Setting up minor leagues for online league

[rem]

Cross posted from general discussions - didn't receive a reply there

I'm considering doing a 1949 historical league and I am working on setting up the file to see how well it would work. I am not sure how to handle the minors. I don't want a ton of minor leagues because they're a pain to manage and there aren't that many minor leaguers in historical leagues in any event.

However, I would like to set things up to include iconic minor league franchises of the time without getting out of hand. I am fishing for suggestions as to what franchises to include. It was a a boom time for the minor leagues and independent baseball with the war and a major league that was mostly on the East Coast.

That brings me to my next issue, I'd like to set up the PCL which I would assume was entirely independent at the time. Is this a good idea? Also, I believe Henry (BigCity) had a database setup with historically accurate PCL players or at least he had the right kinds of settings for it. Does anyone know where it is and/or if it can be made compatible with this version?

Finally, the best way to handle the lack of complete historical minor leaguers is with ghost players who cannot advance to the majors - correct?

[SteveP]

Originally Posted by remangiii

Finally, the best way to handle the lack of complete historical minor leaguers is with ghost players who cannot advance to the majors - correct?

I don't have a basis for answering most of your post without knowing more about how to plan to populate your minor leagues in the first place. If you using the Lahman DB, you will only have a handful of players for the minors, for example. If you are planning to populate the minors with a lot of real players, and just need to fill a few gaps (especially when injury caused), then ghost players make sense. Otherwise, I prefer to use fictionals rather than to have several hundred Joe Unknowns in the game.

[rem]

Assuming I can find an accurate list of minor leaguers' names somewhere, I'll generate fictional players and rename them.

[SteveP]

Originally Posted by remangiii

Assuming I can find an accurate list of minor leaguers' names somewhere, I'll generate fictional players and rename them.

Sounds like a lot of work.

What happens when the game generates new historical rookies at the beginning of each subsequent season? You would likely have two players in the game with the same name. I suppose that's the only problem though -- I don't think the game will get confused as to which is the real one.

Anyway, I don't have much else to add. I know in the past when I've tried to align "real" minor league teams with the ML organizations in an historical league, it began to get messy. For one thing, minor league teams changed their affiliations so often (plus you sometimes had to choose which AA team to use because some ML organizations would have more than one, for example), not mention going from dependent to independent. It was way more trouble than I wanted for a solo league.

[rem]

I was just going to use players that never made the majors. I am operating on the presumption that you can do mass renaming using a CSV import - obviously ratings would be luck of the draw.