One thing I hated during my previous attempt at a contemporary game was the proliferation of fictional managers and coaches at the lower level of the minors and also in the "available personnel" pool. So before starting this game, I got rid of all of them, and with (annoying time-consuming amounts of) research, was able to get all the proper personnel in place in Bluefield and Kingsport and Greenville and Greeneville and all the other corners of the minors. At first, I just assigned random values to the new guys, but then I devised a mathematical formula, based on a coach's experience, that let me calculate the ratings. For those coaches who were not former MLB players, I just cloned someone with a similar name and body type, turned the clone into the coach I wanted, and then deleted the clone.
As far as the pool of available personnel goes, some of the people who were in the wrong place
were actual coaches and managers, who had worked in 2009, but were now roving instructors or whatnot; they went into the "available" box. And then I went through the coaching staffs of the MLB teams over the last decade, and anyone who wasn't currently occupied got put in the "available" pile as well. Granted that some of these people are retired in real life, but given the right offer, they might go back into coaching, so IMO they're still "available" personnel.
(All except for Vern Ruhle, that is. He may have been a pitching coach a few years ago, but having died in 2007 is proof enough against being conscripted back into service, I'd agree.)
I didn't do this with all of the teams (Baseball-Reference, my source on this, only had complete staffs on about 9 clubs, and then I did my Mets by manually going through the individual-year team pages at the Baseball Cube), and I ran into a problem with some people who had been recently employed, such as Mike Hargrove and Lee Mazzilli: although they were not listed as coaches in the database, their retired-player records could not be converted into coaches by the editor. Apparently, they HAD been converted to coaches in a previous version, but those coaches were trimmed from the db when they lost their jobs. Now, what I could do is find a similar player (such as Bruce Bochte for Hargrove, for example) by using similarity scores, clone that guy, make the clone a coach, give that coach all of Hargrove/whomever's biological data, and then delete the clone…but I haven't done that yet, just as I haven't yet combed through all of the team pages to find coaches I may have missed. I have enough available personnel (at least 20 in each category) to start the game, and frankly this groundwork was taking too long, so I just wanted to get started; maybe I'll take a break and get around to doing the rest of this work later. But, rest assured, you won't be seeing "Padres fire Bud Black, hire Hang-Fu Acret" or any nonsense like that in my reports; all coaches/managers/GMs will be actual baseball people.
Which you might not care about, but (obviously) I do. So there.
