in OOTP. So, if 2 of your AAA pitchers are injured, they stay on the roster ... and the AI will not demote them (or anyone else usually) to bring up 2 additional pitchers to help out.

So, you need to have spaces available for extra guys to cover this -- else you'll find your remaining pitchers getting seriously overworked. I say keep your minors set to 30, though, and monitor injuries. If it appears that injuries are an issue, raise the roster size by 1 or 2. 45 should be good at the lowest level, but you may find that AI-controlled teams sign hordes of a minor leaguers and releasing hordes of minor leaguers all at once.

The AI is pretty good about balancing rosters at all levels other than the lowest. Marcus has a post here somewhere where he explained why that is (including the large signings and releasings), but I can't recall the answer specifically. Basically, though, you'll see pretty good roster managment at all levels other than the bottom, where you definitely need to keep roster limits high (unlimited is suggested).

As for salaries, the numbers you enter are averages, not caps. So, a $14MM superstar average means that some superstars will make more. How precisely the game determines the salary curve I'm not sure.