Baseball family legacies in fictional leagues
 

I just started thinking about this a few minutes ago in relation to my current (and first) fictional league and then low and behold I see a new section here just dedicated to fictional leagues. So this seems like as good a time and place to bring this up as there could be.

One of the things I love about baseball is the way it gets passed down from generation to generation and that includes the propensity for professional baseball players to spawn more professional baseball players. I am fascinated by multi-generational baseball families like the Hairstons and Bells, etc. And the father and son combinations that reach way beyond the obvious Griffeys and Bonds and Fielders to also include brief MLB careers for the likes of Pete Rose Jr. and Bump Wills.

So I find myself thinking that eventually I would love to see some of the current players in my fictional league (the W.P. Kinsella League) with sons or grandsons (or nephews, sons-in-law, etc.) finding their way into the minors at least with the possibility of eventual major league (WPK) careers of their own. (Thinking ahead, if I play the league far enough into the future- the starting point was the 1965 season- I would love to have daughters and granddaughters, nieces, daughters-in-law, etc. also- but I guess that's another thread entirely.)

What I'm wondering is if I am the only lunatic who thinks like this or if this is something anyone else here has incorporated into their fictional league. And how you went about it. Also, is there any way in the game to indicate family relationships among the players?

Aaaand....crickets.
Okay, I guess I am a lone lunatic in this regard. Wouldn't be the first time. :D

The only way to see family relationships in-game at the moment iirc is if someone has the 'jr' designation attached to their name.

That really only works for players who have same first name as their pro-playing dad. Would be pretty cool if a family tree option was included.

I sometimes give players with same last names familial relationships in my dynasty report league. It's a nice way to add depth imo

Thanks Izz. I figured as much as far as the Jr. designation being the only current indicator. I was hoping perhaps there was some clever workaround that I hadn't discovered where this information might be added to a player's profile.
I guess I'm thinking more in terms of creating a few fictional characters each year including the occasional relative of an aging or recently retired player. Was wondering if anyone else already does this (so far the evidence says maybe not) and what method they might use to randomly (or otherwise) choose which players to give progeny. And then also how they decide what to name said progeny (since it wouldn't be very interesting or realistic to make them all Jr.'s.)
Not that it would be very difficult for me to create my own approach to this- I was just wondering if anyone else was already capturing this little bit of mirrored reality and how they might be going about it.

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I think one of the earliest incarnations of OOTP had the option of spawning descendants and relatives of ballplayers - my first experience with OOTP, though, was with version 8, so it predates that.

I'm not sure how the game handled sons and grandsons in fictional leagues. It's still something that people request from time to time, but the developers haven't shown much interest in restoring it to the game. In any event, it's relatively easy to go into commissioner mode and change a player's name to "Babe Ruth III" or something like that, so I can understand if it's not a big priority. As it is, such multi-generational baseball families are fairly rare in real life. It seems like most sons of superstar fathers flame out early in their careers or never pursue baseball.

Thanks joefromchicago! I am quite new to OOTP so did not realize that this was a feature in much earlier versions (or even that it has been requested since by other players.)
I agree that this is still relatively rare and certainly very rare is the situation where there are two good to great players in one family (again, Griffeys, Bonds, Boones, etc.) but I think not really all that terribly rare that there there are sons, grandsons, nephews, cousins, brothers, etc. of MLB players (including not terribly good MLB players) who also play pro ball but never make it to The Show. I think of examples like Al Kaline's grandson Colin who played a little A-ball in 2011-2012. This is really what I'm interested in more than the rarity of solid to great major leaguers in the same family. (Also, I find myself tuning in to random current MLB games and seeing a Bedrosian pitch to a Butera and feeling like I've stepped back into the '80's. My impression, with no data to support it, is that this sort of thing is quite a bit less rare in baseball than in other major professional sports.)
What I envision is creating relatives of players in my fictional league and then watching them as they try to make their way through the minors to the bigs. I would hope that most of them would not get higher than AA/AAA or maybe a quick cup of coffee stint in the majors. I would want it to be very rare, as it should, that one of them become a successful major leaguer and even more rare that one become a star or HOF'er. And I plan to set up a method where the players with relatives who become professional players are very random so it could happen that a mop-up reliever with only a season or two at the top level could have a son who becomes an All-Star outfielder or Cy Young award winning starting pitcher.
And I completely understand that in the grand scheme of things family relationships would not be a high priority for the developers. I have no problem keeping records of this sort of thing the old fashioned way.

It seems like reliable, everyday players who fall short of being stars have the strongest baseball lineages. I'm thinking of the Alou, Smalley, and Hairston clans, for instance. It's rare for a player to exceed his father (like Ken Griffey Jr and Barry Bonds). More common is the son or grandson who never achieves his illustrious ancestor's level of success (e.g. Dick & Dave Sisler, Dale Berra, Pete Rose Jr).

Hockey has a bunch of brothers who played in the NHL (the Sutters could have fielded an entire team), but I can't think of too many lineal families apart from the Howes.

Yeah, you'll need to make those edits to the player profiles yourself. The game won't do that.

So, if I am understanding you correctly, joefromchicago, if I just create a new player and name him (and a few other demographic items) but let the game randomly assign his ratings I am unlikely to get the array of results I am looking for? (I have not explored this part of the game at all so I am coming from a vantage point of complete ignorance.)

Do I need to edit the profiles a bit at the start to have a better chance of achieving this?

Nylanders would be a modern father and sons playing in NHL. Going back the Vail’s did the same, the father Sparky only played a few games but Eric was ROY. As a cross Ted McKaskill played in the NHL and Kirk was in MLB.

Well at least I am not alone. I always enter My Grandpa,Father and myself as players and try to enter them around the time they would be playing just to see what happens. I also go back and find some big names in my universe and add in sons just ot see how they do. Always a lot of fun.

Trevor L.

I'm curious about what method you use to add sons for players in your universe. Do you attempt to steer the path of the sons, assigning them ratings that you hope will produce desired outcomes and if so how do you decide who to assign what? How do you name them? Any other details would be much appreciated. (As much out of curiosity as anything. I have started working today on some methods of random creation of relatives for my league but am always looking for new ideas and things I didn't think of.)

For players in my league, I just create a free agent and assign them to one of the high school feeder teams i have. I usually make them raw but try to give them a lot of potential then just let the game go. I have a spreadsheet that I keep track of things like that and then I will usually shortlist them to keep an eye on their progress. I just kinda name them whatever sounds right. I tend to sim a lot of years before I start to play and I randomly add sons as the sims progresses. Sometimes they are still around by the time I play or if not I check back and see how they ended up. Trevor L.

Thanks Trevor.
That sounds like basically what I was looking to do. Although I was originally hoping that I could just create them and step back and not manipulate any ratings at all and hope a few of them eventually developed into major league players. Getting the feeling I might need to be a bit more hands on than that.

Yeah you can be real hands on if you want a specific result. I like to see what the computer can do with a raw talent.

I guess what I'm trying to figure out though is whether I can also just dictate some of the player's demographics and let the AI do the rest in terms of identifying the players skills/ratings/personality, etc. and still get results that will be more or less realistic (the majority of my created relatives topping out somewhere in the minors, a handful more having very minimal major league careers, a few having solid, average to above average major league careers, and a very, very few (1 every 50 to 100 years, maybe) becoming HOF type players.
Do I need to be hands on to achieve these kind of results?

yes I would think you would. I would suggest making very specific ratings higher than normal to achieve an ouitcome you want. Also in what context are you creating them? How many leagues are present? I have a total of 27 in mine so the players have other places to go and hone their craft then come back to the Majors and really shine, (or fall flat on their face :-) )

Trevor L.

A little bit of context: this was the very first fictional league I started shortly after purchasing the game. So it really is pretty darn basic. Fictional league, fictional teams, but modeled after the MLB of 1965 (to start). So just 20 teams in the majors and the usual complement of minor leagues. Not many places to go other than a minor league team affiliated with one of the 20 major league teams. Looking to only bring in one or two created players each season (and sometimes none, given that I am randomly generating relatives and sometimes they won't actually be ready for creation as players until many, many years later.) And since the league is called the W.P. Kinsella League (with sub-leagues called the Shoeless Joe League and the Moonlight Graham League), I was thinking also of occasionally creating a player named after a character in one of Kinsella's baseball books.

Sounds very interesting, Best thing to do would be to just tinker. Remember BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP. that way if it doesnt turn out how you want, just restart and try again.

Trevor L.

Thanks. Yes, I did take to heart the importance of backing up pretty early on so I am diligent about that. I haven't moved far into this little project but I've already become very fond of my Denver Brewers team and especially some of my young players who are starting to look quite promising. I wasn't convinced I could become invested in a fictional team with fictional players but I have become very invested indeed. Now, having laid the groundwork and found my passion for this league I am finding myself thinking about how to enhance it going forward.
But I'm also enjoying taking it quite slowly, playing out each and every game (which hasn't been my approach up to now in my short OOTP life) and loving every minute of it.