Hello,
I have been a long time player of sports simulations who sold his soul to the Out of the Park Baseball back when it used to be called Season Ticket Baseball. I like to play historical simulations, and I've played plenty over the years. The longest I've ever made it is 26 years. I'm pretty certain I have posted on this board before, but I could not, for the life of me, remember what my username and/or password was. Or what email address I used to register.
OOTP 18 appears to have a unique feature in the Challenge Mode that has prompted me to start a new franchise. I went all the way back to the 1884 season when the Los Angeles Dodgers were officially born into the Major Leagues as the Brooklyn Atlantics.
Some ground rules:
I am playing as Brooklyn with the challenge mode turned on. The league starts with a fantasy draft prior to the 1884 season. I have tweaked some settings to try to capture modern day aspects of the game combined with the historical accuracy of the talent of each player. I have four-man rotations turned on with fatigue and substitution tendencies set to "normal". I will concede that this gave me a distinct advantage in my inaugural draft, as I went directly after pitching in a pitching scarce league.
I am playing as manager and general manager, but the only items I control in-game are substitutions. I leave most of the on-field strategic decisions up to the AI. The primary reason is because I will practically never steal a base (among other things), and allowing the AI to make those decisions provides for a more realistic outcome.
The DH is enabled in the American League for the duration of this replay.
I will also warn that I have a tendency to trade extra roster players for draft picks, and I'll take as much of what the computer teams will give me in those deals.
I'm going to post a season synopsis for each season I play. Please let me know if you have any suggestions on making this better*.
To start, here is a list of the Brooklyn Grays' picks for the inaugural draft conducted prior to the 1884 season. Record keeping at the time was shoddy at best, so record of 24th pick have been lost to the sands of time**.
* I am searching for a way to make file hosting easier. For work, I spend a lot of time copying and pasting images into documents. Its' a process I dislike immensely, and adding the step of having to host the document first has had me reluctant to start posting. I'm going to give it a shot, though. If anyone has any suggestions, here, that would be amazing.
** I didn't start recording until the third season. Because of this, along with some of the settings I have selected, I believe this player retired before ever reaching the Majors. That means that his existance in the database is lost because I have the setting to delete players who never make it to the Majors enabled.