[Neags23]

Originally Posted by Expat28

I am new to OOTP 2007 and I think what I am trying to do is possible but for the life of me I can't figure out how.

I would like to simply play just as if I started the 1980 season as a manager/GM of one of the MLB teams but I want to start with empty rosters and empty front offices for all teams which would allow me to appoint myself the manager of the team of my choice, hire my personnel (from the full available pool of staff) and then draft from the pool of available real-life players. I would also like that all cities/teams start on equal footing financially.

I tried to start a historical league and import the Lahman database and use the "release all/draft" feature but i can't release all the staff and the starting financials are drastically different for each city.

So then I tried to create a standard league and renamed all the teams thinking I could import the real players in after the fact to replace the fictional players but that seemed also impossible.

Can anyone help me to create league using real-life teams and players with all teams starting off empty and equal (no players or staff, equal money and financial potential) that would add historical rookies each year to the draft?

Don't know if you're still around to read the answer to this... but I think you can do it this way. You're on the right track about using the "release all/draft" button after starting the historical league with Lahman. That will release all the players into the free agent pool. To get the staff situation you want, start with coaches and scouts disabled. When you're ready to join your team, turn coaches and scouts on. I'm not sure if this will automatically assign your front office staff or not, but it's worth a try.

As far as the financials... there is a "Assign fictional financials to Teams" button. Before your rosters are filled through a draft, free agents, etc., click that button. This recalculates financials based on payroll. But since all payrolls will be zero, it will give everyone equal footing. If that doesn't give you the desired results, you can go in and manually edit the financials for each team.

For the historical rookies, just make sure you have "Import Historical Rookies" checked.