[kbuchanan]

In case anyone is interested, I wanted to list my findings. I ran two 75 season sims. First league was MLB, full minors, 2 foreign leagues and no feeder leagues. I used a 50 round draft (because that is what I wanted to use if it works out alright) and had the game generate enough players for 55 rounds. this league was making 1800 players for the draft every year and 1500 were drafted.

The second league was the same as above, except it had a 50 team high school feeder league (4 year), a 24 team junior college league (2 year), and a 112 team NCAA feeder league (4 year). Draft was populated by feeder leagues only. Draft classes ranged from 1700 to 2200 players. So I was producing more players per draft in the second league.

My primary goal was to see if I would over load my league with talent having such a large draft and so many feeder teams.

I noticed very little difference in the stats being generated over 75 years. The first league seemed to produce more outliers, but overall the stats were very consistant over the 75 seasons. One strange thing is that both leagues seemed to have on average lower ERA's and BA's the first 10 years and then went up by about .20 and averaged around the same for the other 60 years. This resulted in the NL having ERA average around 3.97 for the first 10 years and 4.18 for the other 60. This was the same in both leagues. I also compared the stats of all minor leagues and again it was very consistent. It is also of note that I used SkyDogs settings (with a few minor tweaks) and got exactly the stats I was looking for. I believe that the effects of such a large draft class had no effect on the stats, and I am very happy with those results.

Second I tried to use the overall ratings and potential ratings to compare leagues. I think the game may actually control the overall ratings. Each league every time I checked had almost exactly the same number of players with certain overall ratings. using 20 to 80 her is what I found every time I checked ( usually every 10 years):

4 to 6 players with overall rating 80
40 to 45 players over 75
215 to 225 over 60
395 to 405 0ver 45

This was every single time within this narrow range in both leagues. I think the game must meter the overall talent in the majors. It got a little weird with potential ratings, but I couldn't fully understand the results. I had many more players in the second league with potentials higher than 21 and a much larger amount of high potential players in the draft. The weirdest part is that the percentage of players with a potential higher than 21 in both leagues was very low. only 6.2% in the first league and 10.2% in the second league. I was really interested to see if the players for example in the bottom 30% of the league were getting better over time, but it was impossible for me to compare players accurately over time. Since they all had overall ratings of 20 and the individual ratings were all over the board I had no real way to compare players. I will say that the differences in potential seemed to have no effect on the majors. It seems that the large part of those extra players with high potential where in the feeder leagues which you would expect. Here are the ratings for all players in the majors in both leagues:

league 1:
375 players with overall 45+
650 players with overall 21+
386 players with potential 45+
725 players with potential 21+

league 2:
375 players with overall 45+
609 players with overall 21+
376 players with potential 45+
660 players with potential 21+

This is actually the second test I did I did 50 seasons with almost identical results. I made a couple adjustments and stopped every 10 seasons to record data on the second test, so it is better documented. I wanted to repeat the tests with only a 25 round draft, but I am very happy with these results and don't really feel that having such a big feeder system will have a detrimental impact on my league, so I'm going to skip that test because I am anxious to get playing. I hope this helps people that want to use feeder leagues.