FICTIONAL HISTORY OF BASEBALL QUICKSTART FOR OOTP20
Here is the link to the second one. I am currently in 1917 in this league and may post the 1920 version of it for those who want a prebuilt history in their leagues. The two changes I made with the version I am playing out is to eliminate the high school level feeder leagues and just run with college because there were too many feeder teams, as well as change the league modifiers so that instead of evolving over time the stats will be designed to mirror a 1940s output every year. I just found that I needed to mess with the league totals far too much to try and get the stats I wanted. So be aware if you use the quickstart version you will likely want to tinker with your league totals pretty regularly.
Anyway, here is the link to the quickstart:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/psqpg31sg4...start.zip?dl=0
LEAGUE DESCRIPTION
The universe begins in 1901 and is set to roughly mirror real life baseball of the 1940s with stat outputs that will hopefully come close to mimic their real life counterpart seasons as we progress form 1901 to modern day. I have no plans to expand as the league enters the 1960s but you certainly could if you liked. While the team names are historical, all of the players in the universe are fictional.
It includes a major league, 4 levels of minors, two independent leagues, a college feeder and 4 high school level feeder leagues.
LEAGUE ALLIGNMENT
I like the simplicity of the standard 2 leagues of 8 teams each format of baseball's glory days so I did that here with the same 16 teams that existed from 1903 until the Browns moved from Boston to Milwaukee for the 1953 season. So we have an 8 team American League that includes the St Louis Browns, Washington Senators and Philadelphia Athletics and an 8 team National League complete with the Boston Braves, Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants.
In real life the era had dozens and dozens of minor leagues. I felt that was too cumbersome but still wanted a mixture of affiliated as well as independent minor league clubs so I settled on 10 minor leagues spread over 4 different classifications (AAA,AA,A and B). Each minor league has 8 teams and every MLB club has 1 affiliate at each level giving me 80 minor league teams with 64 affiliated clubs and 16 independents.
There are 3 AAA level leagues (American Association, International League and Pacific Coast League) with 5 of the 8 independents at that level being housed in the PCL. Those teams include the San Francisco Seals, Hollywood Stars, Portland Beavers, Oakland Oaks and San Diego Padres.
There are no independent clubs at AA and A as I have just two leagues at each level so every club is affiliated with an MLB team. The AA leagues are the Texas League and Southern Association while at the 'A' level we have the Eastern League and Sally League.
I have 3 leagues at the lowest level. Two of them play a short 84 game season starting just after the June draft. Those leagues are the Illinois-Indiana-Iowa League and the Interstate League. The third Class B League is the West Texas-New Mexico League which plays a full 140 game slate. Only 3 of the 8 teams in this league are affiliated with major league clubs. While there is no age restriction, the Class B level is designed primarily to introduce freshly drafted players to professional baseball - hence the late June start for two of them after the college and academy seasons are complete.
Speaking of the draft it is held every June for graduating players from the NCAA or the 4 academy level leagues. The NCAA is a 72 team league with 8 divisions : the SEC, ACC, Big 10 and Pac 10 each have 10 teams while the Big 8, Ivy League, SWC and Big East are 8 team divisions. All teams are housed in a single sub-league and play 126 game regular season (all games are in your own conference thanks to a great schedule created by gmo). The season runs from early January until the end of May and is followed by an annual NCAA tournament. The 8 conference champions get an automatic berth in the tournament along with 8 wildcard teams. The tournament is split into 4 regions and teams play a double round-robin with the top two from each region advancing to the Elite 8 quarterfinal round. The quarterfinals, semis and the College World Series Final series are all best of three to declare a National collegiate champion.
The region alignment is as follows:
EAST REGION - ACC and Ivy League champions plus wildcards 1 and 8
SOUTH REGION - SEC and Big East champions plus wildcards 3 and 6
MIDWEST REGION- Big 10 and Big 8 champion plus wildcards 2 and 7
WEST REGION - Pac 10 and SWC champions plus wildcards 4 and 5
My college teams are based on real schools and all have complete logos/uniforms thanks to Txranger's great work through the years. Conferences are not completely accurate as my number one criteria for selecting a school was if it had a good retro style logo and uniform.
In addition to the college league there are 4 high school level leagues that I call Academy Leagues. These leagues are divided geographically and draw the best 15-18 year old's from across the country to play on club teams. I envision this like a small town Cape Cod league setup so I for the most part choose smaller sized cities to house the teams but again the priority for me was a uniform/logo that I liked.
The Academy Leagues are named the following: Northeast, Southeast, Midwest and Pacific and only recruit players from their respective regions so you won't have a California born kid going to the Midwest League.
The Northeast plays out of small New England cities and the Midwest uses for the most part smaller city's in Michigan and Ohio. Basically I took Knuckler/Txranger's New England League and Michigan-Ohio League graphics. The Southeast League is comprised of Florida based teams while the Pacific League started out as small towns in the California/Arizona border area but expanded with some San Francisco and Los Angeles based clubs when I found graphics I wanted to add. Either way, if I uploaded the file correctly all team and league graphics will be included. The academy teams play a 126 game schedule - just like the NCAA - but have no playoffs.
I realize that is probably more feeder league teams than I should have but I just couldn't cut any more (originally I had 16 teams in each academy region before pairing down to 8). To help find a home for undrafted players beyond the independent minor league clubs I created two other independent leagues.
There were a number of different leagues running outside of the minor league system in the 1940s and 50s, primarily outside of the United States. The Mexican League had existed for a number of years by that point so I after finding some good graphics on the board I added an 8 team Mexican League to the universe. It does not participate in the draft but can sign free agents from the US. I also have a small 3 round draft (create enough players for 4 rounds) of Mexican born players to add to this league. Like unaffiliated minors the Mexican clubs can have their players purchased by MLB organizations. It is a low ranking league - really on par with the Class A level in the States.
Canada also had a few leagues at this time including the Quebec based Provincial League (which was affiliated with major league teams for several years) and the Western Canada League. I add both of them as my Canadian League. Exact same setup with the 3 round draft of Canadian players as the Mexican League has and players can be purchased from this league by MLB, but at double the cost of the Mexican players. Both of these leagues limit a squad to carrying 14 foreign-born players. This is so they don't get completely overrun with college and academy graduates who fall short of the majors.
NOTES
I would suggest right after the 1901 NCAA seasons ends you change the schedule start date to January 2 as it presently can run beyond the draft date if there are a lot of tie breakers needed for the wildcard spots. Running beyond the draft date means teams run the risk of releasing players who have aged out before the College World Series ends. I have included a copy of the schedule.lsdl file called NCAA126 if you need to reimport it for the change to take. The game will not allow the schedule to start before January 8th in the first year of a league so after the 1901 college season I move the start date up to January 2nd. I wanted a long season for my feeders so a January start date is necessary. The academy leagues are fine starting in mid-January as they have no playoff.
I have set the Major League draft to 20 rounds but for some reason it defaults to a much higher number based on the amount of players eligible. If you want it capped at 20 rounds the only workaround I can see is to manually change it in the league settings on the day before or the day of the draft. Not a problem if you forget and have a 30 or 40 odd round draft...just means a bunch of bottom picks will be released quickly.
As you get into the 1920's and beyond you might want to keep an eye on the league total modifiers as in tests I found the offense, particularly homers, tended to drop off a little compared to real life norms.
A note on Financials. I use reserve clause era rules so I don't pay a lot of attention to them but I do have the league finances set to evolve so you should keep an eye on them. You may want to raise the cost of purchasing players for MLB teams as the years progress. I like to have draft bonus negotiating on so some HS draftees elect to not sign and go to my NCAA league instead so finances might be a factor in that. Downside to that is sometimes a college graduate will sit out a year because he did not sign. I just chalk it up to he is very smart and continuing schooling for a year towards a doctorate.
That's it. Enjoy. To use just unzip into your OOTP20/quickstart games folder. Should work fine but I'll add the usual disclaimer 'use at your own risk'. A big thanks to everyone who made graphics and schedules included here. If something is yours and you don't want it in this file let me know and I will remove it.