Simplifying minors in historical leagues?
 

One of my favorite features of ootp historical play is seeing future mlb players get generated as youngsters in the low levels of some team’s farm system. However, the historical minor league structure, with all of its leagues and levels, is too much for me. i need things simplified.

What i’d like to do is delete the real minor leagues and replace team with four new “grand” leagues: AAA, AA, A, and R. Each of these “grand” leagues would include every organization’s minor league team for that level.

what I’m worried about is: (1) will “historical rookies” under such a system, be placed with the correct organizations at the appropriate level or (2) will they get kicked into ree agents since their real-life minor league teams no longer exist and have been replaced??

The way I understand it, the game would just restore the real minor leagues next season. I think you would still get the rookies imported properly, since the game is restoring their appropriate teams. But of course, you would have a mess.

You can play with "phony" minor leagues in the structure that you want, but you don't get minor league players that way.

Unfortunately, there is no way to import the minor league players in the same manner as major league rookies without the minor league structure to go with them. It's been requested before, but I haven't seen any response from the developers. Maybe someone on the beta team has a better feel for whether this could be done.

Orcin - you're right about the minor league structure.
The only way the players can be imported would be to do so manually. Even if you create a game without historic minor leagues, and create your own minors systems and import minor league players from their debut years in the minors, you'll have a mess because the game will create many of these same players when they enter Major League baseball. i tried to do it once, and had two Ty Cobbs, two Walter Johnsons, Two Christy Mathewsons, etc etc, Without constant editing,it's a grand nightmare.

The only way i know to make this sort of work is to create a fictional game, enter all the real major league teams info manually - overwriting the fictional ones made by the game, create your own minor league structure and import all the players via a text file from the import historical players mode on the Free Agent tab each year. That would mean a LOT of work, getting all the players from each year when they first appeared in professional baseball, typing up a list of their player IDs into a text file, and importing the players into a draft or into Free Agency. (you can get all that info from the .csv file, but it still requires manually cut/pasting the info to a text file - ie in to Notepad. i understand you could put players on their "real" teams by adding a few things to to the text file (as explained in the example on the import historical players page), but i've never done it for my game - except for a two player trial - and that was a couple of years ago. i suspect it remains similar in 19.

without a lot of research - and editing the players to exact minor league teams - the game - as i have structured it - would put the players to free agency or to the draft pool. so this may not be what you want. And then this whole missive isn't going to work for your needs.

if anyone wants to try this ... have fun, but i did make a write up for someone a while back, and saved a copy for myself. That write up is a little clearer and more specific on how-tos. i can post it or send it if wanted. It still is a ton of work to get it set-up and working. and every year, a new list of that years players needs to be created for the game to progress correctly. The only caveat is: it works. i set-up my league last year this way and got almost 30 seasons into before i got bored and then 19 came out and i decided to focus on a fictional league, but with the same approach of entering historical players via text files to mesh with my fictional ones.

that's right... that was the problem I had when I tried something like this a few years ago, it would reset the minors each year. I should have remembered. I put a ton of time into setting up a league and playing out the first season, only to see my fake minor leagues explode and ruin the save grrrr

definitely not worth the trouble to try and make it work.

Just for clarification, do I understand correctly that if (a) I choose the historical minors option, in addition to accurate divisions/teams/logos/etc, I’ll get generally accurate minor league rosters, including future stars as lower level youngsters. On the other hand, if (b) I forego the historical minors option and create simplistic fictional minor leagues, the new talent will debut in my game in the first year they reached the major leagues.

Yes, that’s correct. Be sure to allow ghost players (incomplete minor league rosters) unless you want to have fictional players. It will take a few years to fill the minors, so I recommend using no more than four levels and less if you like. Also, do not put a roster limit on the lowest level.

What determines where minor league players show up? Is it the "Historical Minor Team ID?" And if I edit the MiLBTeams and MiLBLeagues documents so that a team, could I move teams around while maintaining their historic minor league player imports?

That would be a giant undertaking. The DB is not like it used to be pre ootp17- where there were individual files. Now it is just one giant DB file.
I am still hoping Orcin's "Free the Minor League Database" will catch on...
Its a beautiful creation that I never actually use because I like to have different historical league setups.

The main reason the minor leagues are all or nothing and you can't pick and choose leagues is that the database is no longer just major league centric. It used to be that players did not appear in the game until their first major league season. Now with minors on they appear in their first pro season. That is a big change. If you only go halfway or make up your own teams most players would start out as free agents. That is a nightmare for most ootp players.

If anyone has an idea how to fix this please post it.

When OOTP was designed probably 20 to 30 ideas were bandied about. The majority could/did/will not work. Please feel free to post ideas as mebbe there be a white whale on the port side.

Go get Moby Dick Captain Ahab!

and remember the ghost of Queequeg .... there's a moral in there somewhere, i think. :confused:

Let us have the option to have players from the minor league database imported into the game as free agents. If a player appears in both the major and minor league database, then we choose which database from which we wish to have the player imported. The decision applies to all players and made once at creation time.