A Word on the NeL MLEs of OOTP26
How many and who are the Negro League (NeL) players with MLEs in OOTP26?
The MLEs in OOTP26 are from the 212 players that were modified in The InteGreated Mod. They were selected by Garlon and I because they were some of the greatest players of their era and because they spanned a wide range of years. Included in the count are players that also played crossed over into the AL/NL after Jackie broke the color barrier and some that played the majority of their time in Cuba or Mexico. They listed in the bottom of the post.
What is a “Major League Equivalency?”
At its simplest, an MLE stat line is an estimate of what that individual would have done had they been dropped into the AL/NL in that given year.
Where did these MLEs come from?
The mod’s, and thus the MLE’s, starting point was the work of Eric Chalek. I first starting reading Eric’s posts on the old Baseball Think Factory website and then in the Hall of Eric and Miller. Now, he has a new home. You can find out more about him and his great work here:
https://horsehidedragnet.wordpress.com/
While Eric’s MLE’s were impetus for Garlon and I to get to work on fleshing out the players (OOTP needs a lot more info to make the players work in-game – including defensive attributes). Led by Garlon's expertise, we spent about a year putting it together and then released it during the middle of the OOTP25 cycle.
So, has the InteGREATed mod, as played in OOTP25, been incorporated into the game?
No, it’s not that simple. First, the stat lines are not exactly what was in the mod. Since its release, I’ve continued to work on those 212 players. For example, creating batting lines for the pitchers, reviewing them for typos, consistency across batting/pitching/fielding stat lines and doing an additional review for stat reasonableness. It is that version that was provided to OOTPD. Additionally, all the alternate IDs we assigned to our modded players have reverted back to the BBR IDs with the exception of players that had careers entirely before 1920 who kept the ID we created in the BBR format and added a -98 numerical value to.
Okay, so tweaks to the numbers, alignment of the IDs to OOTP defaults, that sounds fine – is anything else different?
Yes, something very important is different! Whereas Garlon and I simply modified the core database files within the historical.database.odb, directly added the NeL players via an alternative /stats folder, and harnessed the OOTP engine as-is to make the mod work, OOTPD has gone a different direction. OOTPD treats the MLEs in the same way it treats neutralized stats, an alternative csv file of data that the game can look to in order to create ratings for players already in its database.
What are the pros and cons of each approach? Start with the mod.
For the mod approach, the biggest con is that the game cannot be played with Real Minors on. If you were to turn on Real Minors while using the mod’s database, you’d end up with duplicate players – one set of NeL players with our MLE stats/ratings and another set of NeL players with the default in-game NeL stat lines. So, we instruct users to turn Real Minors off when using the mod.
The pros are significant though. OOTP is designed to take MLB stat lines (AL/NL) and create player ratings based on those stats and then the players with those ratings enter your sim and do what they do. So, we thought, why not treat the MLEs like the actual MLB stat lines they proport to represent and just let the engine do what it does best? The game has no idea that the MLE stat lines entered for Oscar Charleston’s in the database are MLEs and not actual MLB performance stats. The game just makes the player based on the stats it sees and ties them to the ID assigned.
As a result of this approach, the game debuts and retires the players perfectly according to their MLE years. The players miss the war seasons that the MLE stat lines account for. The players appear in Random Debut sims seamlessly along with all the other players. The excess talent can be absorbed by a modified Teams.csv file, if desired. Any modded Teams.csv file doesn’t impact other, on-going sims you may have running off the default OOTP /stats folder. The use of an alternative /stats folder (the mod uses /statsNeL instead of /stats) also keeps the core mod files from being overwritten every time an OOTP patch is installed. Lastly, to check performance, the Real Stats tab is populated with the MLEs so one can compare in-game performance against the stats being used to create ratings.
What about the pros and cons of the OOTPD’s alternative approach?
The biggest strength is the fact they are building something that will work in all game types – including the one we can’t do, Real Minors on. As modders, we don’t have to make a mod that fits everyone’s play style. We made one for ourselves and shared it, with disclosure of its limitations. OOTPD has a wider audience with all sorts of varied play styles, and I understand wanting to use programming and other tools they have – and we modders don’t – to try and make that happen.
Once you understand their point of view at OOTPD, I think you have to give them time to make it work for everyone. So, let the community play with the new OOTP26 MLE functionality and report their feedback so bugs can be identified and fixed. For example, unlike the neutralized database, there is not necessarily a perfect match of stat line to stat line. Will the game be able to properly align all the vital minor league NeL stats with the MLE stat lines? Given the game is wired to look to the real-life debut and retire dates, how will the players perform absent an MLE for any given year? Will Random Debut games know to use Satchel Paige’s MLE debut age or is it still too tied to his AL one? It takes a lot of programming to sort all of that. Not an insurmountable challenge, of course, and a lot of work has already gone into it, but it’s still a challenge and far, far more complex than the approach the mod took.
So, stay tuned. Soon they’ll know what’s a bug in need of squashing (be patient – it’s a brand-new feature so after all!) and what is just an inherent limitation of the legacy programming.
So, how will you play the game?
With Real Minors off and with the mod on, of course.
It’s perfect for my style of play and I have no one to blame for any glitches other than myself.
Also, that way I can keep adding new NeL MLE-based players (and even other international players for whom MLEs exist). I’ve already got some I want to add as soon as I can crack the OOTP26 .odb file open and get to the .csv files. I also love my customized Teams.csv universe at this point.
One thing that is a huge help to those that do dabble in modding databases, is that Step One of the Historical Wizard now has an easy way to navigate to a custom database. No more complex Advanced Settings to wade through – and that might be my personal favorite underappreciated feature of OOTP26. Well, that and the facegens not bloating based on in-game weight.
So, if you want to give their approach a try, go for it and give them feedback. If you prefer the mod approach, be patient as it will take us a bit to get into the files for 26, come to a consensus on additional tweaks, realign our IDs to deconflict the overlaps with OOTPD’s new approach, and get it out there.
Thanks for all the support and thanks to everyone through the years that has poked OOTPD to try new things to get the NeL players to play more like they ought to!