Fictional Leagues

[timmcdonald]

What I have done for fictional leagues is take a selection of 3-4 of the Montreal Expos & Toronto Blue Jays teams: both expansion teams - and a selection of their better seasons, and their last - well of course most recent for the Blue Jays. Then I made a team or two of "left-overs" from each franchise that weren't on the pro-teams. I also imported the minor league for each team.

At the time I thought it was a great idea - but I also picked a handful of teams from a past season to round out the league.

Unfortunately I deleted the teams and left them in free-agency - AND I imported a bunch of hall of famers and put those in free-agency. Not thinking the obvious - every team will go and sign those free agents and thusly totally warp all the work I did to have "past Canadian teams".

I played about a month or two and lost interest.

So next time around I chose just the Expo teams and pinned those against a reduced past season. I put a lot of work into this one also and abandoned it.

The most recent league I've basically created a bunch of new players onto an existing team - so still a hint of fictional, but not drastic. I've stuck with this league, starting in 1960 I'm now playing in 1966.

I also just started a league in 1965 with the ability to trade draft picks on, and ability to trade newly drafted players in their first year. Otherwise, everything else is the same - other than I'm playing in GM mode only. I'm much more focused on the trading / drafting / rule 5 end of this. Less so on arbitration / free-agency part that happens in later seasons.

I played one season in the 80s and was very overwhelmed with the effort for arbitration.

[Calvert98]

Originally Posted by Sizeman21

When I think of fictional, I think literally "of fiction" so my mind turns to made up worlds, creative maps of far off lands and crazy people of worlds not of Earth.

That being said, check out some great writers on the forums, namely Eugene Church for his Islandia series, jaa34 for his Terra Baseball League, Clovidequano Dovatha's Slaabovian Baseball Confederation, and Dream Teams' Metro Leagues. All have created immersive fictional baseball that seems so close to what you watch on tv now.

Search the dynasty forums for more fun fictional leagues people have made over the years. I have over 200 pages bookmarked for when I need some inspiration in creating my own stories and leagues.

Hope this helped. Let me know if you would like some tips or ideas, happy to help.

Thanks Sizeman. Good note.

I have been checking out some reports on the forum since Blue mentioned something, and it seems like a good place for ideas.

Also - I recognize some of those names you noted in your post, like Eugene from around the OOTP community and will certainly check them out: having an immersive baseball universe is high on the priority list for any fictional league I create.

-Cal

[oldfatbaldguy]

Originally Posted by ryanivr

2. I played a lot of Strat-O-Matic growing up and the randomness of dice always appealed to me. I incorporated it into OOTP around player acquisition. In the offseason, I use random.org to roll a number between 2 and 8 each Monday. If that number is a 5, I can make an offer to a player rated 50 or below. If it's a 7, I can offer a player rated 70 or below. I can make one offer per week based on that roll. This makes me lose free agent targets much more often that I would normally and feels more realistic in general.

3. Last one - right when the offseason begins, I roll twice between 1-4. First number is how many 50+ rated free agents I can sign that offseason. Second number is how many trades I can make that season.

I like the idea of restricting moves, especially in free agency. One of the things I've noticed over several fictional save games is that you can stumble into a huge advantage by not spending your free agency budget too soon. AI teams tend to spend it all quickly. In the spring the star free agents who set their asking price too high in the fall become available for much less. Often, my team is the only team that can afford them, even at a discount.

I need to think about the trade restriction. I set trading on "very hard" and have house rules on top of that. One is that when I float a player and then don't trade him immediately, I keep a record of what teams made an offer in response to the float. I can only add one of my players to a trade offer if the other team has expressed an interest in him, either in response to an earlier float or on a list they've submitted in a NO WAY message pertaining to that specific trade.