[Charlie Hough]

I've developed an update to the ethnicities, names, first_names, and world_default.xml files that provide a more accurate reflection of the racial and ethnic differences between Hispanic populations in Mexico and Central America vs. South America and the Caribbean.

OOTP lumps together all Hispanics as a single ethnicity. It uses a single, overall setting for Hispanics that distributes Spanish names across the racial/ethnic groups like African, Hispanic, and Caucasian.

This is problematic and unrealistic because, based on real world ethnicity data, the African ethnicity in OOTP should be virtually non-existent in Mexico and some other countries, while it should have high representation in places like the Dominican Republic and Cuba.

But OOTP treats all these places equally, so the percentages of these racial types are applied the same way to ethnically Hispanic players in any Spanish-speaking population and also in the U.S.

I have not refined my mods yet, but they are based on recent real world population data, and they replace the Pakistani ethnicity and name set (37) with a new ethnicity and a copy of the Spanish nameset that represent Mexico and Central America. This allows those countries to have a distinct ethnicity that provides more accurate racial representation for players from those locations.

Meanwhile, the original Hispanic ethnicity file has been tweaked and is used for countries like Venezuela, Colombia, Dominican Republic and Cuba.

Of course, this is an oversimplification, so I might need to create a third ethnicity to make things more accurate. After all, the racial makeup of other countries in this region varies widely. In Argentina, for example, you would almost need a unique ethnicity and nameset just for that country, with an overwhelmingly Caucasian population and especially a mixture of Spanish, German, and Italian surnames. But I will probably save that for a future day when maybe OOTP expands its number of supported ethnicities.

By the way, I chose to eliminate the Pakistani ethnicity simply because it was the first one, starting from the bottom of the numerical list, that is not important for a realistic reflection of contemporary baseball. I would probably move up to #36 and the Indonesian ethnicity to do the next set.

NOTE: As a bonus, I also used U.S. census data to add thousands of surnames to the nameset for the modern U.S., including quite a number of Spanish surnames that are often combined with English first names and have been around baseball for the past few decades.

I removed many prospective surnames from this new list because they represent real-world ethnic groups that still have minimal representation in baseball at any level, including Little League. So, for example, you don't see Arabic or Persian names in this set. But you get a far more diverse and realistic nameset for American players.

In testing, I have really liked the results thus far.