[Charlie Hough]

This may be due to limitations of the minor league database, plus the fact that minor league affiliations didn't start until much later, and OOTP may be unable to deal with all the minor leagues and teams that changed frequently in the early decades of baseball.

However, I created a game beginning in 1916, which is supposedly within the range of OOTP's historical minors feature, but no minor leagues were created. Instead, there is a large number of free agents who didn't play the 1916 season in MLB and played in other leagues instead. But those leagues and teams don't exist in the game. Not surprisingly, MLB teams' extra players are on reserve lists rather than the minors, since there were no affiliates yet.

Is this by design, based on current limitations with the historical minors feature? Does OOTP just import historical minors players as free agents during this early era, but it doesn't actually create minor leagues and teams?

In what year does OOTP start creating minor leagues and teams automatically?

I know this has never been possible in OOTP previously, but if I want to have some semblance of the independent minor leagues during this era, is there a way to create the required minor leagues and teams to match the team IDs in the historical minors database and get OOTP to assign the right players to those clubs automatically?

If you start with created minor leagues, will this potentially conflict with OOTP later adding those historical minor leagues and teams in the future?

I'm just trying to figure out a good and manageable way to handle this, so there isn't a massive pool of free agents with no place to go, but those historical minors players are still in the game with independent minors teams, and they can be signed by MLB clubs.

I suspect that this would take a lot of manual work, and maybe there's no way to get it to happen in OOTP. But if anyone has any clues or tips, they would be appreciated.