Help! Historical Players without the draft
 

Starting a league in 1946 and my plan is to have no expansion, no relocation and to play out history with a 16 team league. I don't want a draft. I want historical players to show up on the team they debuted with. Here are my questions:


1) Am I right to assume that say Cal Ripken will import automatically to the St Louis Browns since they are the historical equivalent to the Orioles?

2) George Brett, there will be no Royals. Will he just import as a free agent?

Just wondering if anyone has tried this. Thanks

If you're not going to have expansion and relocation, you might run into some issues.

I don't think a player who debuted for an expansion or relocated team will be assigned to that organization if it doesn't exist or hasn't relocated.

In the case of the St. Louis Browns, OOTP will use a historical franchise ID to track it as the same franchise as the current Baltimore club. But a separate historical team ID is also used to identify its current iteration, so this will be updated when the team moves. I believe that the database uses the historical team ID. So a player will end up being imported as a free agent if he was supposed to be with the Orioles but the Browns are still in St. Louis. That's because there will be no franchise with the Orioles' historical team ID in your game.

However, I'd create a test league and see what happens first. I've done leagues like this but don't remember how it worked.

As far as George Brett is concerned, he will definitely be imported as a free agent. But keep in mind that the AI is not very good at being competitive in bidding for rookie free agents. Human-controlled teams can easily outbid the AI and scoop up rookies with bright futures like Brett.

I think you can do this by changing the Historical ID value on the Team Page whenever a franchise relocates...

So for the '53 season you'd need to change the Braves' ID from BSN to ML1 so Braves players imported to Boston...

For '54 season you'd need to change the Browns' ID from SLA to BAL so the Orioles players import to the Browns...

For '55 you'd need to change the A's ID from PHA to KC1... For '58 you'd change the Dodgers from BRO to LAN and the Giants from NY1 to SFN, and so forth, including changing the Braves again, in '66, from ML1 to ATL...

This field may or may not be the same field that shows up as the team abbreviation throughout the game. I'm not in front of the game right now so I can't be sure (and mine is OOTP v12 so this may or may not apply to v14). If so, you could get around this by remembering to change your abbreviations just before new players import, and then when that process is complete, you can rename your abbreviations to what makes sense... Good luck

This worked for me in the past. Haven't tried it since about ver 10 or 11 though.

Good stuff guys and I am concerned about the free agency of a rookie like Brett and how I know more than the AI. I might just change ID's and once the league expands in 1961 we will go with a draft. Thanks again for the help

Just be careful: OOTP is known to update the IDs each season, although I think the option to turn off automatic expansion and relocation addressed this.

But always double check the team IDs and make sure they don't change when the next season's data is loaded. You might want to make a copy of your game and sim ahead to make sure that everything is okay before advancing officially.

Carolina,

I'd make things easy on yourself...after importation of the rookies, go to Free Agents sort by career stats (all levels-using AAA clubs right?) and use a 20 sided die to assign "expansion" rookies
(17-20 of course meaning...no team leave it up to faith) to teams as assigned by number (NYY being #1 and so on)

I'd do that because like Charlie stated, the AI is stupid, OR one team grabs all the FA's

I did that with the Federal League rookies around 1914-1916