Revamp the HS/College system

[Syd Thrift]

I think OOTPDev has always been reticent to do this because the amount of processor load required would be enormous but I think modern computers are beginning to be up to the task now...

The biggest issue I have with high school and college feeder leagues is that they assume that each and every player is going to be good enough to play in the game's minor league system. This is just, like, straight up not how things happen in Major League Baseball. Only a small percentage of college players are good enough to even be considered for the draft every year and the numbers are astronomically small for high school players.

Let's break down the math on this. Assume you have a 30 team league with 5 levels of minors (AAA, AA, A+, A, and rookie). According to the rule of thumb that says you need 5 players per round per level per team, that's 25 rounds of drafts multiplied by 30 teams or 750 players created. In turn, thanks to the numbers Baseball America published here, you need the following breakdown of players:

4Y: 500
HS: 187.5
JuCo: 62.5

As of 2019 there are 297 NCAA DIvision I teams that play baseball. Even assuming that nobody ever comes out of DIvision II and lower schools (which of course is not the case) that means that on average teams should have 1 or 2 players on them who get drafted per season. Of course, some programs will have a couple every year and others might only have a player come around every few years who's that good, but on average teams should have around 1 and a third draft-ready players.

There are around 190 DIvision I junior colleges with baseball programs, so you should see a little under 1 in 3 of them produce a draft-ready ballplayer every year.

For high schools it gets a little crazy. There are almost 15 *thousand* HS baseball teams to produce those 187.5 players from. Of course, everyone who is in a college or JuCo program also once went to high school but even if you do something where you make 3 times too many HSers and send the remainder off to college programs, you need to have just *one* HS baseball player created for every *20* teams.

Anyway, how to resolve this:

- For 4 year and JuCo programs: simulate Division I and have the game generate an average of around 1.3 players per 4 year school and 0.3 per 2 year school. If you really wanted to be fancy you could raise the 2 year rate and have them move on if they go undrafted. That's not really the important part. The important part is, every other player on every team has to be basically a "ghost" player who has every rating at or near 0 except maybe in fielding/baserunning/other stats. The game engine may need to find a way to incorporate floating point numbers for pitching and hitting but that might be too much work to resolve what's mostly a side issue.

- For high schools: man, I don't want 15,000 teams simulating fake games on my computer, not when literally 99.5% of the players featured in them will never get anywhere near a major league team. I guess we *aren't* at that point yet, and I guess the game can just make up those gaudy numbers that ML-potential baseballers put up at that level. For now, just go ahead and autogen them. Produce 4 times as many as you might need in a given draft, try and ensure that the game makes it very hard to impossible to actually sign 75% of those guys, and put the undrafted ones into the college ranks.

- Perhaps due to injury or freak retirements or whatever there aren't enough collegiate players coming through the ranks in a given year. The game should look for that and auto-gen "walk ons" at the college and JuCo level to account for the shortfall. Likewise with expansion.

I realize that this *still* has your average fed league simulating 250+ games every day during the college season. Again, I think that modern CPUs and the approach to threading the game has taken in recent years can handle that now. Perhaps if you're doing a long-term sim you'll need to turn off feeder simulation in order to keep individual years from taking like an hour to sim, but I really do think that this is doable for most solo and league players. You're really only expanding the player database by around 35% once you take all of your current minor leagues into account (figuring that a 30-team minor league system should have somewhere around 5200-5500 players in it).

[Syd Thrift]

Just to follow up on this since it looks like feeder leagues aren't getting any love this year...

IMO the reason why so few people use these (and admittedly I don't use them either) is that they're at worst broken in key ways (the fact that literally every player in a feeder is considered draft-ready is something that is going to make the game unplayable for many), and at best they represent a universe that doesn't exist in reality. If you were to do tweaks to the feeders like the ones I talk about above and then add those to the default starting league, I can all but guarantee that they'd be used a lot. You might even start to have calls for people who want to manage college teams, which is its own issue but that at least represents a good problem rather than the "you might as well dump this feature because it doesn't work" issue you've got now.

[low]

They need love and keep getting ignored.