[thehef]

Originally Posted by AESP_pres

I want real 19th century baseball with the real NA / NL / AA / UL / Player Association league structure

I'm not sure about the "real" part cuz I don't know exactly what you mean, but as far as the real NA, NL, AA, UL, PL league structure, players, etc., those should be do-able. OOTP would just need to decide how to handle:

a) Include like the Federal League: as part of the minor league module, or
b) include like the AL & NL: as major leagues

Based upon my somewhat limited knowledge of how it all works, a) would probably be the easiest to program.

Originally Posted by AESP_pres

19th century minor league... the players are already in the system so why not?

If a) above were implemented, then 19th century minor leagues would likely be fairly simple to add, too.

Worth noting, though, is that we do not yet have complete* 20th century minor leagues. For examples, the significant early 20th century minor leagues (such as the Int'l Lg, PCL, Am Assoc, Tx Lg) do not appear in OOTP until they first have major league affiliates. This leaves a major gap in OOTP's minor league module during the 1901 - (approx) 1930's period. The data is all there, and based upon my own and others' testing, OOTP is already about 90% (or thereabouts) programmed to handle it. And while I don't know this for sure, I believe that we'll be seeing these add'l 20th century minor leagues in OOTP soon. I bring this up because I would think that this all will be a step-by-step approach: Add the missing 20th century minors, then add 19th century majors, then add 19th century minors. At least I hope that's what on tap!

*I define "complete" as to the data available. There are some minor leagues - even some in the 50's - where the player data is very incomplete, even non-existent.

Originally Posted by AESP_pres

Add minor league "transaction"... not transaction per se but a file who tell the AI that a player is in the team system and to not release him (unless he was in real life of course)

This is very doable. Lukas previously indicated as such - at least OOTP's willingness - in another thread:

Originally Posted by Lukas Berger

I suppose if someone presents us with a (reasonably) complete minor league transactions db, that could change the picture...

The historical transactions for OOTP's MLB module was user-created. Therefore, the same would need to apply to a historical transactions database for minors: Users would need to create it. It's very doable as long as the approach would be...

"get the right players in the right organizations at approximately the right time"

... and not...

"100% accuracy"

In fact, the exact dates for many MLB transactions are not known, and therefore reasonable assumptions are used (both by official sources and, to fill gaps in official sources, within OOTP's database). That would need to be the approach here.

I've included elsewhere (a few years ago) the overall logic of how it could be done, and OOTP contributor legends BigRod and the late, great Spritze both indicated it would be doable. Here's what we'd need to make it happen:

1) OOTP's blessing to move forward. Or at least their pledge to at least try out a small test database in order to determine if moving forward is worth the effort.
2) A few volunteers to do the work, at least one of whom would need be a guru in database programming (my Access & Excel skills are decent, but are not up to the level that would be needed for this project).
3) A consensus on the approach. My suggestion would be to largely rely on data that already exists and is readily accessible, and to only - possibly, it wouldn't be required - supplement that as time goes by with in-depth research to find specific dates and details of specific transactions. (Worth noting here is that the MLB historical txn database was and is a work in progress. When it was first implemented in OOTP, it did not contain nearly the number of txns that it includes now. So a minor league txns db would not need to be complete in order to be implemented. In fact, it would pretty much never be complete.)

Re the specifics of #3, I could go into a lot of detail, but this thread is not the place. If there is interest, then I'll do that elsewhere