[Brad K]

If you do a regular historical game and don't import entire history you may be short of subs to cover for injuries in the first year. That's because with that setup the game will give you only players who played MLB in the start year. So if in real life a team had the 3B injured then you'll get the player they called up to replace him. But if they didn't have a 3B injured you won't get that player and if yours is injured you won't have anyone to call up.

The answer to this is to import complete history which will give you players who played MLB before and after the starting year but not starting year. When I started my 1951 saves this resulted in about 80 additional players, a significant number for 16 teams.

However the additional players will show up as free agents. It will be necessary to manually assign them to their correct organizations.

Another fix is to import full minors. There's a mass delete button to delete everyone who didn't make it to MLB, which you'll need to do to avoid the problem you have with fictional players, although I suspect there's more of a problem with fictional players than there is with full minors.