[cinwdr]

My idea of an interesting baseball sim game is to pretend that African American players who were in the Negro Leagues got a chance to play in the Majors before 1947. I thought that might be easy with OOTP7, but it isn't. The other features of OOTP7, however, so far (I have only played up to 1907) have made the extra fuss and stress worthwhile.

Here is what I do. It may not be the right way, or even a very good way, but it is what I have been able to work out for myself from the Manual.

First I set up a standard historical league according to Sticky's basic instructions. I make sure that I am playing in Commissioner mode (and I choose to manage the Senators because there is a historic connection between the Senators management and black baseball and the Senators pretty quickly turn into a deplorable team that needs all the help it can get).

Then I make a year-by-year list of when the black players I want actually got into professional ball.

Then I make sure to acquire some no name cup-of-coffee players from the Amateur Draft to correspond to the players I want on my team. The best thing would be to find ones with good stats for their short stays in the Majors (for reasons that will come up later). However, I don't always have the patience to do that and players with good futures don't usually qualify as no-name.

Then I edit the no-name players into big name black players and issue them standard Major League contracts on the Senators. (One great bonus here is that Gambo's picture file has a lot of the pictures of better known black players, even if you can't see Grant Johnson's face on the field). Now we are talking legendary ballplayers here, so I tend to make my black players fairly legendary. Unbalances the game A LOT, I am happy to say.

You would think that this would just about nail it to the roof, but it doesn't. The program does not like these interlopers and seems to spend quite a lot of time trying to undermine my editing work. This probably happens during player recalculation and I can't imagine how one would be able to deal with it easily if that is the case. Anyhow that is the reason it is a good idea to re-edit players who have good initial historical stats. The program seems more willing to think of those guys as potential superstars, but not players who really were the pits statistically. Anyhow, what I am saying is that I have had to redo a lot of these players every year, since (of course) they don't appear in Lahman. Why "a lot" instead of "all" I don't really know.

I sure hope that there is a better way and that we can learn about it from this thread. Meanwhile I have to go back to my game and create Jose Mendez.