New League Idea

[spelvin56]

Hi everyone - I am a long time lurker, occasional poster on these boards. I am struck by the devotion this community has to this game, and that makes this board something really worth reading. I've prevailed on the group before for ideas, and I wanted to ask a question again.

Has anyone ever attempted to do an extremely local, extremely small league. I was thinking of putting together a league based on my old neighborhood - 4 to 6 teams, correlating to the streets near where I lived, 12 players on a roster, maybe a game or two a week during the summer. Everyone would play in the same ballpark. I would custom build the neighborhood as a world comprising only a couple of hundred people. I would love to see players be stars as both position players and pitchers. I can envision really cool rivalries developing over time.

The thing I would like to do is have the age range of players do either one of two things - represent childhood from 8 to 16 or something like that, or have it be from 16-65 (I would be thinking of fathers playing alongside teenagers in the neighborhood). How would one tweak the aging in order to do something like this? Also, given the limited population of the world, would enough players be generated to keep up a continual flow of talent?

I am also debating player movement. I don't want financials in this league, but having some kind of free agency could be interesting (kids switching teams each year would the be the storyline) or perhaps trading could be on high to give a sense of kids hopping around from team to team.

So, is there any collective wisdom out there about how a league like this could work within the parameters OOTP offers? Thanks for your help!

[pgjocki]

Try a quick sim test and let us know. Don't worry about logo or uniforms

[Padreman]

I'll let the experts help you with the age and settings but you will have to make sure your stadiums are small. Local park would likely be used for your league so capacity of maybe a 100? No financial

[jpeters1734]

sounds cool. I think you would have to set the aging to very minimal if you want older players.

[goroyals]

You could get something close to what you're shooting for, but maybe not exactly what you described.

I think you're going to have to have at least 15 players, and unless I'm mistaken, you probably won't see players be P and position players at the same time, unless you want to manage every team's lineup.

The age ranges you described are probably also outside the scope of what OOTP can do. It's a game built on the traditional model of player development and regression, you can mess with that curve a little bit, but I would hesitate to think you could get players that a) are going to progress as you want them to (8-12 year olds) or b) are going to keep playing (50+ year olds) on their own.

Keep in mind that I've not tried these things, but it's just a hunch based on editing things for other reasons.

The population and the small world shouldn't be a problem. I think a lot of that information is cosmetic. Player movement is also going to be well in your control, and a few other users have suggested good ways to handle that. You could even re-draft everybody every summer if you wanted to.

Hope that answers a few of your questions. Good luck.

[Bluenoser]

I've run a small 5 team league based on the local provincial senior league here in NS.

Nova Scotia Senior Baseball League

I didn't use extremely young or old players, but if you want guys playing into their 40's then lower the aging speed in league setup. Experiment and adjust accordingly.

I set it as a region so only players from NS are created for the draft class.

Small leagues are a ton of fun imo. It's very easy to get to know all your players quickly.

[Tashtego]

Here's a small ballpark to get you started.

[jpeters1734]

i ran a quick test, even by putting the aging speed to .0001, no player played past 50. several get to around 45. a few get to 50, but none will play past. and they do not regress at all.

[spelvin56]

Firstly, thanks to everyone for their good thoughts (and for the nice small ballpark!)

jpeters1734, I ran some tests this morning as well and found pretty much the same thing. Mine was slightly different - I was seeing a few guys each year in their mid-40s, none much past that, and a whole bunch of guys in their mid to late 30s. I didn't see a player past 50, but mine was not a completely rigorous test. I did find that at a certain point - I think I put mine all the way to .0005 - that it didn't appear to change the age distribution radically.

So, it doesn't look like I can do my league exactly the way I want, but that's ok. This conversation has triggered a whole bunch of ideas for me. When I get home after work I'm going to test out my Little League idea and see if that will work. And I will certainly still try to do a neighborhood league.

I've played the game a whole host of different ways over the years, but I think I could really like a small league. Never done one that way before.

[jpeters1734]

it could still work with a little bit of maintenance. I once had my superstar play into his 60's by un-retiring him using the commish tools

[spelvin56]

I did a bit more fooling around with it - while it doesn't look like I get the game to allow players to play until their 50s or older without my intervention, it looks like on the lower end it would work fine. I created a league of 8-12 year olds and it appears to be working ok. If I understand how this all works, I imagine that by manually tweaking the saber metric player creation modifiers, I could create a league that was less proficient than the lowest option, high school. Is that correct?

I am torn now - I initially thought about creating a small neighborhood league, but now I was thinking about making a series of leagues set in one city, in which a player could simply move through the leagues from little league to high school, then to college, the pros, or into rec leagues around the town. Without setting up feeder leagues, would this league interaction work?

[Garrett67]

I'm curious. Are these 8-12 year olds 6', 180 lbs?

[spelvin56]

Just checked it out and it looks like they are all adult sized players.