Q: What's the best way to set up a College League in a game where there's no draft?

[tm1681]

It's all in the thread title.

Basically, I'm looking for ideas and feedback regarding the ideal way to set up a college league and/or college feeder league for an in-game universe where there's no draft. I've never done it before, so I'm open to all suggestions.

Thanks!

[tm1681]

Bumping this after 72 hours, just to see if anybody has any good ideas.

[millhousebc]

I feel that if you had no MLB draft, and set a college league age limit, the players would just become free agents. Should just quick sim a season and see what happens

[Hrycaj]

I have never done it myself without a draft either. I would imagine the players age out and become free agents. Whatever you do make a backup. If this is for your awesome sim you have been running for a few years there are some fundamental issues that could ruin the good thing you have going by using feeders. The main one being that the United States, as a nation, is too big to run feeders properly. For immersion sake people justifiably want a large college/HS feeder system. That creates too many players and it throws your talent out of whack to put it simply. As a player who loved feeders, I had to stop using them because unless you have a really small island type of universe, they become too difficult to control. Maybe you plan to use them in a different way and will be successful, I would just make sure you have a backup/quickstart handy if you need to roll back the file. Good luck.

[tm1681]

Originally Posted by Hrycaj

I have never done it myself without a draft either. I would imagine the players age out and become free agents. Whatever you do make a backup. If this is for your awesome sim you have been running for a few years there are some fundamental issues that could ruin the good thing you have going by using feeders. The main one being that the United States, as a nation, is too big to run feeders properly. For immersion sake people justifiably want a large college/HS feeder system. That creates too many players and it throws your talent out of whack to put it simply. As a player who loved feeders, I had to stop using them because unless you have a really small island type of universe, they become too difficult to control. Maybe you plan to use them in a different way and will be successful, I would just make sure you have a backup/quickstart handy if you need to roll back the file. Good luck.

Thanks for the shoutout on the 1800s game I run

It is indeed about that. I'm kicking around the idea of adding 8-10 college teams because every Ivy League team and some other Academic heavyweights in the Northeastern USA had baseball teams by 1878.

I wouldn't necessarily have to make a backup, at least I don't think. What I could do is save the current APBL/NBBO/PCBL setup as a Template, start a new game with that, and just label it "TestTestTest" or something.

Here is why I wanted feedback, and what my preliminary thoughts are...

I wanted feedback because I'm well aware of the issues that come with having too many college or high school teams running in the in-game universe, or both.

I know that the default Sabermetric Creation Modifiers for College Leagues in-game are .650/.650/.550/.550/.650, or something like that. My idea was to test with roster limits similar to those in the other leagues in my game (college teams at the time really only had about a dozen players IIRC), and maybe set the creation modifiers a little bit lower so that most of the players would be squad fodder at best for the senior-level leagues.

When I had the APBL split off in 1871 in my in-game universe, I moved the modifiers of the NBBO down to .900/.900/.900/.900/.900. I could have made them equal to modern AAA, but I decided that would be a good place to start. When the PCBL started in 1873, I made them .850 across the board.

Setting the modifiers there for those two leagues has worked as intended. With the first pro league now seven years old, only the best players under the age of 30 in the NBBO and PCBL rank the equivalent of 3.0 stars (50/80) or higher compared to the APBL, with maybe a handful in the 4.0-5.0 star range, and there are far more players that move down the league ladder than move up.

I was thinking that if I made a small college league that had standard roster sizes and modifiers of something like a straight .600 then it could result in the kind of long-term player outcomes that I want. Obviously I'd need to spend some time messing with it.

I'm confident that I can figure out something. I was able to monkey around with the in-game database so that the International Free Agents the game created matched the most common nationalities of immigrants to the USA in the 1850's to 1870's, so I think it's just a matter of tinkering under the hood until I get it right.