fictional scheduling and roster issues.

[Tram2Whitaker]

I wanted to set up a league that began play on Memorial day every year. So I set the first season opener to memorial day (May 31, 1976), and selected force start on certain weekday to Monday, thinking that it would always be the last monday in may.

Season 2 started on June 6, and season 3 on the 5th. The simplest solution would be to push the start back by a week. But, what happens in 1982, when Memorial day is on the 31st again. Likely, Opening day would wind up on the 24th.

Also, in this league, I have winter time minor leagues. On my team, I've been able to keep the players on the appropriate rosters (doubling their development). The other 11 teams in the league filled all 5 of their rosters. One unfavorable result of this, is that I dominate the minor leagues, because I haven't been forced to dilute my rosters. Is there a way to establish this pattern league wide?

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by Tram2Whitaker

I wanted to set up a league that began play on Memorial day every year. So I set the first season opener to memorial day (May 31, 1976), and selected force start on certain weekday to Monday, thinking that it would always be the last monday in may.

Season 2 started on June 6, and season 3 on the 5th. The simplest solution would be to push the start back by a week. But, what happens in 1982, when Memorial day is on the 31st again. Likely, Opening day would wind up on the 24th.

Two things:

First, up until 1970, Memorial Day in the U.S. always fell on May 30th. Starting in 1971, it was changed to fall on the last Monday in May.

Second, the way the option really works is that the schedule will start on the specified day of the week on or after a specified date. For example, if you had it set up as starting on the first Thursday on or after April 1st. That means for 2010 the schedule would start on April 1st, while in 2011 the schedule would start on April 7th, in 2012 the schedule would start on April 5th, and so on. (All of those dates are the first Thursday on or after April 1st.)

You can follow the same technique to get a Memorial Day start. The trick is determining the proper date to use as the 'on or after' reference point. You need to know the range of dates that the fixed day of the week holiday falls upon, then use the lowest date in that range as the 'on or after' reference date. Memorial Day falls on dates which range from May 25th to May 31st. To get the schedule to always start on the Memorial Day, you'd set it so that the schedule starts on the first Monday on or after May 25th.

The problem in your case is that you used May 31st as your reference date, which means you're telling the game to start the schedule on the first Monday on or after May 31st. Hence the June starting dates for your 1977 and 1978 seasons.

You may wish to read the section of the online manual about schedules; it'll help explain some of the various options, what they mean, and how they work. You can find the index here.

[bwburke94]

The way it is set up caused a problem in the 2010 season in OOTPX and the 2011 season in OOTP11. For some reason, the start date was set so that the start date of the initial season was the earliest the schedule could start, resulting in a 9-day difference between the start of the 2011 season in OOTPX/OOTP11 and real life. The problem did not apply in OOTP9 due to the Boston/Oakland Japan series giving us roughly the same start date.