I got involved in this project because, recently, I’ve felt that the Negro League (NeL) part of the game had fallen behind. A trove of new statistical research has been uncovered by the folks behind Seamheads.com. On the centennial of the Negro National League’s founding, MLB announced its intent to research and then integrate select NeL stats into its record books. Baseball-Reference added those stats in June 2021. MLB made it official this year. OOTP has tried to apply patchwork solutions to improve the performance of NeL players, but it is hampered by the time and effort it would take to update their database, the League Total Modifiers built for only the AL/NL talent levels and their league-wide output, the Adjust/Weaken settings (a.k.a. “Make Bads”) that would hit NeL players and Al/NL part-time players alike, and other game limitations that reflect the fact OOTP was built to accommodate one MLB with two sub leagues, the AL and the NL.
As I thought about how to go about advocating for more focus on the NeL, I reached the conclusion that I’d rather just work with like-minded people so we could try and do it ourselves. OOTP’s game engine wants stats to reflect the talent of the player in that given year. It wants a reasonable sample size to take into consideration. For MLB players, it wants MLB stats. So why mess with old, incomplete stats and spend multiple game cycles making coding changes that require constant tweaking and may risk undoing some of OOTP25’s great advances in the historical game’s output. Why not just feed the beast what it wants? That’s where Eric Chalek’s Major League Equivalent (MLE) stats came in. They can found here:
https://horsehidedragnet.wordpress.com/negro-leagues/
Using stats from his MLE’s we tried to present to the game how these select NeL players would have performed in the Major Leagues. We are enormously grateful to Eric for his hard work and are thrilled to bring more attention to his efforts. To account for the increased talent in the league we also imagined MLB expansion in 1911. Consider that: [Rube Foster’s] initial vision was that he would create a league that was so dynamic that he would force Major League Baseball’s hand to expand. So, if we were looking at it in a more modern-day context, think football with the NFL and the AFL merger, or for those who are basketball fans, the merger of the NBA and the ABA. Now, this was Rube Foster in the 1920’s, that’s how forward thinking and how much a visionary this man was. – Bob Kendrick, President, Negro League Baseball Museum from the 2023 documentary, The League
Now we had MLE stats for the game to read and value appropriately. We had also gotten around the LTM issue as the game accounts for additional teams. We were so happy with the results that we started adding logos, and uniforms, and messing with the 19th century… and so on. Finally, we were ready to share.
We welcome your feedback. We’re still looking over the results too – not “making the perfect the enemy of the good” – but still considering tweaks. The hitters come from an MLE publication Eric did about a year ago whereas the pitchers reflect the most recent edition. We also confess to putting our thumb a bit on the scale with the HOF NeL pitchers, adding a small oomph to Eric’s stats. Was that a good choice or too much? The HOF two-way players play like Ohtani before Ohtani - is that sustainable? We don’t quite have enough players in the game to assign them to particular teams every year, but with some additional players added (at or below league average) perhaps we could assign the stats lines to those expansion teams directly – eliminating the need for an inaugural fantasy draft in years 1911 to 1961. Maybe instead of just four NeL teams with the same city and team name over time, they could move and evolve into different iterations in a manner reflective of the dynasty teams that each had their day in the sun in the NeL, so you get the Pittsburgh Crawfords in the early 30’s before they merge into the Homestead Grays, and so on. Maybe there is enough talent in the late 50’s and early 60’s from Latin America and overseas such that additional expansion teams could be pulled forward in the same manner. Eric has MLE’s for them too and it’s been too long (ever since Spritze passed away) that a true historical database mod was maintained offering those players in a ready-to-play/import format. Maybe with this release. more folks will learn how to use Dr. Doom’s database tool to change something they don’t like and to customize the database or Teams.csv to their own preferences rather than be subject to our or OOTP’s best efforts.
Mods are a lot of work. There’s at least two years of effort and testing behind this. We will endeavor to improve and expand upon it as best we can. Thanks to luckymann and Makonnen for your collaborative efforts and especially to Garlon who carried, by far, the bulk of the load in creating this mod.
There are a ton of suggested settings and explanatory notes in the user manual but to just dive into the NeL part of the mod: Load the database. Go to 1901 for an easy starting place. Turn off the color barrier, let lots of people be available in the 1911 expansion draft, and adjust settings to reflect your play preferences. ... Have fun!