No Draft - do players get generated?

[spleen1015]

Toying with the idea of not having a draft the first few years of my league. I'll let the teams sign players as they can.

Question is, do players get generated? If so, when?

I just simmed through a year and I am in the pre-season of the next year and haven't seen any new players as far as I can tell.

[Déjà Bru]

This is bothering me in two ways:

• I believe it's either in the offseason or preseason when the game is supposed to create enough free agents to fill rosters without an amateur draft, and more importantly,
• When I tried to test this, I could not get the game to do so at any time. This bothers me. It's related to the setting below but I am sure that this is set correctly.

The problem with playing OOTPB fictionally is that there are not enough of us to encounter problems, report them, and be heard. What is it, something like 80% of players just play the standard MLB game? That makes it tough.

[Cobby]

With my OOTP17 league, I disabled the amateur draft and the game was creating free agents every year. They seemed to range in age from 19 to 29 and almost every year there were premium, superstar quality players that just appeared out of nowhere. I didn't really like it much. It just didn't seem realistic to have so many high quality players without an integral history. Also I had to restrain myself, since I could always outbid the AI for these guys even though all the teams had plenty of budget room.

So. When I started a new league in OOTP18, I checked the "disable automatic creation of free agents box". So now I'm not getting any newly created free agents, as advertised, To (try to) compensate, I increased the number of international scouting discoveries to "more" (which is about 6 per year). Then I changed the country origin of the so-called international discoveries so that they are mostly from the US. I'm trying to capture the feeling of early baseball and I imagine the scouts roaming around the cornfields or out west and maybe finding the next Walter Johnson playing in a league in Idaho, or something.

I'm only 6 years into the new league (starting in 1871). So far there are no signs of teams running out of players, but I don't have a sense for whether or not the quality of players feels right. I figure I'll change the setting to "a lot" (12 per year) if I notice any problems with the amount or quality of players.

I'd be interested to hear other's experiences with player creation without the draft.

[spleen1015]

Cobby,

I like your idea of using the international scouting discoveries. I am going to mess around with that and see how it goes.

[NoOne]

if you turn it off completely, you need to do something to prevent you r league from running out of players.

discoveries are the worst possible source for consistency. most don't even warran a promotion past short-a or A-ball.

you will have a very left skewed distribution of talent in your league... so a few really good players will likely have some wicked stats.

this is how you can re-create an environment where babe ruth hits more hr than all the other teams (individually, not cumulative) or w/e the comparison is of note. so, i'm not saying it's a bad idea, merely a good guess of its outcome. the good players will take an even larger chunk of the league totals and how you have the league callibrated with the modifiers.

turn it to as many as possible, 6 won't cut it .. no minors? if none, then maybe 6 is okay... won't need nearly as many in that situation, but with a full set of 1 each MiL R-AAA -> ~30 players per team created per year or you run out for sure (not extreme if close but some teams won't have enough of each positions / pitching at various levels, it can take a few years to know for sure).

international amatuers created jul 2nd in normal games are of a much higher quality... never tried going with highest possible value, but in a larger league default was "40" for me and .. they were mostly decent players with some exceptional ones, too. pretty equivalent to a 1st round in my league, i'd guess, if not a bit better potential wise (needs to start higher, since they are so young likely to lose at least some of it).

so, i'd guess some combination can be a more bell-curvish distribution, but maybe that's not your goal... i don't know if the max july 2nd type crated are all of similar quality or if they drop off at some point relative to the size of your league. figure thse things out and play mad scientist with some method

[Cobby]

Yeah, I just set the international discoveries to "a lot" (12) right before reading your post. I don't have minors and just a 15-man reserve roster, so 6 was plenty enough to keep from running out of players. But, there weren't enough good players and things were starting to feel moribund. Veterans were hanging around longer and not being adequately pushed by younger players.

I feel like I'm operating a steam plant or something. Pressure is low in one area, so open a valve over here...

With the setting at 12, maybe there will be just enough good young players to keep things interesting. If not, I guess I'll have to open a valve somewhere else. I don't mind a skewed distribution with a few players hogging the statistical glory. I think the game plays a little flat with the normal settings - at least for the 19th century and early 20th century. (and fictional - that's probably not the case for historical)

Anyway, it'll be interesting to see how it plays out...

[NoOne]

dupe post...

[NoOne]

yeah, i've never turned up that setting, i usually go the other way... based on that, i don't think it changes probability of a 'better' player.

just for info, you may want to look at them in editor as they come -- most will have 1 in movement or control out of 200, if a pitcher, and batters are mostly 60-70/200 contact potential.

heh, maybe that would result in a cool distribution, lol... sim out ~20 years and check back in before investing too much time into it. auto-calc and sim a couple more years to check stats - individuals of various costs (league will be turned-over after change)

the july 2nd ones are completely different in quality, FYI... so, if you want a bit more competency, they might be an option or mixed in for some combination. if you don't want the bidding approach, maybe make them a 1 round fa draft or somethign more creative.

[andyhdz]

Originally Posted by Déjà Bru

This is bothering me in two ways:

• I believe it's either in the offseason or preseason when the game is supposed to create enough free agents to fill rosters without an amateur draft, and more importantly,
• When I tried to test this, I could not get the game to do so at any time. This bothers me. It's related to the setting below but I am sure that this is set correctly.

The problem with playing OOTPB fictionally is that there are not enough of us to encounter problems, report them, and be heard. What is it, something like 80% of players just play the standard MLB game? That makes it tough.

I have two indy leagues where I want a few free agents created so I do NOT have that option on that you highlighted and it creates free agents fine. However it doesn't create a lot of them. Set the player creation settings to a country that normally doesn't get created so you can easily see them. Vietnam for example. Run through the season and I believe after the season is over thats when they are created. Someone once said it's usually like 3 per team.

[andyhdz]

Originally Posted by Cobby

They seemed to range in age from 19 to 29 and almost every year there were premium, superstar quality players that just appeared out of nowhere.

You could create that with the player creation age range in your league settings as far as the age ranges. I create 18 year olds only

[NoOne]

Originally Posted by andyhdz

You could create that with the player creation age range in your league settings as far as the age ranges. I create 18 year olds only

i kinda like the sound of that... been thinking of setting these min/max...

do you have too many 'long' careers? does it noticeably drop the ~average age a player gets to the MLB? any cost or drawback you noticed yet?

everytime i do somethign liek this, there's cost/benefit => biggest reason for personal choice on the matter

[Cobby]

Originally Posted by NoOne

yeah, i've never turned up that setting, i usually go the other way... based on that, i don't think it changes probability of a 'better' player.

just for info, you may want to look at them in editor as they come -- most will have 1 in movement or control out of 200, if a pitcher, and batters are mostly 60-70/200 contact potential.

So, I've simulated 9 seasons so far - most with scouting discoveries at 6 per year, but the last season with scouting discoveries at 12 per year. I just examined my player pool. I did get a handful of quality position players this way. So maybe 12 per year would be enough for sustainability of position players. But what is striking is that there have been exactly *zero* viable pitchers created. So. It does appear that going up to 12 per year really isn't going to cut it (for pitchers, at least).

(although it might be entertaining to see how the league would play out without any pitchers)

(when I looked at the player pool, in general, the scouting discovery position players had more talent at pitching than the scouting discovery pitchers did...)

Originally Posted by andyhdz

You could create that with the player creation age range in your league settings as far as the age ranges. I create 18 year olds only

Yeah. I think that's a good idea. I'm going to go back to the default for "scouting discoveries" and again uncheck that "disable auto create of free agents" box and set player creation to create younger players. That looks like the best bet. I'll probably still have to restrain myself from snapping up all the quality talent for my own team, but at least I won't have those pre-formed superstars appearing out of nowhere.

[slugger922cubs]

If its not producing enough pitchers you can adjust the player creation modifiers to weaken the hitters again or strengthen the pitchers. As mentioned before it's like playing with a lot of valves trying to get the right spot.