Great New Idea For Leagues!

[sixfour210]

I've been trying to come up with a way to incorporate a separate college/rookie league in ootp5 so you get a chance to look at players perform before you draft them.

After looking all around the board for ideas, I've put a lot of them together and here's what I came up with:

A Caribbean League that serves as an overseas Developmental League for young prospects. GMs would be able to scout this league for young talent based on statistics. They would only be allowed to chose from a team's single-A "Developmental Team" to try and sign players. The real good this about this idea is that players in the actual Caribbean League only play for 6 years (until they become free agents), so the really good players would be drafted directly onto the affiliated Caribbean team. Occasionally, you will find a great latin player on the D-Team though.

NOTE: You can force everyone to become a free agent with computer controlled teams by setting the salary cap and max cash to $1. Then after the free agent period, delete all of the free agents.

This way, you would not have to draft players from this league (since ootp doesn't allow that). You could independently sign players (maybe 1 signing per team per year) like they do in MLB based on scouting.

To make this idea even more realistic, you could change all of the naming files to American names when conducting the normal draft, and change them to all to latin names when conducting the draft for the Caribbean league.

Also, if your normal draft is 5 rounds, you could change it to 3 rounds and have GMs "sign" 2 players per year from the developmental teams in the Caribbean League.

I know some leagues already have independent leagues like a Japanese league or a college league but that I think that can crowd the talent pool especially if the player is already developed. With this idea, all of the players signed will only be ready for single-A ball, yet their talent ratings are still pretty good (a good # of 4.0 star guys and maybe one 4.5 star guy every year).

I think this is a great idea (obviously) and would love to see what all of you guys have to think. Let me know if you have any questions, too.

[mavericktango]

Sounds very good to me ! Now all we need is someone to create it ?

[sixfour210]

Originally posted by mavericktango
Sounds very good to me ! Now all we need is someone to create it ?

This is how I created it.

1. Start about 20 years before you plan on using the league (if you want it to start in 2003, start around 1983). This is because it will take about 15-20 years to get rid of all of the initially drafted guys and even out the rosters.

2. Set it up with 2 leagues each with an 8-team division and a 6-team divison. I used the 28 teams from the winter Caribbean Series (Mexico, Venezuela, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico)

3. Conduct the initial draft and afterwards, change the max cash and salary cap to $1. This will force teams to dump players when they become free agents and during the signing period, they will not be able to sign anyone.

4. Set the amateur draft number to 5 and off you go!

Like I said earlier, you can change the name file so that only latin names are generated to make it more realistic. You can also change the league totals around to give the league a lower batting average, walks and HRs.