Are start times of historical seasons accurate

[Xogo]

i noticed all weekend games are during the day. Im doing a 1974 replay.

[Syd Thrift]

I'm *pretty* sure they're taken from the posted times at baseball-reference or elsewhere. Bear in mind that the times are all according to whatever time zone you set, so if you're on the west coast then east coast games start at 4:35 (they still play as night games with the graphics and the stat engine). Also, a quick glance of the 1974 schedule looks like teams played a lot of day games during the first week until switching to the standard night games during the week schedule that everyone knows and loves (except the Cubs of course, who famously did not install lights at Wrigley Field until the 1980s).

[Gerry58]

OK but what difference start times make? Are pitchers affected by sun rays in the eyes?

[cheo25]

The West Coast times on historical schedules have been inaccurate in previous versions of OOTP. Not sure about 19. In the schedule file, the night game times for LA, San Diego, San Francisco, California and Oakland (and I think Seattle once it comes into the league in 1977) are listed as 2205, which will show up as 10:05 p.m. local time. If your manager's settings are set for Eastern or Central time zones, those West Coast night games will show up on your schedule as starting at 1:05 a.m. or 12:05 a.m.

IIRC, the day game times are usually 17:05, which is 5:05 p.m. And then there are different times for the doubleheaders that are also a few hours earlier than what they should be.

As for whether game time affects fatigue, I believe the answers I've seen around here have been "No." Game times are really just cosmetic. But because I'm particular about things in my leagues, I always do a "find and replace" in the actual .lsdl schedule file itself to change the night game times from "2205" to "1905." I also massage those times for day games, too, but it's harder to do a "find and replace" for those because you end up changing some doubleheader times on other games not on the West Coast.

[joefromchicago]

Originally Posted by cheo25

The West Coast times on historical schedules have been inaccurate in previous versions of OOTP. Not sure about 19. In the schedule file, the night game times for LA, San Diego, San Francisco, California and Oakland (and I think Seattle once it comes into the league in 1977) are listed as 2205, which will show up as 10:05 p.m. local time. If your manager's settings are set for Eastern or Central time zones, those West Coast night games will show up on your schedule as starting at 1:05 a.m. or 12:05 a.m.

Those 10:05 pm start times are still in the OOTP major-league schedules. I can only surmise that they're a relic left over from when OOTP set all game times to the Eastern Time Zone. That changed around version 12 when the world_default.xml file, which contains time zone information, was introduced. All start times should now be set to local time, but evidently nobody has bothered to edit the schedules to reflect this change.

[joefromchicago]

Originally Posted by Gerry58

OK but what difference start times make?

None whatsoever.

[JaBurns]

Originally Posted by joefromchicago

None whatsoever.

Except if you get hung up on details like I do in my leagues.

[Kalanth]

Originally Posted by JaBurns

Except if you get hung up on details like I do in my leagues.

If you are hung up on those details then make sure that all games at Wrigley Field are day games since they did not play at night there until 1988.

[Le Grande Orange]

Historical start times for MLB would need to be researched. Part of the issue there is that newspapers did not publish the start time for all games scheduled on a given day, but only for the team within the city that newspaper covered. I looked into this some years back, and the earliest example of a major newspaper publishing the start time for all of a given day's games was the Chicago Tribune, which started doing so midway through the 1964 season. The New York Times didn't start doing the same until the mid-1970s.

Another sticking point to the above is that the boundaries for the various time zones changed during the 20th century.

I do have start times for some seasons for those clubs based in NYC.

[Shackdaddy]

From 2013 forward in OOTP, the starting times for games are the local starting times appropriate to the time zone the teams are playing in.Prior to 2013, the games starting time are all Eastern Time Zone. This applies to real MLB schedules only.