19th Century Improvement Thread

[guamyank]

This is a thread for things we'd like to see improved on 19th century play, and also hopefully a repository of information that the devs could use to make it easier for them. I am by no means an expert, and 99.999 percent of the work towards making 19th century play better has been done by others...not me.

However, if we combine the group knowledge in 1 place, in an organized manner, with priorities listed, I can't see how that wouldn't only help the cause. Most of this stuff has already been covered by Baseballman and others...again...I'm just looking to get it all organized and prioritized in 1 location.
So please share your thoughts here, and I'll try and create an organized summary list right here in this first post. I'll start by researching what others like baseballman have already requested and will update the summary as people post information. Thanks in advance for any contributions. Why not make the game run smooth from 1871 to 2018, instead of 1901 - 2018? (as smooth as possible anyway) There have been a ton of improvements to 19th Century play, but there's still a little left to be done.



Teams
1. General - Getting the right teams in each year is an obvious first step. What isn't so obvious is how to link the teams together year by year. I am personally a proponent of having each franchise appear and disappear just as it was in real life. I think you have to start with that as a base...and possibly give an alternative setup where the similar franchises are more linked together. Example teams would be the Washington Nationals and the Cincinnati Reds, a couple of the teams that went in and out of existence under different franchises. When a team folds, the players should turn into free agents, or else go to the team they went to historically.

2. The Union Association - 1884 was a very unique year in baseball, with essentially 3 major leagues. Let's figure out the best way to implement in OOTP. My solution was to have 2 sub-leagues, 1 with the NL and another with 2 divisions, 1 being the AA and the other being the UA. A better solution would be the ability to create 3 sub-leagues, which is currently not possible.

3. Teams that Fold or Join Mid-Season - This would need to be accounted for. A specific problem here is, what if a team goes 9-0 and then folds? Here is the Le Grande Orange solution, one which I like very much:

"The method by which the standings of teams within a league are ordered should have three options: (1) by winning percentage; (2) by games behind; and (3) by number of wins."

Players
1. Rookies and Retirement - Obviously assigning players to their correct teams each year, having rookies import correctly, and having players retire on schedule is important. My experience with this to date has been very hit and miss, though it is quite possible that it is user error.

2. Transactions- I'm so used to making every transaction myself during the regular season, that I'm not even sure how it works from 1901 and on when you set it to automatic. Do players get traded or released correctly mid-season? If so, I'd like to see the same thing done automatically for the 19th century. Baseballman has put a lot of effort into his Transactions excel file, it would be a good starting point with his permission.

3. Pitchers - Most, if not all of the pitchers should be starting pitchers. In addition, there should be more options for emergency starting pitchers.

4. Injuries - This may be a bit overboard, but it would be nice if you could have actual injuries as they occurred in real life as an option, at least the ones we know about. I'll leave it at that.

Schedules
1. The community has done an excellent job of generating practically all of the 19th century schedules. I think it's just a matter of getting them into the default game. We should compile a list of schedules that work and don't work in the vanilla OOTP19. And potential replacement files...which I know have already been created and shared by others. Baseballman has the schedules and is reviewing them for accuracy. Spritze has agreed to submit them to the OOTP development team. Summary: Use tbe real as played schedules, also include as scheduled schedules.

2. Playoffs - In 1887 the World Series was 15 games. In 1888 10 games were played. These are the only 2 World Series that you cannot currently replicate in OOTP. The maximum number right now is 9 games. Are we going to die without an 11 or 15 game option? Probably not...in fact, personally I think anything over 9 games is absurd. But I'm just the messenger. 10 games in 88, 15 games in 87.

Front Office
1. Manager -
Allow for player/managers to be used.
Include real managers in the game.
Where possible, use real abilities for managers. When not possible they could start at a default value and improve maybe by a combination of experience and real life record.

2. Owner - Include real life owners.

Graphics
1. Facegen - Player facegens are another thing that can be improved for the 19th century. Granted, this seems to be more of a community task than a dev task, but we can still come up with a list of 19th century players that need their facegens improved.

2. Logos The community has created an incredible selection of team logos. Getting the ones most people deem as the "best option" into vanilla OOTP might be a challenge, I'm not sure. At any rate, though the logo options are really, really good, there may be a few teams that could use a bit more work. Let's identify those teams. Let's also either see if logos, and other graphics for that matter can be put into vanilla OOTP. If not, let's at least set up weblinks for everything people need in one place.

3. Uniforms/Ballcaps This is pretty much the same as Logos, although I would say we're in even greater shape here. There are some really nice historical uniforms/ballcaps that have been made.



(Work in Progress - Prioritization to be created once list is somewhat complete)

[Spritze]

here are a few clarifications about TEAMS-GENERAL and why the default setup is the way it is in ootp19. absolutely no new 19th century programming was done by ootp developments although they definitely helped where they could.

1) previous to 19 zero real team names were used other than by happy accident. with19 all but 2 real teams appear in their correct seasons although some teams stick around for seasons where they did not exist irl.

2) Using real team names meant that players would appear as rookies on the correct roster, a draft was no longer a requirement but an option.

3) When the current day al and nl went to 15 teams per league it allowed the even only number of teams per league restriction to be removed from the game which allowed odd numbers of teams to work in the 19th century.

4) the must have two leagues restriction is still in place however. this is worked around by using inter-league scheduling to stitch the al and nl together by having each team in either league play the same number of games against each team irregardless of league.

5) Teams do not fold because all their players would be forever lost as the game does not release the players by default. Instead teams move to other cities keeping the players from the previous city.

6) franchises do not fold as during testing casual players reacted negatively to the "chaos" that resulted.

[guamyank]

"4) the must have two leagues restriction is still in place however. this is worked around by using inter-league scheduling to stitch the al and nl together by having each team in either league play the same number of games against each team irregardless of league."

Hey thank you Spritze for the info. For now Id just like to say that there's an easy workaround for item #4. All you do is import 1 subleague schedule at a time, changing the number of games played in options before you import the second one. That way both leagues can have different schedule lengths.
Thanks again for the valuable insight.

[guamyank]

"5) Teams do not fold because all their players would be forever lost as the game does not release the players by default. Instead teams move to other cities keeping the players from the previous city.

6) franchises do not fold as during testing casual players reacted negatively to the "chaos" that resulted. "


#5- Well, when I remove a team manually, all of the players on that team turn into free agents.

#6- I could understand why people wouldn't be crazy about this from 1901 on, but the very definition of the original National League, American Association, and the 1 year of the Union Association was chaos from 1871 up to the turn of the century. The early years were chaotic, which for me is part of the fun. But hey everybody has there own preferences...as I'm sure you are only too well aware. It'd be cool if there was an option to choose...

[BaseballMan]

TEAMS
1. I agree with following the franchise timeline according to real life. Just remember that in some years cities had more than one team. I used retrosheet and linked teams that had the same players. For example when there were 2 Washington teams and only 1 survived.

2. Im not sure The UA and PL are worth it. I found the that with the UA you are basically watching how many games the Maroons will win by. While its true they were not in the same league as teams from the NL and AA the game can only see the stats and will come to the conclusion that they are as good as the 1976 Reds. If you do decide to play it I would set it as a separate league.

3. We need to accept that either a team will win with less wins or a less winning pctg. The problem isn’t with the teams that played 9 games as they usually folded cause they weren’t that good but it’s a team like the Troy Haymakers that could play 30 games and have a high winning pctg. Maybe an option to set min amount of games to go with highest winning pctg.

Players

1. Well we know the real players can import to the correct team as rookies when we match the team and franchise id to a teams csv file with the real teams. I think the database will need to be changed from setting up fictional historical teams to the actual real teams. I don’t think this would mess up the historical players as I have found the players and teams to import correctly.
To me this seems like it would be an easy fix as all I do is just is match the ids.
I realize the game has made great strides in this as the real teams and players do appear but i think we can improve upon having a team like Mansfield tied to the Cubs.

2. Transactions are very important and a key to getting 19th century leagues to work.
I think transactions need to be kept simple for now. We need to keep in mind the team
Schedule. You don’t want players signed to teams after the team has folded or releasing a player and leaving a team with less than active players. For the most part I think my transaction file has helped to have players follow their actual career and eliminate not enough players on roster error.
Still it’s a work in progress. So I not only don’t have a problem with anyone using it but would welcome it. Another eye might find a player transaction is better on another date due to that player’s position. Once we can finalize a transaction file then it needs to replace the data in the historical transaction for 1871-1900. If the players import to the correct teams then a correct historical transaction file should make it the same as running a modern league with historical transactions.

One other thing, I think we need to keep injuries low. Back then players played many positions but when teams had 1 starting pitcher an injury could leave a guy that pitched 1 game in real life winning or losing 30 games. We can have a rotation setting but this would probably be something the user will have to monitor. However if the game can take care of players and teams importing correctly and transactions happening automatically then monitoring rotations shouldn’t be much of a problem.

I would like to see Owners and Historical Managers imported. Seems like historical managers should already be in the game for modern leagues as they would follow the teams. I don’t think managers need to be rated when following the actual historical timeline. I have found that managers like John McGraw and Casey Stengel are going to win a lot of games because well the records of their historical teams were good.

I think this is a good start. I remember when you would rarely see a 19th century league and now i see more 19th century replays. This is good as it leads to improving it.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by BaseballMan

3. We need to accept that either a team will win with less wins or a less winning pctg. The problem isn’t with the teams that played 9 games as they usually folded cause they weren’t that good but it’s a team like the Troy Haymakers that could play 30 games and have a high winning pctg. Maybe an option to set min amount of games to go with highest winning pctg.

Accepting it is not an improvement. The method by which the standings of teams within a league are ordered should have three options: (1) by winning percentage; (2) by games behind; and (3) by number of wins. Each of these methods is different. All three of these methods have been used in baseball.

(Technically, there should be a fourth: by points. Several leagues have used a system whereby the season was split, and the clubs in each half awarded points based on their final standing for that half. The clubs with the best point totals overall were the playoff qualifiers.)

[BaseballMan]

Originally Posted by Le Grande Orange

Accepting it is not an improvement. The method by which the standings of teams within a league are ordered should have three options: (1) by winning percentage; (2) by games behind; and (3) by number of wins. Each of these methods is different. All three of these methods have been used in baseball.

(Technically, there should be a fourth: by points. Several leagues have used a system whereby the season was split, and the clubs in each half awarded points based on their final standing for that half. The clubs with the best point totals overall were the playoff qualifiers.)

Yes but with the chaotic schedules of early baseball there will be a time in which a team with more wins will win over a team with a better win pctg or vice versa. I just dont wanna see a team like the Baltimore Marylands going 6-0 and winning it all.

[Spritze]

Originally Posted by guamyank

#5- Well, when I remove a team manually, all of the players on that team turn into free agents. ..

100% of the 19th century issues have by hand workarounds. They do not exist as out-of-the-box defaults and cannot unless ootp undergoes programming updates. The number of 19th century players are very few so it is understandable if not many resources are delegated to it. As I mentioned earlier the development team helps where they can. I do not expect a full rewrite of the 19th century until we at least hit triple digits in the number of users, but you never know.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by BaseballMan

Yes but with the chaotic schedules of early baseball there will be a time in which a team with more wins will win over a team with a better win pctg or vice versa. I just dont wanna see a team like the Baltimore Marylands going 6-0 and winning it all.

I think you have that backwards. If ordering by total number of wins, the Marylands wouldn't be in first place as a mere six wins would not nearly be enough. By winning percentage, of course, being 1.000, it would.

Originally Posted by Spritze

100% of the 19th century issues have by hand workarounds. They do not exist as out-of-the-box defaults and cannot unless ootp undergoes programming updates. The number of 19th century players are very few so it is understandable if not many resources are delegated to it. As I mentioned earlier the development team helps where they can. I do not expect a full rewrite of the 19th century until we at least hit triple digits in the number of users, but you never know.

True enough, but I would point out that some of the fixes for 19th century play offer interesting options for fictional league users, and for historical users who want to try something different in the post-1900 years.

[guamyank]

" I do not expect a full rewrite of the 19th century until we at least hit triple digits in the number of users, but you never know."

I would counter with, if you rewrite it so it is easier, then you will have more users.
Ya I get it, more people are interested in modern times...so we're probably both right to one degree or another.

[joefromchicago]

Thanks for doing this, guamyank. You make a lot of excellent points. I'll just offer a few comments:

Originally Posted by guamyank

Teams
1. General - Getting the right teams in each year is an obvious first step. What isn't so obvious is how to link the teams together year by year. I am personally a proponent of having each franchise appear and disappear just as it was in real life. I think you have to start with that as a base...and possibly give an alternative setup where the similar franchises are more linked together. Example teams would be the Washington Nationals and the Chicago White Stockings, a couple of the teams that went in and out of existence under different franchises.

Except for one case that I'm aware of (the Chicago-Pittsburgh franchise in the UA), moving a franchise and its roster of players from one city to another just wasn't done in the 19th century. The most valuable assets that a soon-to-be-defunct club had were its player contracts, so those were usually sold off to the highest bidders. Some will argue that the Troy Trojans moved to New York in 1883, but the evidence I've seen indicates that the New York management simply purchased the contracts of Troy's best players and let all the rest go.

I agree, then, with your suggestion that a team that goes out of existence should release all of its players as free agents. I'll note, however, that the White Stockings never went out of existence. They changed their name a few times, but the Chicago NL franchise is the only one that has had a continuous existence in the same city since the league's inaugural season in 1876.

Originally Posted by guamyank

2. The Union Association - 1884 was a very unique year in baseball, with essentially 3 major leagues. Let's figure out the best way to implement in OOTP. My solution was to have 2 sub-leagues, 1 with the NL and another with 2 divisions, 1 being the AA and the other being the UA. A better solution would be to be able to create 3 sub-divisions. I don't believe this is currently possible...correct me if I'm wrong.

It's certainly possible to have a sub-league with three divisions. The problem is that it will screw up your league's history. A much better solution would be rewiring OOTP so that it can handle more than two sub-leagues. The game offers associations as a sort of a work-around, but those don't seem to work very well for this kind of situation either.

Originally Posted by guamyank

3. Teams that Fold or Join Mid-Season - This would need to be accounted for. A specific problem here is, what if a team goes 9-0 and then folds? You should have the ability to set it up so that the team with the highest number of wins will win the pennant...or a better option if anyone can think of it.

Here, the ahistorical solution might be the better one: just add the record of the defunct franchise to that of its replacement.

And that's something that's important to keep in mind. A lot of gamers will look at, for instance, the UA and see that it had 12 franchises. But it never had more than 8 operating at any single time. The UA, in other words, was an 8-team league that had a bunch of teams drop out and come in. Likewise, I've seen requests for a 9-team schedule for the 1890 AA, but the AA didn't have a 9-team schedule. It had 9 teams, but only because one club dropped out and was replaced by another. The AA itself was an 8-team league that year, so it only ever had an 8-team schedule.

Originally Posted by guamyank

1. The community has done an excellent job of generating practically all of the 19th century schedules. I think it's just a matter of getting them into the default game. We should compile a list of schedules that work and don't work in the vanilla OOTP19. And potential replacement files...which I know have already been created and shared by others.

The way OOTP handles 19th-century schedules is, frankly, baffling. Ironically, accurate schedules were included with the game up to around version 14, when they were replaced with completely fictional schedules. I still have those old ones in case anyone is interested.

Originally Posted by guamyank

1. Manager - It's understandably difficult to know managers tendencies and get them right in the game, especially way back in the 19th century. What would be more reasonable, particularly as a starting point, would be for the game to include real life managers' name, date of birth, Lehman ID, etc..., perhaps with a set of mid range abilities. At some point maybe the actual abilities could be improved on if enough knowledge exists.

Many managers in the 19th century were players as well. Until OOTP gets a grasp on player-managers and prevents them from leading separate lives, this will be a problem.

Originally Posted by guamyank

2. Logos The community has created an incredible selection of team logos. Getting the ones most people deem as the "best option" into vanilla OOTP might be a challenge, I'm not sure. At any rate, though the logo options are really, really good, there may be a few teams that could use a bit more work. Let's identify those teams. Let's also either see if logos, and other graphics for that matter can be put into vanilla OOTP. If not, let's at least set up weblinks for everything people need in one place.

Believe it or not, teams in the 19th century didn't really have logos. That's largely because merchandising wasn't a big thing back then, and also because team names were usually unofficial. In most cases, the best you can do is take the first letter from the city name as it appeared on the player uniforms and use that as a logo.

[guamyank]

Hey I really appreciate your thoughtful responses, thank you very much!

Originally Posted by joefromchicago

Thanks for doing this, guamyank. You make a lot of excellent points. I'll just offer a few comments:


Except for one case that I'm aware of (the Chicago-Pittsburgh franchise in the UA), moving a franchise and its roster of players from one city to another just wasn't done in the 19th century. The most valuable assets that a soon-to-be-defunct club had were its player contracts, so those were usually sold off to the highest bidders. Some will argue that the Troy Trojans moved to New York in 1883, but the evidence I've seen indicates that the New York management simply purchased the contracts of Troy's best players and let all the rest go.

I agree, then, with your suggestion that a team that goes out of existence should release all of its players as free agents. I'll note, however, that the White Stockings never went out of existence. They changed their name a few times, but the Chicago NL franchise is the only one that has had a continuous existence in the same city since the league's inaugural season in 1876.

Well it's semantics but I was referring to Chicago before the NL, in the NA after the great Chicago fire. But I should have used a better example as there are tons of them.

Originally Posted by joefromchicago

It's certainly possible to have a sub-league with three divisions. The problem is that it will screw up your league's history. A much better solution would be rewiring OOTP so that it can handle more than two sub-leagues. The game offers associations as a sort of a work-around, but those don't seem to work very well for this kind of situation either.

-I actually meant to say sub-league here...I used the wrong term. What you suggested is exactly what I'd like too!

Originally Posted by joefromchicago

Here, the ahistorical solution might be the better one: just add the record of the defunct franchise to that of its replacement.

And that's something that's important to keep in mind. A lot of gamers will look at, for instance, the UA and see that it had 12 franchises. But it never had more than 8 operating at any single time. The UA, in other words, was an 8-team league that had a bunch of teams drop out and come in. Likewise, I've seen requests for a 9-team schedule for the 1890 AA, but the AA didn't have a 9-team schedule. It had 9 teams, but only because one club dropped out and was replaced by another. The AA itself was an 8-team league that year, so it only ever had an 8-team schedule.

Well, not crazy about this idea. What I'm currently doing is, I've added all the teams for the UA at once. They will simply play their games as played. I'm not sure if I'll be able to import a schedule for that, but if not I'll just do the schedule manually.

What I really like is Le Grande Orange's proposal: "The method by which the standings of teams within a league are ordered should have three options: (1) by winning percentage; (2) by games behind; and (3) by number of wins."

Originally Posted by joefromchicago

Many managers in the 19th century were players as well. Until OOTP gets a grasp on player-managers and prevents them from leading separate lives, this will be a problem.

That is clearly the ideal solution...allow player/managers! But it's only part of the solution. They still need to link correct managers to the correct teams in a historical replay.

Originally Posted by joefromchicago

Believe it or not, teams in the 19th century didn't really have logos. That's largely because merchandising wasn't a big thing back then, and also because team names were usually unofficial. In most cases, the best you can do is take the first letter from the city name as it appeared on the player uniforms and use that as a logo.

The logo set I use...I don't remember who created it...but it pretty much does exactly that...takes the first letter from the city name. It might be cool to identify which of those are real and which are just artistic fiction...some of them at least I believe are based somewhat on reality.

Anyway, I will be modifying my original post to try and reflect what people have said so far...thanks for everyone's comments.

[guamyank]

Originally Posted by BaseballMan

TEAMS

2. Im not sure The UA and PL are worth it. I found the that with the UA you are basically watching how many games the Maroons will win by. While its true they were not in the same league as teams from the NL and AA the game can only see the stats and will come to the conclusion that they are as good as the 1976 Reds. If you do decide to play it I would set it as a separate league.



One other thing, I think we need to keep injuries low. Back then players played many positions but when teams had 1 starting pitcher an injury could leave a guy that pitched 1 game in real life winning or losing 30 games. We can have a rotation setting but this would probably be something the user will have to monitor. However if the game can take care of players and teams importing correctly and transactions happening automatically then monitoring rotations shouldn’t be much of a problem.

Baseballman, apologies for the late reply to your post, thank you for contributing. I wanted to reply to a couple of your paragraphs.

-As for the Union Association, what I like about it is that it fills a gap in many players' careers, where if you don't have the UA they simply won't play in 1884. For some people it could be the difference between making the Hall of Fame or not. That's 1 reason anyway.

-As for injuries...I've had injuries off from 1871 to 1883 and so far I haven't missed them 1 bit. For the rare occasion where I know of an injury, such as Cap Anson's early departure from Chicago that one year, I've simply added the injury myself. So I'd say having random low injuries is as far I would go...if even that. However, what I'd also like to see is an OOTP with historical injuries...injuries that happen automatically according to history. You could turn it on or off...like some of the other historical settings. I know there's the setting for players that missed a season IRL...but this is different. Anyway, it isn't critical but it'd be pretty cool.

[BaseballMan]

Originally Posted by guamyank

Baseballman, apologies for the late reply to your post, thank you for contributing. I wanted to reply to a couple of your paragraphs.

-As for the Union Association, what I like about it is that it fills a gap in many players' careers, where if you don't have the UA they simply won't play in 1884. For some people it could be the difference between making the Hall of Fame or not. That's 1 reason anyway.

-As for injuries...I've had injuries off from 1871 to 1883 and so far I haven't missed them 1 bit. For the rare occasion where I know of an injury, such as Cap Anson's early departure from Chicago that one year, I've simply added the injury myself. So I'd say having random low injuries is as far I would go...if even that. However, what I'd also like to see is an OOTP with historical injuries...injuries that happen automatically according to history. You could turn it on or off...like some of the other historical settings. I know there's the setting for players that missed a season IRL...but this is different. Anyway, it isn't critical but it'd be pretty cool.

I'm not sure many if any player would have not made it to the hof because of a year in the UA.
It seems a bit like XFL stats the same as the NFL.
After reading Bill James opinion and others I'm leaning towards it being more like a minor league.
I mean how many UA players went on to long successful careers in the other leagues.

[swampdragon]

Random thoughts:

1. I've always thought the Union Association was too much trouble for a league which was probably no stronger than half a dozen others that year. The Players League is another matter, but I won't lose any sleep if it's treated the same as the 1914-15 Federal League.

2. We really need the proper schedules available for download. Not having to enter the 1880s by hand would certainly make 19th century more playable.

3. Unless franchises can be added and deleted, out of the box 19th century will never be playable. Then it just becomes a matter of how many workarounds the player is willing to do.

[Spritze]

The real 19th century schedules are included in the game, both as played and regular. Do they not work? To use them you would need to choose and then import them into your league.

[scott1964]

I have had trouble loading some 1890's schedules, error of structure is incorrect.

[Spritze]

Yes, to use those schedules you must alter the default structure to match. the correct team id's are now used in game but the league construction is different due to the default two league requirement. Seems like the ability to have just one might solve a few things?

[joefromchicago]

Originally Posted by Spritze

The real 19th century schedules are included in the game, both as played and regular. Do they not work? To use them you would need to choose and then import them into your league.

Well, that's not entirely true. Some of the regular schedules (as opposed to the as-played schedules) appear to be accurate, but only for the NL. The game does not include any AA schedules at all, so when you open up, e.g., the major league schedule files for 1885 (both regular and as-played), they say that there were only 8 teams in the majors that year. That's wrong - there were 16. And that's not even addressing the regular schedules from 1871 to 1882, which, as far as I can tell, are completely fictitious.

So yes, you can say that they do not work.

[joefromchicago]

I'll add my own vote here for revamping the way OOTP handles pitchers in the pre-reliever era.