Full MLB Feeder System (College, Juco & High School)

[ashburnandyawkey]

Cradle to Grave American Baseball System Template

This is something I've been trying to do in OOTP for years. But this template will evolve over time to let simmers follow players from freshman year of high school, through travel ball, into Juco & college, summer college ball, and up through the minors to Major League Baseball.

When the template is done, you should theoretically be able to simulate every organized, competitive game of baseball a player plays after the age of 13.

May god have mercy on your systems.

Version 0.1
OOTP 23 default MLB system.

College Baseball:
NCAA D1
NCAA D2
NCAA D3
NAIA

Canadian college team, British Columbia ThunderBirds and Virgin Islands Buccaneers included in the NAIA

Juco Baseball:
NJCAA D1
NJCAA D2
NJCAA D3
CCCAA
NWC

High School Baseball:
8 regions, based on American Legion baseball regions
10 teams per state
20 teams for Arizona, California & Texas
10 teams for Washington, D.C.
10 prep school teams

Canadian teams from British Columbia (supplement the Alaska division)
Canadian teams from Saskatchewan, Manitoba & Ontario (an additional division in the north with Minnesota, Wisconsin, etc)

High school teams were picked by taking the top 10(or 20) schools based on the most recent available state rankings on maxpreps.com

League Reputations:
Colleges
NCAA D1 - 10(max)
NCAA D2 - 9
NCAA D3 - 8
NAIA - 8

Juco
NJCAA D1 - 7
NJCAA D2 - 6
NJCAA D3 - 5
CCCAA - 5
NWC - 5

High Schools
High school regions are ranked by 2's; 10, 8, 6, 4, based on the general strength of the region. IE: Western with California, Arizona & Texas is 10. Northern with Manitoba and Minnesota is 4.

Roster Sizes:
All college & Jucos have a 30-player roster + 15 reserve. Closest to NCAA roster rules as I could get.

High schools have a 22-player roster + 22 reserve ("JV"). Again, closest I could get to "real world" equivalents.


Player creation is turned off for all college & juco leagues.
Roster rules in high school limit foreign players to 5, based on team nationality (simulates foreign exchange and immigration).

Schedule Lengths & Start Dates:
Colleges start in early February and play a max of 60 games
Jucos also start in early February and play a max of 55 games

High Schools start between late February and early May, based on region's general weather (and information found on HS baseball websites), and play 40 games.

All-star Games are turned off for all college, juco & high school leagues.

Post-season is turned off for all high school leagues.

Version 0.2
Added Arizona Fall League
Edited NCAA Division 1 to audit tames & nicknames.
Added stadium names for NCAA D1 teams
Added Team Region & Draft Region for all NCAA D1 teams

Version 0.3
Deleted summer college leagues (did not cooperate with college feeder leagues)
Audited all 8 high school regions.
Team nicknames added
Added Team Region & Draft Region for all high school teams
For Prep School division, all teams set to "All of USA & Canada" for region & draft region

Version 0.4
NCAA D2, D3 and NAIA teams audited
Accurate team regions set
Accurate team cities set

Persisting issues:
Load time remains a nightmare (dependent upon, of course, your system).
Generated players in high school teams still ignore team & team draft region upon creation.
Some AIO logo files don't automatically pair to team (teams with special characters, or schools where AIO & I disagree on which version of the school's name to use)

Download the v.0.1 file:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i2H...ew?usp=sharing

Download the v.0.2 file:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AKh...ew?usp=sharing

Download the v.0.3 file:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YrF...ew?usp=sharing

Download the v.0.4 file:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g4D...ew?usp=sharing

[itsmb8]

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU(!!!!!!) for this! This will 100% be the base of my save going forward (and thankfully I'm building a 3080ti/5900x PC that can handle this lol). I'll try to help any way I can when I'm not working on my MLB/MiLB project.

Also, have you tested the PCMs for these leagues, and if so, how do they look in regards to MLB Draft pool talent levels?

[ashburnandyawkey]

I have not tested the league at all. It's a 100% WIP. I haven't tuned any sliders to manipulate the talent pool. The only thing I did was dial back the college & HS pitching rotations to 3 starters. I found in the past when I tried this if I ignored the feeder league rotations, I'd get a glut of 5star pitching prospects. I'm also probably going to go in and set all the leagues to select talent based on current ratings rather than potentials. That should shallow out the talent a little bit, as late bloomers won't always get a chance to grow early on.

Right now, I'm working through the colleges to assign regions & cities, as well as edit stadium names.

I'm also auditing team names as I go (already found 2 or 3 errors in D1).

Please share your findings, though. I am 100% more than willing to turn this into an open project. I will post iterations as I go, and people who want to contribute can certainly fork any version.

[ubernoob]

A man after my own heart.

[PHI34Halladay]

Awesome package!! Absolutely love this project.

I just got one question: I started a new game, imported the template so I have hundrets of college an juco teams loaded.
However the guys in the mlb draft pool are not the guys that are on the college rosters..
How can I change that?

[ashburnandyawkey]

Originally Posted by PHI34Halladay

Awesome package!! Absolutely love this project.

I just got one question: I started a new game, imported the template so I have hundrets of college an juco teams loaded.
However the guys in the mlb draft pool are not the guys that are on the college rosters..
How can I change that?

Two thoughts without having a game loaded.

#1 - double check the MLB settings and make sure that your draft pool is set to "feeder leagues only". (I'm 75% sure it is.)

#2 - it's possible that your year 1 draft pool is generated, because the feeder leagues haven't had a season to seed the pool.

If #1 is good, maybe sim through a season to the 2023 draft pool reveal date and see what you get.

[PHI34Halladay]

Originally Posted by ashburnandyawkey

Two thoughts without having a game loaded.

#1 - double check the MLB settings and make sure that your draft pool is set to "feeder leagues only". (I'm 75% sure it is.)

#2 - it's possible that your year 1 draft pool is generated, because the feeder leagues haven't had a season to seed the pool.

If #1 is good, maybe sim through a season to the 2023 draft pool reveal date and see what you get.

#1 seems most likely be the reason...
Where can I find that option?
I only found "Disable automatic creation of free agents" which does not seem right.

Thanks in advance.

[Sabres2000]

can this be imported into a current save or is this a whole save itself?

[Aceshigh24]

Where to I place this file once downloaded? Also, this is just something i add to an existing game correct?

[ashburnandyawkey]

To set MLB draft pool to feeder leagues only:
1 - Go to MLB LEAGUE SETTINGS
2 - Go to the RULES tab.
3 - in the right hand column, under TRADING RULES you should see AMATEUR DRAFT SETTINGS
4 - At the bottom of that section is a settings "DRAFT FEEDING MODE", options are:
Feeder League + Additional Players
Feeder League Players Only

Under that, you should see a list of all the college and high school leagues in the game.

Select "Feeder Players Only".

Can this be imported?
It is a template, so it can't be imported into an existing game save. But it is not a game save.

To use this template:
From OOTP 23 home screen -
Click "NEW CUSTOM GAME"
From the LEAGUE CREATION WIZARD, go directly to the bottom left and click "ADVANCED MODE" DO NOT go through any league creation wizard settings.

From ADVANCED MODE:
Click ADVANCED (Under "Create" in Create New Game)
Click "Import Template"
From the Load a Game Template, select "full_feeder_system_v1.wtp"

From there you can double check all the settings, or customize to personal taste.

If you want to add any leagues, you can do it from there, just always double check that if you're loading a real world league, you deselect MLB. You don't want to load in 2 MLB systems. There are too many leagues in this as there are. LOL.

Where to save the file:
My OOTP is in my D drive, but go to where your OOTP folder is and you'll go through this folder tree:

OOTP
> data
>world_templates

Save in world_templates

[Aceshigh24]

Appreciate the breakdown

[ashburnandyawkey]

No problem, Ace. When you get some games under your belt, let us know how the template ran for you.

[ashburnandyawkey]

Just thought about this, too.

If you load the template, and decide that it's too many feeder leagues (which is totally fair, it is...), just keep in mind that if you cut too many leagues, you may end up not generating enough draft-worthy talent to maintain all your professional leagues, so you may have to turn the Additional Players & automatically create fictional free agents options back on.

If you're keeping all these leagues, take a look at how many discoveries your teams are generating internationally. I always set mine to "A lot", which is about 40 a year. I also increase the number of random origin discoveries. I do that in hopes that over time some obscure baseball countries will develop into 3 and 4 star level nations to compete with Cuba, Japan, USA, etc at the top of the international competitions.

Just some thoughts.

[Dr. P.R. Park III]

Good job on this, I don't have OOTP 23 but eventually I'll give this a go.

If you want, you can download "World of College Baseball" and pluck all of the images / graphics from that and plug into your universe. It's time consuming but in the end, it's so much prettier.

https://forums.ootpdevelopments.com/...llege+baseball

[ashburnandyawkey]

Originally Posted by Dr. P.R. Park III

Good job on this, I don't have OOTP 23 but eventually I'll give this a go.

If you want, you can download "World of College Baseball" and pluck all of the images / graphics from that and plug into your universe. It's time consuming but in the end, it's so much prettier.

https://forums.ootpdevelopments.com/...llege+baseball

Very much appreciated. I've been working through auditing NCAA D1 & D2 schools, and adding missing logos...which is absolutely a time suck.

[itsmb8]

I will have a PC build done soon that will be where I run my long-term save, so I will start testing as soon as that is done and get sims done.

[ashburnandyawkey]

Originally Posted by itsmb8

I will have a PC build done soon that will be where I run my long-term save, so I will start testing as soon as that is done and get sims done.

I love building computers. I'm looking to upgrade my B550 board to an x570 and now that GPU prices are coming down, I'm hoping to get an affordable upgrade to my R580 (until I can do a complete overhaul).

Anyway, v.0.2 has been uploaded. Notes are in original post, but this was a NCAA D1 & D2 focused build. I'm going to run a couple of seasons with this build, since I haven't tested the template myself yet. And see what happens.

[ashburnandyawkey]

I just simmed a full season with the v0.2 file

Notes:
MLB
- I didn't see any Spring Training standings. Simmed fine, but no games played until opening day.
- There were well over 1,000 games in February and March (college & HS combined), lead to slower-than normal processing times


College
- DO NOT try to sort standings by "team vs team", that was just silly on my part.
- Draft class star ratings do seem to vaguely diminish as you go deeper down the college ladder
- Colleges seemed to be hitters-leagues. No overly dominant sub1.00 ERAs (that I saw), most of the top 10 prospects in each level were fielders.



High School
- Needed to delete foreign player limit rules for regions with American & Canadian teams mixed. Otherwise, teams ran out of eligible players before game 1
- League region has no bearing on player creation home towns.
- Didn't do a deep dive into the high schools. But the undrafted high schoolers have to go to college, since college player creation is off. Fingers crossed.



Summer College Leagues
- Cape Cod & Prospects League simmed with ghost players
- Draft League simmed with no players.

Win/loss records were recorded, but CCBL & PL players are not on anyone's rosters & DL has no players listed in it's history.

Draft Results
- A lot of NJCAA D3 players in the top 10. Mostly NJCAA players in the top 10 (that's how far down I looked)
- The drafted JuCo players that didn't sign did commit to NCAA D1 schools
- Top high school draft pick was at #18 overall.


Summary -
I've run into the summer college issue before w/ OOTP22. I never understood what caused it, didn't know how to fix it.


Never seen a game with a standard start date & MLB schedule not sim Spring Training games.


I'm not sure what caused either of those two issues, or what can be done to resolve them. I am curious if anyone else has seen these issues with their first season on the save.


NJCAA seems to be a little overpowered as far as prospect rankings go. That may settled in as seasons progress. But if by season 10 we're not getting most of the first round at least out of NCAA D1/NJCAA D1 and high school, I may have to nerf the league reputations for D2's & D3's.


NAIA, apparently, had reserve roster limits set, because the Rochester Warriors have 150 student athletes for season 2.

Does this mean every high schooler that doesn't sign a pro contract goes to college?

[kidd_05_u2]

Originally Posted by ashburnandyawkey

- Colleges seemed to be hitters-leagues. No overly dominant sub1.00 ERAs (that I saw), most of the top 10 prospects in each level were fielders.

I may be wrong, but this could be related to the player creation bug that nerfs the stuff ratings of pitchers.

See here: https://forums.ootpdevelopments.com/...d.php?t=337637

Edit: Thank you for building this by the way. I'm looking forward to using the template. Sadly, I don't think I can help much due to zero experience with creating custom games or feeder leagues.

[ashburnandyawkey]

That's good to know, Kidd. I was worried that I over compensated by limiting to 3-man rotations.

I simmed out 2 more years and found this:

Summer college leagues are still borked. I tried with "Draft Eligible + Future Draft Eligible" and "Draft Eligible" settings, neither worked.

I did get spring training game results for MLB in season 2, and I feel like the talent spread was normalizing to be weighted towards NCAA D1, NJCAA D1. Teams are still trigger shy to take a high schooler in the first round (but I'm not complaining about that).

High school players are still being created for each team from all over the place, so player creation, unless I have the settings wrong, does not respect league regionality rules, only national rules. I'm hoping that once I start setting team regions and cities for the high schools (and maybe even tagging the draft region, as well), that will start to limit the footprint of where schools are getting their players from.

I also had to delete the reserve roster limit for all college leagues. On the transition from the 1 week spring training to the regular season, teams were struggling to get down to the limits. Concordia in the NAIA, for example, had 145 student athletes at the end of spring training. 110 of them ended up on the reserve roster (or hopefully getting cut after opening day).

I'm going to see if I can't trouble shoot some of those while I start working on v.0.3. That's going to focus on auditing and editing NCAA D3 & NAIA. Depending on how quickly those go, I'll try to knock out NJCAA D1 in that build as well.

I still have probably a month left on workman's comp (I broke my leg playing kickball, at work, as a middle aged man...you know, like you do). So I'm going to try to get through the heavy lifting of this project before I go back to work.