MicroLeague - Question

[JamieEllisOOTP]

I’m new to OOTP but am a former long-time player of MicroLeague Baseball (including all iterations). I love the look of OOTP 19! Very excited! When I played MicroLeague, I would select 6 to 8 teams each year and play a season. I selected new teams every year and manually created a history book of performance including individual stats. Is there any way to do this in OOTP? Basically, I would want to remove all of the history in OOTP, start a new season each year with different teams, yet accumulate stats over the years (even if I upgrade to OPTP 20, 21, etc.). Any thoughts on how to do this? Any help is greatly appreciated!

[gskweres9]

I believe this is possible, but it would take quite a bit of manual work

[Syd Thrift]

I'm having problems figuring out what you're wanting to do... is this like a Champions League setup for baseball, where you have, like, the top 8 teams in, say, 1995 play a season against each other, and then have a set of teams in 1996 that's the top 8 from that year, could be different teams, could be the same? Or am I way off?

Depending on what exactly you want to do this should be possible either out of the box or by making a yearly MySQL dump. In the above example, what I'd probably do is import players every year with 1 year recalc, split the league you imported up into a "Champions" and a "Regular" league, and then regenerate schedules for those leagues (in Microleague it sounds like you were only running the top set if that's what you were doing, but in OOTP you can easily schedule both). In the above scenario the game tracks accumulated stats for all levels but also, just the same as you might see in baseball-reference, it tracks accumulated stats for each level individually. Records are currently only kept at the league level so a guy who gets 2,000 hits in your CL and 2,000 in your "normal" league wouldn't be recognized anywhere as having 4,000 hits total.

Anyway, though, I'm not 100% clear as to what you want to do so it's hard to say. Bear in mind that OOTP is not Microleague so there are a lot more things you can play with:

- Fielding is *way* more accurate
- We've got a good 20+ years of sabermetrics
- It's *extremely* easy to build leagues, set up schedules, and play games

but mostly...

- OOTP has this whole aging and player creation thing going which IMO is the true strength of the game. My biggest issue with historical replays in the past - I played a good amount of Microleague myself, and then Strat-O-Matic and Diamond Mind later on - was that there's no "fog of war". What I mean is, if you're replaying the Seattle Mariners' 1984 season in SOM (what can I say, I'm a masochist), Gorman Thomas will hit .157 for you every time. I mean, sometimes he'll be better by luck, sometimes he'll be worse, but that card you have in front of you has a whole bunch of outs on it and a lot of the time it becomes a matter of "hiding" a guy like that until he gets his requisite PAs or whatever, or at least accepting that he's bad. But is that accurate? Thomas wasn't great the previous year but I'm sure the M's trotted him out there game after game thinking he'd hit better than .157. Players get into slumps like that all the time. At what point do you decide whether it's a slump or a guy is just not very good anymore? (and in the case of Thomas, he recovered to hit a passable .215 with a lot of power for the 80s - how long of a leash *do* you give a guy like that?)

I've gone so far as to only play with fictional players now just because I don't like to have preconceived notions of how a guy "should" hit, but different people do different things. You can start a league with "real" players but let the game engine take over and age/develop them so sometimes you wind up with Ted Williams getting hurt and leaving the game and Ryne Duren getting a bump to his control and becoming a perennial Cy Young award winner. You can force the game to recalculate player abilities every year so that the engine never kicks in. Or you can go like me and have your version of organized baseball full of guys with fake names who could be anything. It's all up to you...