Need advice on how to set up minors in a historical career league

[Art99]

I started a league in 1955 and imported minor leaguers. Then during the 1956 offseason half my minor leaguers dissapeared because 3 of the affiliates were switched to minor leagues affiliates unavailable in Ootp. There was no record in the transactions log of what happened to these player but I did learn some were signed by other MLB teams they never played for. There is no way in hell I am going to search for all these players every season and assign them to the correct affiliates. Total waste of time unless you are certain a player is going to be a useful major league player later.

What I would like to do is to start over and import the historical minor leaguers but keep the same affiliates every year to avoid this headache. When a new season begins I want all my players left exactly where they were when the previous season ended. I do not want my affiliates disappearing EVER and if that slightly messes up the realism I'm fine with it. Is it possible for me to do things this way ?

[mitchkenn]

if you go to league settings> leagues & teams - on the far right is a drop down box, probably says Major League Baseball ML .... if you click on that you will see your minor league levels. If you pick, say AA, it will show all the teams that are in the system. It will also tell you if they are affiliated with a team or not. The teams with no affiliation, their players are free to be signed by any team.

if the Team loses affiliation, the players become Free agents.

unfortunately, real teams changed affiliations from time to time, and the game reflects those changes, so i don't know a solution other than checking before each season what affiliations you have. i suspect in future patches or version, they will smooth this out. After all, this is the first year for historical minors and it's been a major undertaking. I'm amazed at how well it does work, even with some hiccups. (i started to amass my own minor league data base once, so i could get around those disappearing affiliations ..... and was so overwhelmed by the sheer size of the project, i folded after two weeks.)

if you want players to go to the teams they actually started in, you need to have BOTH of these - check the box that says Automatically import historical rookies & have the draft turned off (draft can be turned on/off only in off-season). If you have the draft, all the players go into the rookie draft, not the teams).

don't think from your write-up you have your own minors, but they are NOT compatible with the game if you have historical minors checked. Those teams will vanish at the end of a season (every season) and players end up free agents. (i've tried various methods to get around that, to no avail .... maybe in future versions, but for now.)

not certain this addresses your exact issue, but it's a quick over-view of what could be happening and some things to look at or avoid... Hope it helps.

[Art99]

Thanks for your post. It's so true that teams switched affiliates with maddening regularity. I went to baseball reference.com and saw that within 5 years after I began my 1955 Senators league that they only still had one of the affilates left from then by 1960. I wish when an affiliate goes defunct that the game would simply put their players in a affilate still associated with your Mlb team instead of them becoming FA's. Several of my players were reassigned like this but I still had about 75 others disappear which is half of my players.

I was wondering if you turn import real minor leaguers on when you start your league as usual and then after they are imported turn it off so it wouldn't 'maintain real minor leagues'. As long as it still imported historical players for the draft each year I guessing that might work as a workaround.

[swampdragon]

I think one of the aids that could help the most with historical minors would be flow charts for each team showing its affiliations over the years. Then you could identify the coming changes at the end of each season and use the editor to move the players you cared about to their historic teams.

With historical minors on, I think it's harder to get good results if you just turn the computer loose and sim multiple seasons. OOTP will generally reward going slow and paying attention, and this is another example of that.

[swampdragon]

Originally Posted by Art99

I was wondering if you turn import real minor leaguers on when you start your league as usual and then after they are imported turn it off so it wouldn't 'maintain real minor leagues'. As long as it still imported historical players for the draft each year I guessing that might work as a workaround.

I think that turns off the minor league database, so the rookies would not be available until the year they made the majors.

[David Watts]

This whole thread had me confused. So when affiliations change when using real minors, teams just lose all the players?

[Art99]

Originally Posted by swampdragon

I think that turns off the minor league database, so the rookies would not be available until the year they made the majors.

That makes sense and exactly what I don't want to happen. I could have just kept ootp 12 and done that. Now I see why so many play fictional leagues to avoid some of these headaches.

I think it was too ambitious to try to do the real life affilate changes. If I could just design a fictional minor leage system with the number of teams I want at each level and permanantly keep them each year and then get the historical minir leaguers put on the designate for assignment list when you create a new game that would be satisfactory for me and eliminate a huge headache.

[Art99]

Originally Posted by David Watts

This whole thread had me confused. So when affiliations change when using real minors, teams just lose all the players?

When I lost my affilates after my second season started a few playrrs were reassigned to an affilate I still was in control of. The vast majority became free agents and the transaction list says nothing about what happened to them. All you can do is search for the players individually to find out which of your MLB competitors stole them and then place them back into your organization via Commissioner mode which takes tons of time and makes the game more like a job than a hobby which is rarely good. At the end of my first season I had around 150 players in my minors distributed into 7 affilates. When the next season began I only had about 75 players distributed into 4 affilates. In real life my team still had 7 affilites that second year but 3 of them were in leagues that are not part of the Ootp minor league database and that causes a big problem.

[David Watts]

Originally Posted by Art99

When I lost my affilates after my second season started a few playrrs were reassigned to an affilate I still was in control of. The vast majority became free agents and the transaction list says nothing about what happened to them. All you can do is search for the players individually to find out which of your MLB competitors stole them and then place them back into your organization via Commissioner mode which takes tons of time and makes the game more like a job than a hobby which is rarely good. At the end of my first season I had around 150 players in my minors distributed into 7 affilates. When the next season began I only had about 75 players distributed into 4 affilates. In real life my team still had 7 affilites that second year but 3 of them were in leagues that are not part of the Ootp minor league database and that causes a big problem.

Thanks for opening my eyes to this, otherwise I would have learned the hard way. What you have described doesn't even sound playable. I've never been discouraged by a version of OOTP yet, but 17 might end up being the first. Ugh!

[Art99]

Originally Posted by David Watts

Thanks for opening my eyes to this, otherwise I would have learned the hard way. What you have described doesn't even sound playable. I've never been discouraged by a version of OOTP yet, but 17 might end up being the first. Ugh!

I tend to agree unfortunately. If you aren't able to fully control the players that were orginally assigned to your organization then it's a problem. I think adding an option so the AI can't change your affiliations each year is the solution. Since the use of historical minor league players was so ambitious and completely new to the game I did expect some issues to be present but not anything of this magnitude. I was happy with my last version , òotp 12, and only upgraded for the historical minor leaguers. Shoulda waited til the game has been out several month like I usually have in the past before upgrading. I'm doing some experiments tonight to see if I can figure out a tolerable work around and if I figure one out will post it if I am so fortunate.

[David Watts]

Originally Posted by Art99

I tend to agree unfortunately. If you aren't able to fully control the players that were orginally assigned to your organization then it's a problem. I think adding an option so the AI can't change your affiliations each year is the solution. Since the use of historical minor league players was so ambitious and completely new to the game I did expect some issues to be present but not anything of this magnitude. I was happy with my last version , òotp 12, and only upgraded for the historical minor leaguers. Shoulda waited til the game has been out several month like I usually have in the past before upgrading. I'm doing some experiments tonight to see if I can figure out a tolerable work around and if I figure one out will post it if I am so fortunate.

I went back to 16 a few weeks ago.

[Spritze]

Originally Posted by Art99

At the end of my first season I had around 150 players in my minors distributed into 7 affilates. When the next season began I only had about 75 players distributed into 4 affilates. In real life my team still had 7 affilites that second year but 3 of them were in leagues that are not part of the Ootp minor league database and that causes a big problem.

Any league with even one affiliated team should be in the database. Can you be specific about the missing leagues. I count 7 leagues with Senators affiliates. There should be 8 and the Southwest League (Hobbs) will be added.

Any players on an affiliated team remain property of that MLB organization when the affiliation changes unless released. If there are not rooster spots for them available in that organization they can get cut. I personally have 70 roster spots on my lowest minor league level when I care about this.

[Art99]

I started my league as the 1955 Senators. They had 7 affiliates in real life but ootp 17 gave me 5 of them. One of the missing one was the class D Fulton City Lookouts in the Kentucky-Illinois-Kentucky league which is included in the Ootp 17 minor league universe. I checked for the Lookouts and saw that they had either been unassigned OR assigned to the wrong franchise (I forgot which ). Simply reassigning it to the Senators fixed it and was easy. It may have been originally assigned to the wrong franchise because the team was shared by 2 franchises that season. I didnt dig into it further find out.

The 2nd missing team was a class B team called the Rock Hill Chiefs in the Tri - state league which is not in Ootp 17 minor league universe. This league was around in various configurations for decades and went defunct a few times and then reformed several years later. It disbanded after the 1955 season.

1955 Washington Senators Minor League Affiliations | Baseball-Reference.com

In the old days there were probably dozens of independent leagues that were perhaps more like sandlot teams or company teams and were often short lived and probably not considered as 'major' independent minor leagues then and it is very hard to get every one of them into ootp.

Not having access to this team didn't bother me that much since I already had 175 minor league guys anyway. In 1956 the Senators had a total of 8 minor league teams but only 5 are available in ootp. The missing 3 are :

Class B Hobbs Sports of the Southwestern League
Class D Superior Senators of the Nebraska State League
Class D Fort Walton Jets of the Alabama-Florida League

1956 Washington Senators Minor League Affiliations | Baseball-Reference.com

During 1955 I had two D leagues and 2 A leagues but in 1956 only one D and one A league. Many of the players were transferred to the missing leagues above in 1956 but since those leagues are unavailable in ootp i lost them forever unless they were all signed by other organizations. I haven't searched for all 75 missing players and don't intend too. Not worth it and besides they'll just get messed up when I start the next season anyway

[Art99]

Originally Posted by Spritze

Any league with even one affiliated team should be in the database. Can you be specific about the missing leagues. I count 7 leagues with Senators affiliates. There should be 8 and the Southwest League (Hobbs) will be added.

Any players on an affiliated team remain property of that MLB organization when the affiliation changes unless released. If there are not rooster spots for them available in that organization they can get cut. I personally have 70 roster spots on my lowest minor league level when I care about this.

The only 4 of those that I was given in 1956 of the 8 minor league affilites are :

Louisville AAA
Chatanooga AA
Charlotte A
Erie DE

I was able to import the Thibodaux Senators which accounts for 25 of my missing players. They were listed as unafilliated is why they weren't in my system after 1956 season started.

You mention Hobbs Sports is available but I don't see a southwestern league in this game anywhere or I would have added them.

[Spritze]

Originally Posted by Art99

You mention Hobbs Sports is NOT available but I don't see a southwestern league in this game anywhere or I would have added them.

The SouthWestern League will be added in an update or two.
Shared affiliations are not supported.

The rest will be adjusted and new files sent to OOTP for inclusion in an update.

Thanks for finding these.

[Art99]

Been working on this all day so am pretty worn out and my reading isnt the greatest at the moment so sorry I misread. Thanks for the info about the patches.

I usually don't buy vid games unless they've been out at least 6 months but I got so excited about historical minor leaguers that I violated my own code. Since it will be awhile til the patches come out I will replay the 1955 season again since I messed some stuff up on the first try. Worst to First here I come !

[Spritze]

Found a total of 19 teams from 1936-1960 that were set to WAS instead of WS1. They have all been fixed and new files sent.

The Tri-State league will be added as well.

[Art99]

Awesome ! I look foreward to getting them.Since there have been 3 different MLB teams in Wash DC since 1901 I can see how that happened. Sound like it's pretty easy to solve too.