[David Ball]

Yeah, once they got into pro ball even at the lowest level it would be relatively easy to get attention, if only because The Sporting News ran box scores and league leader boards for all sorts of minor leagues. Prior to the coming of the great farm systems, though, major league clubs did not have sufficiently large organizations to track amateur players very much unless a particularly attractive prospect happened to pop up in their back yard. The Yankees found Lou Gehrig immediately because he was a New Yorker. Babe Ruth was a Baltimorean, and so he began his career in the International League. Rogers Hornsby was a Texan, and he started out in the Texas-Oklahoma League.

This is an interesting enough topic that I decided to pick an example at random and do a little case study. Here are the main pitchers on the 1915 White Sox, with their place of birth and first professional club:

Red Faber, b. Cascade, IA, broke into pro ball with Dubuque, IA;
Jim Scott, b. Deadwood SD, played at Nebraska Wesleyan College, broke in with Oskaloosa, IA;
Reb Russell, born Jackson, MS, broke in with Bonham and Ft. Worth, TX in 1912 (I'm not sure which he played for first);
Joe Benz, b. New Alsace, IN, broke in with Newark, OH;
Eddie Cicotte, b. Detroit, broke in with Augusta, GA (Augusta also had Nap Rucker and Ty Cobb, both Georgians -- quite a team for Class C);
Mellie Wolfgang, b. Albany, NY, first pro team, Albany, NY.

My apologies if the geography is not clear to those from outside the US, but the point is that with the exception of Cicotte and Russell, everybody started pro ball in the same state or a state adjacent to their birth place. Even Russell remained in the south. Scott is only an apparent exception: he came from remote North Dakota, but he had played college ball in Iowa, in the same neck of the woods as Nebraska.

Eddie Collins, on the other hand, came from around New York and he signed directly with Connie Mack and went straight to the Athletics, but he had attracted attention as a college player, and of course he was a really exceptional talent. That was not the norm.

For practical purposes, however, if you're playing an OOTP historical league the "amateur" players that enter the database each year are actually (with a very few exceptions such as Collins) not amateurs at all, but players with at least a taste of professional baseball, and usually several years' experience. If you have the draft turned off and are letting the game assign players to their RL original teams, you are in effect mimicking each real club's player acquisition system, whether that club had a farm system bringing player up from the grass roots or was purchasing players from minor league clubs and other major clubs that did have farm systems.

The players you have farmed out to your affiliates represent men your club had acquired from other minor teams and then decided to farm out for more seasoning with minor teams they did not entirely control. I don't believe OOTP will simulate the complex world of independent and semi-independent minor league clubs that existed before the farm system (if I'm wrong about that, I'd be grateful to anyone who would tell me how to set such a simulation up). However, using historical players probably corresponds better to the way a major league club would operate before the farm system develops than a fictional world does, because you generally don't acquire players until they're at least close to being ready for major league play. And using hidden players makes sense in a way because you're not in complete control of all the assets of your "affiliates," just the players (maybe comparatively few of them) you have on loan to them, and that's appropriate in a world without farm systems. When you use fictional players, on the other hand, you're normally responsible for developing them all the way from the time they sign their first amateur contracts, and major league teams did not normally do that before the late 1920's and 1930's.