Guide to Winter Leagues & Other Interesting OOTP 12 Work-Arounds

[Dr. P.R. Park III]

Dr. Park's Guide to Winter Leagues & Other Interesting OOTP 12 Work-Arounds

With the latest rendition of OOTP, I have been obsessed with trying to emulate the dynamics that construct modern professional baseball: top-notch premier Major Leagues
(in hierarchical order MLB/Nippon/KBO/CPBL/Mexican) coalesced with financially inferior independent leagues (Atlantic, American Association, North American League, Can-Am, Frontier, Pecos). Throw "winter leagues" into the mix, and it's a very immersive experience.

This "guide" is open-source; I want other members to build off of it. I know there are things that others do within their OOTP universes that I have never even thought of, and this is the purpose of this thread, to eventually evolve, educate, and hopefully enlighten a few players to some new possibilities.

First, these work-arounds require some "manual" work...meaning you will have to manually move players around. Also, my concept of "winter leagues" is nowhere near realistic nor accurate, it simply is my interpretation of how to implement them manually currently within the game.

WHAT TO DO: I always add winter leagues right after New Year's, and set them to start November/December
1.) I use winter leagues much like they are used in real-life, to prepare struggling/injured/players and phenoms for the coming season. Once you have figured out how you want to use winter leagues, the first thing I do is create a new game, and create the winter leagues through the "create New Game" interface. This interface allows you to change everything, as opposed to creating leagues through saved games, which doesn't.

2.) Once you have created your new game with your winter leagues (make sure you're commish), go to your manager tab, and select "Player Search." Mass select and delete all players of the universe. Save your game as a template. Now when you import your winter leagues template, the teams won't have any players, and the template isn't importing any fictional free agents as well. Now open up your main game, and import the Winter League template.

3.) Select the applicable winter leagues in Game Setup, and make sure to select "Set all teams to NOT allow AI roster changes." Otherwise the WL teams will sign players during the regular season, something you do not want.

4.) Now set a reminder (I usually set mine for August/Sept 1st) for yourself to allow AI roster changes for the Winter Leagues beginning August or September 1st.

5.) Play/sim until you are ready for the winter league AI to start signing players. When they are, make sure to select (for each applicable winter league) "Set all computer teams to allow AI roster changes."

6.) My seasons always wrap up around September or October. This is when I make sure that the winter league teams are actually signing players (sometimes they don't).

7.) If you are running a team, what I like to do is shuffle between my manager persona and the commish...I make sure to shortlist all of my players that I want playing winter league ball (make sure to shortlist them as the manager AND also as the commish.) Then I manually assign whatever players to whichever winter league team. If you go on vacation for a little bit, and leave it on the "Player Shortlist" screen, you can very quickly and easily check the progress of your players.

8.) Once the winter league season and play-offs are over, I assume the role of each winter league GM individually (through commish mode), mass select ALL players of the organization and release. I do this for all winter league teams until there are no longer any players in the league. Obviously your shortlisted players can then be returned to your organization.

9.) Now, make sure to go back into Game Setup, and again select ""Set all teams to NOT allow AI roster changes." Voila! Do the same process over again...tweak it, change it. I've made affiliated winter leagues also using this method, usually by picking the last 6 place teams and putting them into a collective winter league.

It must be noted that even after all of these steps, some winter league teams still may not sign enough players, which is why I recommend not only having enough players (at least 1k-2k free agents) but also making the winter league financials higher then your other "independent leagues." When augmented with higher financials, the winter leagues seem to sign more then enough players.

I was able to finally emulate a realistic winter league model with my latest OOTP 12 test universe. This universe is comprised of my World of Fantastical Baseball 12, which includes the 2011 MLB in one league, and the 2010 ***,KBO, and CPBL in the other league. I built off of OOTP 12's latest MLB QS, vastly cleaned up my World of Baseball 11 and imported the ***, KBO,CPBL, Atlantic League, American Association, and Mexican League rosters through a template. All of these leagues had inaugural drafts.

I also eliminated the MLB's Rookie and Short-A minor leagues.

About two years into the sim, I set up my "Confederation of Latin American Winter Leagues" which consists of the four Latin American winter leagues that participate in the Caribbean Series. I established slightly distorted financials, and even instituted a very small draft (3 rounds/5 generated) to emulate realistic youth players. I also established foreigner restrictions, allowing only 8 total foreigners not from the team country. After two full sim seasons, the Latin American winter leagues signed their own country specific players (realistic ones as well). I'm currently in the process of monitoring some of my own players in the winter leagues. Of course the biggest risk of playing in the winter is getting hurt, something I'm always scared of, but this only adds more immersion and strategy in my opinion.

In the future, I plan on releasing (the BETA very soon) a saved game .lg folder of my "World of Fantastical Baseball 12." The end result is a modestly realistic independent league structure, consisting almost entirely of real raw MLB prospects comprising the independent leagues.

Eventually, maybe I will write my work-around for the independent leagues, but that is much more complicated then winter leagues, and will become obsolete with the release of my universe.

Please share your unique or innovative OOTP work-arounds, tricks, etc!

[Klew1986]

Have you seen struggling players get better by participating in the winter leagues?

[Dr. P.R. Park III]

I really can't say, but I doubt it (ratings wise). I really just like to evaluate the stats and performance of some of my favorite players, adds more storylines...

[Nutlaw]

Good stuff, man! Hopefully real winter leagues make it into OOTP some day, as well.

[GMLoophole]

I just got into the idea of adding winter leagues, but didn't think of approaching them as you have. I thought a "real" winter league operation was possible, but that's pretty close.

FWIW, I started a WBC-type winter league and unretired some old players and scattered them in that league. I read a post here last year from someone who said he watched players move back and forth between leagues for a few years, and I'm curious to see how that works out. It sounded interesting, a different experience from yours.

[ashantewarrier]

Excellent stuff Doc! I too created a Winter League template and was in the process of setting it up. Your notes will definitely give me some points that I may use.

[opparaics]

Great post.

Is there an easy way to remove the scouting and personnel for each team before importing them?