Historical Premier League Style MLB 1907 Quickstart

[pbar25]

I put together an alternate MLB universe. If anybody wanted to try it out I put it up at allsimbaseball.

Export the 1907 Premier 3.0.quick to your quickstart_games folder.


Set in 1907, Major League Baseball elects to model itself after the English Premier League.


The 16 classic Major League franchises from the first half of the century make up the initial teams within the new Premier Baseball League.
Following tradition, the Championship will be won during the season.
There is only one home run king, only one Cy Young, only one MVP, only one batting title, etc.
16 teams, 154 games.





Two additional leagues are included, 1st Division w/feeder & 2nd Division w/feeder.
Upon the first day of preseason, roughly 9/24 each season, relegation & promotion must take place.
Relegation & promotion must be done manually under Game Setup, League Setup, Functions -- 'edit league structure'.

The worst records within the Premier League & 1st Division are both relegated. Champions of 1st Division & 2nd Division are promoted.

A one game playoff breaks the tie for league championships. Round-robin determines multiple tie-breakers.

Create an Exhibition Game to break the tie for the worst record & relegation.

1st Division
Consists of early-era Federal League & PCL League teams with fictional players.

2nd Division
Consists of future MLB historical teams with fictional players. Once their era arrives, so will their players and stadiums.









Additional File Information:

*Database used for initial file, and recommended database for use with file: Spritze DB 5.0
Database is also included in the list at allsimbaseball after clicking on the top link.

Logos/Uniforms/Colors : included
Stadium Pictures : stand-alone download below

Premier League: no amateur draft, players assigned to their actual teams.
1st & 2nd Division : one-round amateur draft (100% international draft reflecting no color barrier)

Finances are locked in place for all three leagues, reflecting the superiority of the Premier League.

Only Premier League players are free agents across all leagues.
Generated players from 1st & 2nd Division can only enter the Premier League via trade or promotion.

Upon a historical player's creation within the Premier League, if his team has been relegated he will become a free agent.
This allows 1st & 2nd Division to sign up real major league players should their scouts find the gems.
This is a historical sim, dominated by real teams and real players.

1st & 2nd Division consist of actual professional baseball franchises.
All players generated by 1st & 2nd Division are fictional.

Teams that did not actually make it to the Major League Level do not have historical IDs or team IDs. As they will not receive real players, they are at a severe disadvantage.


Can you take a franchise from 2nd Division all the way to a Premier League Championship?
Can you take over one of the classic 16 and never be relegated?

This has made for some wild pennant races. My test sims have gone about 20 years in each time, and the best finish in the Premier League by a promoted team was the former 2nd Division 1918 Kansas City Packers. They finished in 4th place in the Premier League, led by Dick Lundy at SS whom they had signed to a minor league deal a few years back.

(OOTP9)

File has been updated to version 3.0 following some changes.

[pbar25]

Just put version 3.0 up which is a fresh new file that runs much closer to history then past versions. Biggest change is that all 3 leagues are major league level with recalc on and they are now in a balanced universe. Previous versions had the lower leagues playing as lesser level leagues.

just a note**Team history does not display what league they were in each season, so you must figure it out this way: When viewing a team's history, each 1st place finish is a promotion -- while each 16th place finish was relegation. For players view their BNN page.

[pbar25]

I was a little vague describing this file so here's more information regarding exactly what you are getting. Anybody not familiar with the concept of relegation & promotion, it's simple:

3 Leagues of 16 teams each
Premier League Champion is the Champion of the World
16th place in the Premier League is relegated to Division 1
Division 1 Champion is promoted to the Premier League
16th place finish in Division 1 is relegated to Division 2
Division 2 Champion is promoted to Division 1
16th place finish in Division 2 is one bad franchise

I have never been a fan of the current wild-card playoff system, division championships, or even league play. Putting the MLB into an English Premier League system creates so many new areas of focus throughout a baseball season.

Below I will include some stats and results from my current testing of my file which currently sits at 4-11-47. This will give you some idea of the results you might have.

As well, here are a few of the different story lines that come about from season to season within this Premier League setting along with the makeup of the initial file which starts in 1907.

Premier League






As you can see, Division 1 & Division 2 are set as 'International Leagues'.
This allows you to quickly discern between Premier League stats & all other league stats (INT, AAA, AA, A). These two leagues are a set a notch below the Premier League in player talent. While the Premier League will bring in all historical real players, the international league creates a limited number of fictional 100% international players during a 3-round only amateur draft each season.

To be the Premier League all-time HITS leader or HR leader is obviously quite the accomplishment. The goal of hitting 500 career home-runs is much loftier then in traditional league setups however. To play on a team and enjoy an entire career within the Premier League is an accomplishment all in itself, and few will do it. It's 1947 in my test file (pictures from that are following), and 500 HRs in the Premier League has still not been accomplished. I have been hands-off outside of changing Ruth's position in 1918.





I picked 1907 in order to sim a full 100 seasons and see how it plays out. Helps that Cobb, Speaker, & Joe Jackson were all just entering the league.









Ruth is the perfect example of what can happen to teams should they face the agonizing prospect of relegation.

Thus far, the most devastating loss for a team in Premier League history occurred on the final day of the 1922 Premier League baseball season. The Yankees lost their final game of the season, and were relegated for the first time in franchise history -- and it could not have come at a worse time for them.

The following season they finished 3.5 games out of the Division 1 Championship, and were forced to suffer one more season relegated until finally getting back with a Division 1 Championship and promotion in 1924. But the damage was done. After one full season with a lower media contract, fewer fans & merchandising, team changes were in order and Ruth was shipped off to the Phoenix Diamondbacks forever changing baseball history. (actually the Arizona Diamondbacks, but I prefer City names for teams)

Cobb is a good example of how many former Premier League Superstars will finish their career with teams down in Division 1 & Division 2 with dreams to someday return.

Charleston was one of the rare guys who started and finished within the Premier League, which in turn places him all over the all-time leader-boards.



Only one team from Division 1 or Division 2 has won a Premier League Championship. The 1932 Montreal Expos, led by Fritz Ostermueller & Waite Hoyt (Hoyt being yet another Yankee casualty during their relegation period).

Few promoted teams can actually remain for an extended period of time up within the Premier League. As time goes on, they must compete with the larger stadiums of established franchises, big contracts in their new environment, and if they are not a real baseball franchise of the period -- they can only build through free agency. Real teams get their historical actual players.







The Red Sox suffered relegation in 1920. They finished in 2nd place twice down in Division 1 but could not get back up to the Premier League again until 1929. They barely staved off relegation the following two seasons, just in time to get a young Ted Williams who has saved the franchise and put them in line with the all-time great teams.

In the initial file, I set the Hall of Fame credentials a little too high -- that is something you might want to change to your own tastes. I prefer that only a handful of players ever make it.

Each season on roughly 9-26 each year, you must go into Game Setup, League Setup, Functions Tab, & Edit League Structure.
Go in between the 3 leagues and promote champions, while relegating last place teams. Don't forget to regenerate the schedules!

[Dr. P.R. Park III]

I'll admit, I'm impressed. Although I haven't played your game yet, it is in the back of my mind, for there will eventually be another time I want semi-historical/fiction in a quasi-English baseball world!

[Cal Ripken's Glove]

hi,
i sent up this league today. thank you very much.
i have a question, when you say that the championship will be decided in the middle of the season - i don't see that. i look at the schedule and the postseason starts on 9-27. can you explain the post season process further?
thank you for your hard work here. i am looking forward to playing with this.

one more question - i am getting an error message when after the league is loading up. the message says - could not find historical database please check your database in the league options. how do i correct this?

thank you.

[pbar25]

Originally Posted by Dr. P.R. Park III

I'll admit, I'm impressed. Although I haven't played your game yet, it is in the back of my mind, for there will eventually be another time I want semi-historical/fiction in a quasi-English baseball world!

lol, thanks for the comment, hope my semi-historical/fictional quasi-English baseball world is fun.

Originally Posted by Cal Ripken's Glove

hi,
i sent up this league today. thank you very much.
i have a question, when you say that the championship will be decided in the middle of the season - i don't see that. i look at the schedule and the postseason starts on 9-27. can you explain the post season process further?
thank you for your hard work here. i am looking forward to playing with this.

one more question - i am getting an error message when after the league is loading up. the message says - could not find historical database please check your database in the league options. how do i correct this?

thank you.

thanks for downloading it, hope you have a great time.

As far as the Championship decided during the season, I stated that with reference to the 154 game season & no playoff structure.
Each of the 3 leagues has 16 teams, and each league has a 154 game schedule. The best record at the end of the season is crowned the champion.

As far as the game stating that the postseason starts on 9-27 -- that's actually stated in error by the game. I have the Premier League set as a Major League Level league with no playoffs. When you do that and disable the playoffs, the game does not recognize it. I could have set the league as an INT league and the wild card would not have displayed and that playoff message would not be stated in error -- but then when viewing player's stats every team would have a (INT) after it and you would not be able to know what league they were in from year to year. But whenever a league is set to Major League Level, it will not recognize that there are no playoffs because no Major League Level leagues don't have playoffs.

So even though there are wild-card standings, and there are messages about the playoffs -- there is no wild-card and there are no playoffs.
The only time there is a playoff, is when after 154 games the top teams are tied. This results in a one-game playoff for the championship, or a round robin if there are multiple teams. From time to time the 2nd place teams will tie -- and this results in a one-game exhibition to break the tie even though it has no bearing on the championship.

As far as that database message --
Before you proceed any futher, you must set a database path for the league to grab players from each year. The database that I recommend for use with the file is Spritze 5.0, which is also available for download on the same page as my file at All Sim Baseball under OOTP 9 Mods.
To set your database path go to :
Game/Game Setup/League Setup/Rules
Under the heading Historical Rookie Options there will be a line which reads Database path:
Download Spritze's database and place it somewhere for safe keeping on your harddrive. In the space provided enter in the path to that folder.

For instance, if you just place that database into a folder called Spritze, and put it right onto your C: drive (look for further instructions on a future post), the database path is:
C:\spritze

If you were not going to download Spritze's database and didn't care about Negroe League players such as Satchel Paige or Oscar Charleston -- then you can just use the original database that came with the game. In that case your path would be something like this:

C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR NAME\My Documents\Out of the Park Developments\OOTP Baseball 9\stats


EDIT : Wild-card standings issue is fixed - they no longer display.
EDIT: All 3 major leagues are major league level - INT no longer displays. Click on a player's BNN page in order to see their league history.

[Cal Ripken's Glove]

ok, thank you very much for the further information.
i did as you suggested and i did not get that error message after I restarted the game. thank you.

[pbar25]

sorry, I forgot the ballpark folder wasn't part of a quickstart file so there won't be any ballparks with this original download.

all ballpark information will be in the next post.

important things to remember:

*Always regenerate the schedule after promotion & relegation

*It's best to do promotion & relegation immediately following the crowning of all 3 league champions (sometimes there are one-game playoffs or even round robins at the end of the season in order to determine a champion)
It is best to do this then because then the teams will have the correct players available during free agency. 1st Division & 2nd Division players are not available to Premier League teams during free agency.

[pbar25]

I've gotten a few questions about various steps in the install process regarding pictures, databases, etc.

So here's the quick-version of installing everything in order to have this file run in the best possible fashion:

1) Download the Historical Premier League 1907 Quick start 3.0 from allsimbaseball:



Within the download will be one folder called : 1907 Premier 3.0.quick
Extract the folder to the following location:
My Documents/Out of the Park Developments/OOTP Baseball 9/quickstart_games


2) Download Gambo & Twil Complete Photopack. Go to Game/Add-Ons Central. Reload the add-on list, download Gambo and T_wil1 Complete Photopack.
If it's not listed you must add PadreFan's server to your list.

3) Download the ballpark pictures for the Premier League file :

Premier Ballparks


Within the download will be one folder called : ballparks
a - Extract the folder to your desktop and open the folder in order to see all of the pictures.
b - Now open up your own ballparks folder within My Documents/OOTP Baseball 9 folder.
c - Select all of the new stadium pictures and drag them into your OOTP Baseball 9/ballparks folder.
You can replace the new ballparks folder with the old instead, but you will lose anything you had within it.


4) Download the Spritze 5.0 database to your desktop, this database will provide all of the players for your future league. This database includes an assortment of Japanese & Negro league players, as well as many other additions which can be read about on the download page.


a - Create a new folder within My Documents and call it: spritze
b - Navigate to My Documents/Out of the Park Developments/OOTP Baseball 9/stats
c - Open up the stats folder, then select all and copy the contents of the folder
d - Now paste all of that information into the new folder you created called spritze
e - Extract the Spritze 5.0 folder that you downloaded onto your desktop. Now you must move the contents of that folder into My Documents/spritze. Copy over all files when asked to do so. Your new database is complete.

Once you have opened your new Quickstart game, you must set a database path :
Game/Game Setup/League Setup/Rules
Under the heading 'Historical Rookie Options' there will be a line which reads Database path. Enter in the path to your new spritze database:
My Documents/spritze or wherever you put it.

[pbar25]

For anybody that downloaded the 1.5 file, here's what was changed in 1.6:

*Chicago (W) White Sox were changed to Chicago (S) White Sox in order to be able to tell the difference between them and the Chicago (W) Whales when simming and viewing the standings should they be in the same league.
Their name, uniform, and cap were all changed to correspond with their new name.

*Recalc was turned on for every 3 years as that is how the spritze database is meant to run. Using 'real stats'.

*40 man roster rules, waivers, etc, were added.

*Finances were adjusted so that the Premier League would make roughly the same amount of money but would draw more fans. ($0.35 per ticket, 14000 per game, 329,307 media contract)

*Both Division 1 & Division 2 BB's sabermetric player creation factor was lowered to .868.

*Both Division 1 & Division 2 fictional amateur draft's were changed to 2 rounds along with 2 rounds worth of players created. They will have very limited minor league systems, but there will be a very limited amount of fictional players ever appearing within the Premier League.

*Talent Change randomness was changed to 20, while injuries were set to Low.


You can obviously change whatever settings you want, but that's what was changed in 1.6.

[bubba22plus]

first things first, The Great Bubba has returned to the world of baseball!

Second: i was going to do something like this!

Third: Not that i'm trying to stop this Project, but the English Premier League was formed in 1992-1993.

[Dr. P.R. Park III]

Obviously, this project is mostly fictional.

[rem]

This all looks very impressive.

[pbar25]

thanks for the kind words. I'd love to hear any feedback or things I should change from people that have tried it out.

Originally Posted by bubba22plus

first things first, The Great Bubba has returned to the world of baseball!

Second: i was going to do something like this!

Third: Not that i'm trying to stop this Project, but the English Premier League was formed in 1992-1993.

Glad that the Great Bubba has returned. Hope you have a chance to try out the file, I'm getting some of the exciting results I was looking for... finally in the 1.6 version. I never enjoyed recalc before, but holy cow, it's actually fun. Once I finish my 100 years I'll post up some results.

[blackrussian]

pbar,
im curious how you set this structure up when you were initially creating it. ive played around with fictional promotion/relegation setups, which are certainly easy enough to setup during initial creation. but if you import a historical league during league creation, youre not able to change league structure until after you actually start the game. so im guessing you did most of yr editing after the initial league creation.

i wanted to try something like this but starting w/1973 (or whatever year, really) but i was looking for some tips on how i can set this up correctly from the outset. thx for your help.

[blackrussian]

dola
ok i think im just kind of a dunce (not to mention running a fever). since you started in 1907 when there were only 16 teams, all you had to do was add an addn'l 2 leagues to your historical import and you were pretty much set, aside maybe from some post-league creation alignment.

i guess theres more of an issue if you import a more recent year that has more teams. in may case, i was envisioning importing a more recent year (say 1973) that had 24 teams total and creating a top tier league and a secondary league according to overall won-loss records. id then add a 3rd tier of fictional teams. but to do that id need to edit after i would the initial league creation, which would be a bit messy since one cant entirely delete unused teams from the league history, if that makes sense.

[pbar25]

Originally Posted by blackrussian

dola
ok i think im just kind of a dunce (not to mention running a fever). since you started in 1907 when there were only 16 teams, all you had to do was add an addn'l 2 leagues to your historical import and you were pretty much set, aside maybe from some post-league creation alignment.

i guess theres more of an issue if you import a more recent year that has more teams. in may case, i was envisioning importing a more recent year (say 1973) that had 24 teams total and creating a top tier league and a secondary league according to overall won-loss records. id then add a 3rd tier of fictional teams. but to do that id need to edit after i would the initial league creation, which would be a bit messy since one cant entirely delete unused teams from the league history, if that makes sense.

yep, that's what I did - imported the actual 1907 historical league and then edited the league structure after I started it up.

If you wanted to start in 1973 it would be tough. Because if you are importing actual players they can only go towards one league unless you do some major database editing to split everybody up sending some players into one league and the others into the other leauge -- of which I'm not sure if that's even possible.

Then the next problem is if your top two leagues are not separated then you are able to import all the actual players into the one league - and then disable the playoffs. Then whoever wins your top league is the champion, and then you can regulate on your own in between the top two divisions, and the third fictional one. But the main problem with that would probably be the displaying history of the league and not really being able to tell quickly who the actual champion was in the years that the 2nd division has a better record then the 1st division.

Not entirely sure what you meant about not being able to delete unused teams from the league history -- which teams will not be used?

[pbar25]

just wanted to report I'm having an issue with Ground Ball percentages within my current setup. Once it hits around 1930ish, the ground ball percentages on pitchers starts to just take off and balloon. Once it hits 1950ish, nearly 25% of the pitchers have ground ball %'s over 100%. Can't figure out what is causing it and will continue to look to fix this because it's effecting home-run totals.

[Spritze]

If you have EVER adjusted league totals and not just the modifiers is one way this can happen.

[pbar25]

Originally Posted by Spritze

If you have EVER adjusted league totals and not just the modifiers is one way this can happen.

thanks Spritze, I was having an issue with the historical totals, and the historical modifiers starting at 1.000; problem solved.

the new 2.0 file will:
* correctly name Div 1 & Div 2 as = 1st Division & 2nd Division.
* fix the ground ball issue along with a variety of historical issues.
* eliminate all fictional players from the league outside of the original Div 1/Div 2 players.
*restructure the initial league setup by placing all modern teams into the 2nd Division, and all Federal League/PCL Teams into the 1st Division. More era related.