1996 Quickstart Mod

[ra24mpa]

I've been working on a modified quickstart for the 1996 season for a few months now, and I suppose now is as good a time as any to upload it. It's not meant to be some great work or anything, just a little improvement here and there on the default historical league setup.

Just in case it matters for whatever reason, I should also have this available on the Steam Workshop at some point, hopefully sooner rather than later, but you can download it now via the link below. For those unfamiliar with downloading from Google Drive, you need to click on the down arrow near the upper righthand side of your screen.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HOv...ew?usp=sharing

I downloaded it myself just to ensure that it works, and I seemed to have a superfluous folder or something after unzipping, so make sure it's the actual MLB 1996.quick that you're dropping into the quickstarts folder.

Anyway.
Why spend time building a quickstart for 1996? For a few reasons...

1) For the Seattle Mariners, I wanted to see how things would play out if they could trade for better pitching and such without giving away part of the future core of the 2000s Red Sox in the process (Ortiz, Lowe, Varitek) for basically nothing.

2) The St. Louis Cardinals have their post-brewery ownership/front office/coaching group in place that will be there for over the next decade, and I wanted to see if they could build their core group from the early 2000s and start winning before then.


What you're getting -

Start of season MLB DL stints are accounted for, but not all injuries are known. The few newspaper articles I could find via Google mention injuries but most of the time fail to mention the specific injury.

I've never liked how some of the players are rated during inital game creation, so I re-rated most MLB batters using the neutralized stats from the Baseball Reference website. I stopped when I realized I probably messed up and would have quite a few regulars with sub-200 averages underneath the hood (that part that states what the resulting stat output would be in a modern, neutral major league environment). Once I got down to the Mendoza line, I realized that I would have to do the same for all the AAA players in order for this to make sense, and I simply have no interest in doing that for free. Surprisingly, though, the stat outputs from the few tests I've run haven't really looked all that bad. The main players do what is expected of them. For what it's worth, I assume that OOTP historical players use some form of yearly ratings recalculation anyway, whether it be of the one- or three-year variety, so everything should be the way one expects it to be by the time 1997 comes around. I didn't mess around with many of the pitchers because it's too time consuming for very little reward. Most of them have the ratings that were generated during league creation other than a few that were so annoyingly wrong to me (velocity of Atlanta's Big 3, among others) that I had to do something about it.

Real coaches, and plenty of them. Other than 13 team trainers and several hitting and pitching coaches at the rookie league level, most real-life coaches are in the game now. I haven't done much in the way of their ratings and strategy with the exception of the MLB and AAA levels, but they're there.

Real contracts... sort of. Salary data is 95-99% from Baseball Reference, with the occasional contract option and monetary incentive gleaned from online articles from the time in question, so the starting payroll is more-or-less accurate, or at least accurate enough. Also, I didn't go through every player to fix service time, but I did enough to ensure that some of the real life arbitration-eligible players during the 1996 offseason won't automatically become free agents in the game.

Most minor league players are now either on their correct starting team or no more than one level off. Even with the Internet Archive, finding MiLB transaction data for anything pre-2000 is nearly impossible with a few exceptions. One just needs to accept that it looks bad for some organizations and move on, like when you see too many red arrows next to AAA pitchers or 30 players on some high-A team and only 21 in regular A. Just let the CPU deal with it.

I had some player histories around from another mod I was working on a few years ago, so I went ahead and added a few of them at the last minute. It's very hit-or-miss at this point, but what's there is there.

Retired numbers have been copied from the official modern quickstart and used for this mod, but with a slight twist: all references to events that transpired after the start of the 1996 season have been removed. Hey, this is 1996, not 2022. Some of those number were for players who were still active and in some cases still living on March 29, 1996.

I have the setting saved to prevent AI roster movement turned on. The first player coming off the DL occurs a few days after opening day, so remember to toggle the switch in the settings area to allow AI roster movement again after you get to opening day or at most a few days later.


Misc notes:
A few MLB players who had career ending injuries in real life but were on the disabled list are included on their respective rosters. The most obvious example of this in the game would be Kirby Puckett. I've given him his neutralized stats from 1995 should anyone want to clear his injury and use him, but he and other players like him are there for salary and budget purposes. One those contracts are up, that's more money available for the teams in question than would otherwise be there a year or two out unless you're stuck with an owner who's cutting salary for whatever reason.

I read somewhere that the Cubs had a four-man rotation to begin the season, and that's why Steve Trachsel begins the year at AA Orlando. IRL he wasn't there for long. You may want to be in commissioner mode and send him up anyway if you don't trust the AI to handle things properly.

A few clubs still have a ten-man pitching staff, while most have moved on to 11 or 12 pitchers. I'm not sure how well the game handles that, though.

Players like Darryl Strawberry for whom I could find hard evidence that stated they began the year in one of the independent leagues are listed as free agents instead of being on the roster of the team that later signed them.

I had to give Reggie Jefferson (Boston Red Sox) a fake injury to bring their roster down to 25 players. He apparently sat on the bench uninjured for the first two weeks of the season, and I couldn't find a way to make room for him.

Ken Edenfield IRL began the season on the California Angels active roster and pitched in two games, but I couldn't figure out who else to send down in order to bring the total down to 25 players, so he's now at AAA Vancouver.

I read an article from the late 1990s recently that stated that the national media contracts were paying out about $12 million to each team, so I upped the totals for all teams from $6 million or whatever they were to the figure from the article. You may need to adjust the figures as the game progresses because when you import finances after the 1996 season, they revert back to $7 million per team. Honestly, I have no idea how finances are going to play out beyond the first year of simming. I've tried to make teams like Oakland poor enough to force the issue with regards to trading McGwire like in real life, but not so poor as to be unable to afford proper scouting and player development. So you may have to tinker around with it.

Other than that, if you dl it and try it out, I hope you like it.
And, although it should be obvious, remember to look over your settings before you begin play. I may have things set up completely different from how you would prefer, so take a minute or two and look things over. Once again, remember to allow AI roster movement after opening day.