Historical Minors & Rookies Questions
 

I'm in a historical sim with the Texas Rangers starting in 1972. Two questions for you:

1. I disabled the amateur draft and disabled creation of free agents. At what date will I get my rookies? i.e. I think I get Jim Sundberg sometime soon.

2. I enabled historical minors. What happens to all my minor league players when the minor league teams get deleted or added? Do they get sent to a random team in my minor system, or the lowest level or what?

Thanks.

You will get your 1973 rookies sometime shortly after the 1972 World Series. Because you have minors enabled the rookies you get will be those that made their pro debut in 1973, which for most will be earlier then their MLB debut year. As minor league teams move and fold your players will stay in your organization and will be assigned, either by you or the AI depending on your settings, to one of your new minor league affiliates.


Edit. Just looked and Sundberg will join you for 1973. He was in the Eastern League with Pittsfield that year and joined the Rangers in ‘74.

Thanks for that. Got the rookies the day after the World Series.

Got Sundberg, and for some reason got another catcher that has better rated potential (Jonathan Astroth) despite being a career minor leaguer in real life. We'll see how it plays out.

The minor league teams shuffled around, and the deleted franchises just dumped my players to the other teams as expected. "Ask AI to set minor leagues" button works well after that.

Are you using recalculate ratings or letting the OOTP development engine control how players develop? That will potentially make a big difference for Sundberg and certainly for Astroth.

Looking at Astroth's career he had a decent couple of seasons in the minors so if you are using the development engine there is a chance he might have an okay major league career.

I'm using the OOTP Development Engine. I have Talent Change Randomness at 85, but it seems there's still some wild stuff happening. A no-name player on the Orioles got a huge bump and winded up with 10+ WAR.

You're right, Astroth mashed in the minor leagues in real life.. hit over 1.000 OPS in AAA! I wonder what happened to him... maybe he got injured and could never make it to the bigs.

It's awesome to find little tidbits like this. Perhaps Astroth will go on to have a great career in my universe. In any case I'll have 2 good catchers for the 70s era.

It is tidbits you discover about these 'unknown' minor leaguers that makes me enjoy playing with the development engine option every so often. I still use recalculate ratings for a lot of my sims but the development engine is a nice way to learn about new players - and wonder what happened to them like in the case of Astroth.



Turns out he did okay after baseball. Found this article on him with a quick google search.

Yes, I saw that article too. Astroth became a doctor and a school president, very good for him. Still no info on why his baseball career ended... either he got injured, or the Rangers didn't know what they had, or he was a bad catcher (can stick him in outfield or DH then?), or he just decided to hang them up.

When you're doing an OOTP Development Engine sim, what do you feel are good settings for aging? I have it at 85 now. I don't want guys falling off a cliff at 32. I don't want everyone to be Nolan Ryan... but I want Nolan Ryan to be Nolan Ryan. I guess in that case I could have gone for recalc.. but I think that would make my job as a GM too easy.

I always just leave aging at its default level when using development engine. Others might have some better ideas but I find it works fine for my tastes at default.