[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by mgom27

We can take this years League and to start with and go to Baseball Reference to find out the Names of the Minor Leagues from the 1990's and search Team history to find Minor League Team history like for Richmond Braves this is the years part of the Atlanta Braves.

Okay. Now try doing that for every MLB team for every year. Let us know how long it takes to do even one season.

You underestimate the complexity of the exercise. I know, because I've done plenty of my own research work on compiling data on the minors. (Relying only on online sources isn't enough, or even convenient. Printed reference sources are invaluable, especially since there is on occasion discrepancies in the data.)

Originally Posted by thbroman

Let's see what would be needed.
First, it isn't required that the structure of our fictional minor-league universe evolve in lock-step with what happened in history between 19xx-2000.

Sure. But there are still issues even when trying to simplify things. Let me illustrate.

Let's consider just the highest level of the minors. The International League has been around since 1901, so that one is fine. The Pacific Coast League has been around since 1903, so that's pretty much it, right? Well, not so fast. There was also the American Association, which initially ran from 1902-62, then folded, then came back and ran from 1969-97 before folding again. OOTP can't handle as yet a league folding and then returning, so we're going to have to decide what to do about the AA.

If you're going for a historically authentic approach, it can be argued it's better to have the IL and AA rather than the IL and PCL. This is because the PCL acted more like an independent outfit, as it's relative geographic isolation on the west coast kept it more 'separate' from organized ball. In contrast, the AA and IL were definitively in MLB's operating area, they mirrored nicely the AL-NL structure, including a championship between the respective league champions (the Junior World Series, which ran for many years).

But if you go for the IL-AA combination, what do you do when the real-life league folds in 1963, and folds again after 1997? Just swap over PCL teams for the intervening years? That doesn't seem very satisfactory or authentic.

Another option is to have all three leagues. But then you have to run the AA for years it didn't exist (1963-68, 1998-present). So AA teams which in real life switched to the IL and PCL will have to stay in the original league, which is probably doable. The main issue is that a three Class AAA league setup will look strange to current users since there has only been two such leagues over the last 16 years. Plus you have to decide whether to make the AA and IL as subleagues within a league so you can recreate the Junior World Series.

So, as you can see even a supposedly simplified scenario raises a number of questions.

Now, of course, if OOTP gets changed to allow leagues to fold and return, this helps greatly in addressing these questions. But we don't know when, or even if, that will be done.

Originally Posted by thbroman

Second, the game already allows for the existence of independent minor leagues, so what is actually needed to allow them to be sources of players in a historical-fictional world?

Yes, but not all that well. To do current-day independent minors well likely requires a good overhaul of the financial system (which would benefit many other areas) but that doesn't seem in the cards any time soon. Also, I would maintain the way the game makes players available would need to change: at present each league has its own draft pool; to simulate the wider world more accurately a single draft pool from which all leagues draw is how it should work. Players are then drafted and/or signed out of that common pool.

Originally Posted by thbroman

The ability to obtain players from those leagues by a mechanism other than a draft, by direct purchase of player contracts. Let's just find a way to find and sign players that doesn't require use of the exiting modern mechanisms and that would be a decent start, wouldn't it?

Sure, but it needs to be thought out carefully, and ideally as part of a larger picture, a more comprehensive idea of where such changes ultimately lead.