[Peregrine]

Someone may know an easier way to do this, but this is what I know so far.

This may sort of answer both your questions, you can do these things in a Major League inaugural draft. What you need to do is make sure you start your league using the Majors quickstart - that has all the 2012 rosters and minor league players etc. On the Game Menu you will see Create Quickstart Game. Then once in the game, you can remove the leagues you don't want, then go to Setup and Options - Functions, and select Release All Players and do Inaugural Draft.

For looking at player's stats, if you don't need to see all these stats in the draft screen, you can go to player search - magnifying glass icon on the right side, and it will show all the players, and in the view drop down there should be a stats view already created. Use the splits drop down to shop like career stats, last year, or whatever.

If you absolutely have to have the player's stats in the draft screen, you can customize the view on the Draft screen so it shows stats instead of other stuff. Go to View, top left above the player list, and choose Customize. Then go to batting stats, and choose all the stats that are relevant to you. Then you can save it as batting stats, go back and do the same with pitching stats, and save it as pitching stats. Then you can use the Split drop-down above the player list to determine what stats you want to look at - last year, 2 years ago, career, whatever.

I have a feeling you may want to go back to scouting after a while - it makes it a lot easier, though it isn't perfect by any means. You can also turn off scouting in the league options, then the stars you see will not be based on your scouts opinion but on the actual numbers coded into the player.

Hope this helps.