Historical Rule changes

[GrantDawg]

Anyone have a list or a thread that lists the rule changes (as it affects OOTP) by year?

What I am looking for:

1) Rule 5 draft: I think 1959, but confirmation would be nice

2) 40 man roster: Found nothing but would think it came some time after '59 because the Rule 5 included all new prospects at the time from what I read.

3) Playoff roster: or playoff roster rules in general

4) Luxury tax: I think that was 1994. I don't know why it is included in the historical financial set up. Was there another form of revenue sharing?

5) September call-ups:

6) Minor league options:

I know some rules used now aren't exactly like their historical predecessors, but will use the current rule equivalents (like 10/5 isn't exactly right, but players did have more say in being moved later in their careers, right?)

[David Ball]

1959 may have been the year the draft became rule #5, but it goes back to 1891. In fact, it was far more important in earlier years than it was by the late '50's.

Clifford Blau has a site with incomplete but valuable information on these operating rules, but I don't have the url handy. Somebody else may be able to provide it readily.

[GrantDawg]

There is actually a good thread on this that I finally found. Let me link it here and keep up with it.

http://www.ootpdevelopments.com/boar...h-history.html

[Le Grande Orange]

Try this web site. If you need more detail than what is provided there feel free to ask me and I'll consult my Baseball Blue Books.

[Le Grande Orange]

You should really visit the web site mentioned in my previous reply, as it pretty much answers your questions. That said, I'll go ahead and offer replies to your specific queries:

Originally Posted by GrantDawg

Rule 5 draft: I think 1959, but confirmation would be nice.

What was later to become known as the Rule 5 draft first began in 1892.

Originally Posted by GrantDawg

40 man roster: Found nothing but would think it came some time after '59 because the Rule 5 included all new prospects at the time from what I read.

The limit of 40 players under contract began in 1910. Between 1901-1909 there was no limit on the number of players a club could have under contract. Prior to 1901, the reserve limit and active limit were largely synonymous, 18 or fewer depending on the year, due to economic conditions, though in most cases there was no actual rule limiting the number of players a club could have under contract.

Originally Posted by GrantDawg

Playoff roster: or playoff roster rules in general.

Presumably something along these lines was started once the World Series became a standard event between the leagues. I don't have exact data.

Originally Posted by GrantDawg

Luxury tax: I think that was 1994. I don't know why it is included in the historical financial set up. Was there another form of revenue sharing?

The luxury tax started in 1997 as a result of the new CBA. In real life luxury tax proceeds are currently not distributed to other clubs; instead a share goes to the players' union and the remainder to MLB to fund various baseball development programs.

Revenue sharing in MLB first started with gate sharing, that is, a portion of the ticket sales generated by that game were shared with the visiting club. In the early 1980s an additional form of revenue sharing was implemented which saw some of the local cable TV broadcasting contract shared with other clubs (this did not apply to over-the-air local TV broadcasting contracts). In 1996 both of these revenue sharing methods were eliminated in favour of a plan which saw a portion of all the locally generated revenue by a club (minus stadium expenses) shared with other teams.

Originally Posted by GrantDawg

September call-ups...

This appears to have started in 1910. Note that clubs could also carry expanded rosters at the start of the season too. From 1910-56 the active roster limit for the first part of the season was the same size as the reserve limit. From 1957-67 clubs could play the first part of the season with 28 active players.

Originally Posted by GrantDawg

Minor league options...

Optional assignments can be traced back to the 19th century. They worked quite differently in those early years. Options as we know them now appear to have started in 1921, though at that time a player only had two option years. (It was raised to three in 1931.)

[GrantDawg]

Thanks, LGO. Actually you had a downloadable version of the website in that thread I linked. So, you basically answered my questions twice.

[D. Boon's Ghost]

Instead of cluttering up the forum with silly threads (and as it relates to the OP), I was hoping to ask a question I have had since discovering OOTP last year:

If starting a historic league in 1921 as Unemployed in order to create a history for when I want employment in, say... 1975, would I have to manually change the teams and league structure as I went?

For example, would I have to go in and manually input the DH rule in '73? Or that the Philadelphia Athletics moved to Kansas City in '55 and then to Oakland in '68?

Thanks a lot. The manual isn't very helpful in this regard.

[Biggio509]

I think rule changes you have to do manual but if you start as a historical league you have an auto-expand option. When you use it will move teams and change names appropriately. Essentially each team has an id, each year that id is checked for changes. So the Boston Americans will eventually become the Boston Red Sox if you have the right ID entered and auto-expand on. Note, this will not necessarily import new logos and unis unless you have them in the main ootp folders. Also at this time OOTP only recognizes say Boston_Red_Sox for logos or unis. It will not say recognize Boston_Red_Sox_1956 and import the correct logo or uniforms for that year.

[Biggio509]

LGO's post is outstanding as always. Just a note for game purposes it is sometimes impossible at this time to make rule 5, waivers, and optional assignments work as they actually did. For instance rules about waivers needed to option below AA or the fact that the rule was a draft of players from independent minor league teams that some leagues refused to participate in. Options were buyback clauses when players were sold to the minors.

I still have not figured out if actually using the modern type minor league system included with OOTP may not be a better approximation of how things actually worked as opposed to setting up independent minors. If you add affiliated minors I think it works more like baseball early in the 20th century even if the farm system had yet to be invented. Although the structure was different the rules in essence worked very similarly to how they work today.

OOTP just does not have a way of recreating the structure and the rules accurately. If you implement accurate structure the rules can not be applied because there is no mechanism for rule V on an indie league for instance. If you implement a modern structure you can have those features like options and the rule V and have them work in a more historically accurate way.

[David Ball]

Originally Posted by Biggio509

I still have not figured out if actually using the modern type minor league system included with OOTP may not be a better approximation of how things actually worked as opposed to setting up independent minors. If you add affiliated minors I think it works more like baseball early in the 20th century even if the farm system had yet to be invented. Although the structure was different the rules in essence worked very similarly to how they work today.

OOTP just does not have a way of recreating the structure and the rules accurately. If you implement accurate structure the rules can not be applied because there is no mechanism for rule V on an indie league for instance. If you implement a modern structure you can have those features like options and the rule V and have them work in a more historically accurate way.

I think this is true if you're using the historical player database, maybe not if you're using fictional players. The fictionals enter the game as true professional rookies, and you develop them all the way from that point to the major leagues by bringing them up through an organization of minor league affiliates. Prior to the Rickey Revolution, no club operated that way.

With the historical database, the players who come in each year nearly all have several years of minor league experience. They are the players who have demonstrated enough promise that a major league club has marked them out for purchase on the open market or in the draft. The independent minors are not represented visibly when you play this way, but they are represented abstractly, as the mechanism that has produced each year's crop of rookies.

Pre-Rickey clubs did not have a farm system, but going back to the 1890's they always had substantial number of players out on optional assignment or otherwise with strings tied to them, so they could be reacquired if needed. If you have incomplete minors turned on, then the players on your minor league roster are the men who haven't made your big roster but have shown enough that you are holding on to them in this way. The Joe Unknowns that fill out the minor rosters are prospects not yet developed enough to show up in the database, or career minor leaguers, or anybody on not under your control but playing on the same minor league team as your guys.

A real team c. 1920 would probably not have had all its optioned players at each level on one team, but that's just a detail -- I think this method is true to the spirit of pre-Rickey baseball.

By the way, I can remember when May 15 was the cutdown date, going from 28 players to 25, but I had no idea that as recently (as it seems to me) as 1956 you could keep your entire forty-man roster that long. I wonder whether teams actually did that.

[Biggio509]

Originally Posted by David Ball

I think this is true if you're using the historical player database, maybe not if you're using fictional players. The fictionals enter the game as true professional rookies, and you develop them all the way from that point to the major leagues by bringing them up through an organization of minor league affiliates. Prior to the Rickey Revolution, no club operated that way.
...
Pre-Rickey clubs did not have a farm system, but going back to the 1890's they always had substantial number of players out on optional assignment or otherwise with strings tied to them, so they could be reacquired if needed.

Exactly it is not historically accurate to model affiliated minors but yet without them you can't have the ability to repurchase someone from an indie minor league in the game as you do if you use a modern system. There is no historically accurate way to fully model rules and structure from at least the 1890's when you see significant indie minor leagues until Branch Rickey. If you historically model the structure there is no way for teams to use options like they did without manual commissionaire work.

Player sales are not really in the game much sales with buy back clauses. That is why I get torn between closer approximation to real rules and closer approximation to structure. A rule V draft requires you have minors and players under team control because of the code. Options may require you to have a controlled minor team to send them to. So either way is inaccurate but there are just some rules you can not replicate without having inaccuracies in structure.

The whole option issue is why I would argue that baseball really worked like the farm system before there was a farm. The farm system was more of a way to allow control of more players under the reserve clause since minors had reserve clauses too. You could also eliminate negotiation and transaction cost of moving players when you owned both clubs.

None the less I just don't think you do can both accurate structure and accurate rules evolution in the game.

[Le Grande Orange]

I'll just add this note for now: farm systems became more common in the early 1930s when a rule change was made in response to the Depression. Originally, working agreements with minor league clubs specified that the number of players the ML club could select at the end of the season counted against the 40-man roster. So, for example, if an ML club had an agreement with a minor league club stating that it had the right to purchase two players from the minor league team, those two selections counted against the 40-man roster for the entire season. So the ML team effectively only had 38 roster spots during the season; the other two were reserved for the working agreement selections.

This sort of arrangement naturally made working agreements of limited use.

It was in December of 1931 the rule was changed so that players to be purchased under a working agreement no longer counted against the 40-man roster until the selection was actually made. This change made working agreements much more useful.

[gollum65]

Hi guys,

I commish an online league that just started the 1973 season. We've had a dispute come up regarding a trade in which a player involved vetoed the trade due to the 10/5 rule. On the website LGO linked to in post #4 above it says that the 10/5 rule started in 1973. Can anyone verify this for me, preferably citing a secondary source, and ideally one I could link to on my forum? Thanks.