[Brad K]

If you turn off historical minors you might have a shortage of replacement players for the first year or two.

Lets say you have a historical start in 1980 and elect not to import complete history. What you will get is players who played MLB in 1980. If during the season the real life team had a SS injured for a couple weeks and called up a AAA SS to cover the injury time, you'll get both the SS who was injured and his temporary replacement from AAA. Both were MLB players in 1980. However if the real life team didn't have any SS injuries and didn't call up a AAA shortstop, you won't have that AAA/MLB SS to call up if you have a SS injury.

There are several partial solutions. You could play with injuries set to OFF for a couple of years. You could let the game run a couple of years on its own and let AI deal with the headaches, then take over a team.

What I've done on my current game is import entire history and then delete all player records before starting. This has the advantages of don't import complete history but provides more players. Since full history was imported a player who played MLB before and after 1980 but not during 1980 will be in the game as a free agent. Rather than leaving them as free agents, I assign them to appropriate teams.

I don't quite remember but in a 1951 start that gave me 50ish extra players. An average of an extra 3 players per team made it very playable.