Suggestion: Acquiring rookies before the amateur draft existed.

robc · 10-09-2010, 08:36 PM

I just had an idea but I'm not sure if it is a good one. How did teams acquire players before the amateur draft existed? Did they just hold tryouts? Did they send scouts to Podunk USA because they heard about some guy who can throw? I don't know how it worked (If you're out there Le Grande Orange, feel free to explain it to me

).

I am playing in a historical league that I started in 1901, and I am now in 1907. I have been holding an amateur draft. At this point in history, shouldn't it be more like how OOTP handles international players? It seems like you should have a chance to discover players from the draft class based on your scouting budget. Perhaps multiple teams know about a player and then they each try to sign the players they know about.

Just a thought.

RamMan12 · 10-10-2010, 10:19 AM

In my league I started with an amateur draft from 1903-1909 and hidden players on but took it out for a season or two to try it like it was before there was a draft. I've found that the draft is just easier to manage as the "discovered players" tend to give that feel of scouts not knowing every single good player in the world.

ukhotstove · 10-10-2010, 03:48 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by robc

I just had an idea but I'm not sure if it is a good one. How did teams acquire players before the amateur draft existed? Did they just hold tryouts? Did they send scouts to Podunk USA because they heard about some guy who can throw? I don't know how it worked (If you're out there Le Grande Orange, feel free to explain it to me

).

I am playing in a historical league that I started in 1901, and I am now in 1907. I have been holding an amateur draft. At this point in history, shouldn't it be more like how OOTP handles international players? It seems like you should have a chance to discover players from the draft class based on your scouting budget. Perhaps multiple teams know about a player and then they each try to sign the players they know about.

Just a thought.

Scouted them, using Shoeless Joe as an example, he started playing for a mill team then moved on up the ladder playing in the Carolina Association before going to the majors with the Philadelphia A's and Ty Cobb was sold to the Tigers by a South Atlantic League team. So with the looks of it, it was kind of a free for all, although in a way it seems like the semi pro leagues were kind of an extension of the majors with teams buying players in Cobbs case. LGO will be able to help you way more than I can, hopefully he does as well because I love reading the history of baseball he posts in response to questions like this.

Leo_The_Lip · 10-10-2010, 07:18 PM

A good place to start reading is The Glory of Their Times.

In the early years, players tended to start out with local teams, usually after being asked to tryout. It wasnt' so much scouting as being referred to the team by a high school coach or family friend, often over the objection of the player's father.

Once they got on a minor league team, they would be sold on up the line. This resembles the way soccer is run on a world-wide basis today.

One of the more amusing ways a HOFer got started in 'pro' ball was either Wahoo Sam Crawford or Smokey Joe Wood who was paid to tour on an all Girls team and pretend to be a girl. He wore those new-fangled bloomers.

David Ball · 10-10-2010, 08:29 PM

Yeah, once they got into pro ball even at the lowest level it would be relatively easy to get attention, if only because The Sporting News ran box scores and league leader boards for all sorts of minor leagues. Prior to the coming of the great farm systems, though, major league clubs did not have sufficiently large organizations to track amateur players very much unless a particularly attractive prospect happened to pop up in their back yard. The Yankees found Lou Gehrig immediately because he was a New Yorker. Babe Ruth was a Baltimorean, and so he began his career in the International League. Rogers Hornsby was a Texan, and he started out in the Texas-Oklahoma League.

This is an interesting enough topic that I decided to pick an example at random and do a little case study. Here are the main pitchers on the 1915 White Sox, with their place of birth and first professional club:

Red Faber, b. Cascade, IA, broke into pro ball with Dubuque, IA;
Jim Scott, b. Deadwood SD, played at Nebraska Wesleyan College, broke in with Oskaloosa, IA;
Reb Russell, born Jackson, MS, broke in with Bonham and Ft. Worth, TX in 1912 (I'm not sure which he played for first);
Joe Benz, b. New Alsace, IN, broke in with Newark, OH;
Eddie Cicotte, b. Detroit, broke in with Augusta, GA (Augusta also had Nap Rucker and Ty Cobb, both Georgians -- quite a team for Class C);
Mellie Wolfgang, b. Albany, NY, first pro team, Albany, NY.

My apologies if the geography is not clear to those from outside the US, but the point is that with the exception of Cicotte and Russell, everybody started pro ball in the same state or a state adjacent to their birth place. Even Russell remained in the south. Scott is only an apparent exception: he came from remote North Dakota, but he had played college ball in Iowa, in the same neck of the woods as Nebraska.

Eddie Collins, on the other hand, came from around New York and he signed directly with Connie Mack and went straight to the Athletics, but he had attracted attention as a college player, and of course he was a really exceptional talent. That was not the norm.

For practical purposes, however, if you're playing an OOTP historical league the "amateur" players that enter the database each year are actually (with a very few exceptions such as Collins) not amateurs at all, but players with at least a taste of professional baseball, and usually several years' experience. If you have the draft turned off and are letting the game assign players to their RL original teams, you are in effect mimicking each real club's player acquisition system, whether that club had a farm system bringing player up from the grass roots or was purchasing players from minor league clubs and other major clubs that did have farm systems.

The players you have farmed out to your affiliates represent men your club had acquired from other minor teams and then decided to farm out for more seasoning with minor teams they did not entirely control. I don't believe OOTP will simulate the complex world of independent and semi-independent minor league clubs that existed before the farm system (if I'm wrong about that, I'd be grateful to anyone who would tell me how to set such a simulation up). However, using historical players probably corresponds better to the way a major league club would operate before the farm system develops than a fictional world does, because you generally don't acquire players until they're at least close to being ready for major league play. And using hidden players makes sense in a way because you're not in complete control of all the assets of your "affiliates," just the players (maybe comparatively few of them) you have on loan to them, and that's appropriate in a world without farm systems. When you use fictional players, on the other hand, you're normally responsible for developing them all the way from the time they sign their first amateur contracts, and major league teams did not normally do that before the late 1920's and 1930's.

Curve Ball Dave · 10-10-2010, 09:59 PM

Other posters have provided good information.

Once the rest of the Major League teams adopted the farm system model created by Branch Rickey when he was running the Cardinals, teams would scout the nation's amateurs and come June sign whomever they could to contracts. It was essentially a free for all. Once under contract players were assigned to minor league affiliates and moved through the system like they do today.

The draft was instituted in 1965 to address competitive imbalances. Teams with big money could sign the most and best players (sound familiar?). Rick Monday has the distinction of being the first player ever drafted when he was picked by the Kansas City A's.

robc · 10-10-2010, 10:49 PM

So it sounds like it would be nice if there was an option to have the rookie class enter free agency instead of a rookie draft for the pre amateur draft years. The draft seems out of place in 1907.

David Ball · 10-11-2010, 06:40 AM

That might work. Bonus money paid to the rookie free agents would correspond to the sales price that was actually paid to the minor clubs that owned them. A problem might arise if the most coveted rookies get more salary, as distinct from bonus payments, because that would distort the pay scale in future years, assuming you're playing with free agency turned off.

On the other hand, a draft probably allocates players with reasonable efficiency, if not real fidelity to how things were actually done. But in a draft, poor clubs will get better draft positions, whereas in the real world the poor only got poorer, and the teams that were already strong tended to acquire the best prospects. But perhaps the financial system would address that, if the poor clubs can draft the best prospects but can't always sign them.

Mike Donlin · 10-11-2010, 08:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by David Ball

On the other hand, a draft probably allocates players with reasonable efficiency, if not real fidelity to how things were actually done. But in a draft, poor clubs will get better draft positions, whereas in the real world the poor only got poorer, and the teams that were already strong tended to acquire the best prospects. But perhaps the financial system would address that, if the poor clubs can draft the best prospects but can't always sign them.

I have gotten around this by reversing the order of the amateur draft, at least for the first round. That is, teams with the best record select first, teams with the worst select last. You can also arrange teams by revenue.

I play fictional, so I then make the feeder leagues into semi-pro and college and low minors leagues. It is the easiest way to recreate pre-1965 player acquisition. What it loses (slightly) in realism it gains in simplicity.

I then pretend that in drafting a player a team has actually bought the player from their "amateur" team (or, in the case of college, signed him to a contract), as used to be the case.

Leo_The_Lip · 10-11-2010, 08:57 AM

All good comments.

I want to mention the Pacific Coast League was a big competitor to the big leagues for west coast talent. Many PCL stars turned down big league offers because the PCL paid very well and they did not want to leave the west coast.

Similarly, Lefty Grove spent more time in the International League than he wanted becasue the owner of the Orioles did not want to lose his best pitcher.

Curve Ball Dave · 10-11-2010, 09:45 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Leo_The_Lip

Similarly, Lefty Grove spent more time in the International League than he wanted becasue the owner of the Orioles did not want to lose his best pitcher.

The owner of the Orioles made Connie Mack pay up the wazoo to acquire Grove. It was money well spent, none the less.

10-09-2010, 08:36 PM	#1
robc Hall Of Famer Join Date: Aug 2008 Posts: 2,095	Suggestion: Acquiring rookies before the amateur draft existed. I just had an idea but I'm not sure if it is a good one. How did teams acquire players before the amateur draft existed? Did they just hold tryouts? Did they send scouts to Podunk USA because they heard about some guy who can throw? I don't know how it worked (If you're out there Le Grande Orange, feel free to explain it to me ). I am playing in a historical league that I started in 1901, and I am now in 1907. I have been holding an amateur draft. At this point in history, shouldn't it be more like how OOTP handles international players? It seems like you should have a chance to discover players from the draft class based on your scouting budget. Perhaps multiple teams know about a player and then they each try to sign the players they know about. Just a thought.

10-10-2010, 09:59 PM	#6
Curve Ball Dave Hall Of Famer Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Chicago Posts: 2,400	Other posters have provided good information. Once the rest of the Major League teams adopted the farm system model created by Branch Rickey when he was running the Cardinals, teams would scout the nation's amateurs and come June sign whomever they could to contracts. It was essentially a free for all. Once under contract players were assigned to minor league affiliates and moved through the system like they do today. The draft was instituted in 1965 to address competitive imbalances. Teams with big money could sign the most and best players (sound familiar?). Rick Monday has the distinction of being the first player ever drafted when he was picked by the Kansas City A's. __________________ "Hitting is timing. Pitching is upsetting timing"-Warren Spahn. Last edited by Curve Ball Dave; 10-10-2010 at 10:09 PM.

10-10-2010, 10:19 AM	#2
RamMan12 Major Leagues Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Maine Posts: 482	In my league I started with an amateur draft from 1903-1909 and hidden players on but took it out for a season or two to try it like it was before there was a draft. I've found that the draft is just easier to manage as the "discovered players" tend to give that feel of scouts not knowing every single good player in the world.

10-10-2010, 07:18 PM	#4
Leo_The_Lip All Star Starter Join Date: Nov 2009 Posts: 1,813	A good place to start reading is The Glory of Their Times. In the early years, players tended to start out with local teams, usually after being asked to tryout. It wasnt' so much scouting as being referred to the team by a high school coach or family friend, often over the objection of the player's father. Once they got on a minor league team, they would be sold on up the line. This resembles the way soccer is run on a world-wide basis today. One of the more amusing ways a HOFer got started in 'pro' ball was either Wahoo Sam Crawford or Smokey Joe Wood who was paid to tour on an all Girls team and pretend to be a girl. He wore those new-fangled bloomers.

10-10-2010, 08:29 PM	#5
David Ball Minors (Triple A) Join Date: Jan 2006 Posts: 281	Yeah, once they got into pro ball even at the lowest level it would be relatively easy to get attention, if only because The Sporting News ran box scores and league leader boards for all sorts of minor leagues. Prior to the coming of the great farm systems, though, major league clubs did not have sufficiently large organizations to track amateur players very much unless a particularly attractive prospect happened to pop up in their back yard. The Yankees found Lou Gehrig immediately because he was a New Yorker. Babe Ruth was a Baltimorean, and so he began his career in the International League. Rogers Hornsby was a Texan, and he started out in the Texas-Oklahoma League. This is an interesting enough topic that I decided to pick an example at random and do a little case study. Here are the main pitchers on the 1915 White Sox, with their place of birth and first professional club: Red Faber, b. Cascade, IA, broke into pro ball with Dubuque, IA; Jim Scott, b. Deadwood SD, played at Nebraska Wesleyan College, broke in with Oskaloosa, IA; Reb Russell, born Jackson, MS, broke in with Bonham and Ft. Worth, TX in 1912 (I'm not sure which he played for first); Joe Benz, b. New Alsace, IN, broke in with Newark, OH; Eddie Cicotte, b. Detroit, broke in with Augusta, GA (Augusta also had Nap Rucker and Ty Cobb, both Georgians -- quite a team for Class C); Mellie Wolfgang, b. Albany, NY, first pro team, Albany, NY. My apologies if the geography is not clear to those from outside the US, but the point is that with the exception of Cicotte and Russell, everybody started pro ball in the same state or a state adjacent to their birth place. Even Russell remained in the south. Scott is only an apparent exception: he came from remote North Dakota, but he had played college ball in Iowa, in the same neck of the woods as Nebraska. Eddie Collins, on the other hand, came from around New York and he signed directly with Connie Mack and went straight to the Athletics, but he had attracted attention as a college player, and of course he was a really exceptional talent. That was not the norm. For practical purposes, however, if you're playing an OOTP historical league the "amateur" players that enter the database each year are actually (with a very few exceptions such as Collins) not amateurs at all, but players with at least a taste of professional baseball, and usually several years' experience. If you have the draft turned off and are letting the game assign players to their RL original teams, you are in effect mimicking each real club's player acquisition system, whether that club had a farm system bringing player up from the grass roots or was purchasing players from minor league clubs and other major clubs that did have farm systems. The players you have farmed out to your affiliates represent men your club had acquired from other minor teams and then decided to farm out for more seasoning with minor teams they did not entirely control. I don't believe OOTP will simulate the complex world of independent and semi-independent minor league clubs that existed before the farm system (if I'm wrong about that, I'd be grateful to anyone who would tell me how to set such a simulation up). However, using historical players probably corresponds better to the way a major league club would operate before the farm system develops than a fictional world does, because you generally don't acquire players until they're at least close to being ready for major league play. And using hidden players makes sense in a way because you're not in complete control of all the assets of your "affiliates," just the players (maybe comparatively few of them) you have on loan to them, and that's appropriate in a world without farm systems. When you use fictional players, on the other hand, you're normally responsible for developing them all the way from the time they sign their first amateur contracts, and major league teams did not normally do that before the late 1920's and 1930's.

10-10-2010, 10:49 PM	#7
robc Hall Of Famer Join Date: Aug 2008 Posts: 2,095	So it sounds like it would be nice if there was an option to have the rookie class enter free agency instead of a rookie draft for the pre amateur draft years. The draft seems out of place in 1907.

10-11-2010, 06:40 AM	#8
David Ball Minors (Triple A) Join Date: Jan 2006 Posts: 281	That might work. Bonus money paid to the rookie free agents would correspond to the sales price that was actually paid to the minor clubs that owned them. A problem might arise if the most coveted rookies get more salary, as distinct from bonus payments, because that would distort the pay scale in future years, assuming you're playing with free agency turned off. On the other hand, a draft probably allocates players with reasonable efficiency, if not real fidelity to how things were actually done. But in a draft, poor clubs will get better draft positions, whereas in the real world the poor only got poorer, and the teams that were already strong tended to acquire the best prospects. But perhaps the financial system would address that, if the poor clubs can draft the best prospects but can't always sign them.

10-11-2010, 08:57 AM	#10
Leo_The_Lip All Star Starter Join Date: Nov 2009 Posts: 1,813	All good comments. I want to mention the Pacific Coast League was a big competitor to the big leagues for west coast talent. Many PCL stars turned down big league offers because the PCL paid very well and they did not want to leave the west coast. Similarly, Lefty Grove spent more time in the International League than he wanted becasue the owner of the Orioles did not want to lose his best pitcher.