Crazy Program Idea

[Comedian2004]

OK, I was sitting here watching the paint dry and came up with a crazy idea. I actually thought about this during the 6.x days, but not sure if this will work or not.

Here it is.

You use the program to first locate the original Lahman database on your hard drive. You then pick a new location for it. Now, once that is done, you will have a pull down menu that you can select any team, any year in the entire database.

This part I already have coded.

Now, you go ahead and pick 20 or 30 teams, then once you have the teams that you want, the program would them load in all the stats for those teams, but change them.

You pick a year to use, let's say 1950.

So, say one team that you picked was the famous 1968 tigers. It would load in each player from 1968 and change his his 1968 stats to look like it was 1950. So, if he started his career in 1965, then he would start his 'new' career in 1947. It would do that for every team that you selected and write a new master.csv file.

I would have to figure out what other csv files needed to be re-written and write those.

You would be then allowed to create the league layout and divisions and where the teams should go. (This would be the hard part).

Then, you would open OOTP, import a historical league using this new database with 1959 as the league and using 'remaining years' and you would have a league with great teams in it.

Now of course, if you imported the 1957 Tigers and you imported the 1958 Tigers, you could have two of the same player in the league. I am thinking of changing the players last name to show the year. The 1968 Norm Cash would become Norm Cash1968. Better yet, change his nickname to the year of the team he was on. But, after thoughts, he would be on a team called "1968 Detroit Tigers.

Now, I am not even sure if this would work or not, but I think it would. It would not be easy, but if it does work, this could be a kick ass program.

Now, one thing right off the bat, this would be a one season replay. With trades, players changing teams, etc., this would be just about impossible, but who knows. But for the first version, it would be for that purpose only.

So, tell me what you think.

[glenn]

Very interesting idea.

I was playing around tonight with creating a league with the 27 Yankees, 75 Reds, etc, and have been looking for the easiest way to import the teams. It looks like the master, batting, pitching, fielding, teams, teamsfranchise, fielding, and fieldingof are the required files you need to create(I think).

I'm not a big fan of one season replays though, so I was thinking of workarounds to make it work. I know you can turn off trades, free agents, etc, but still not sure how many seasons a team could play before they fall apart. So one season replays would probably work best.

Definitely sounds like a great idea though. Any way to import teams in an easier manner would be awesome.

[Raidergoo]

Let's see if I got the gist of it.

You propose to extract select teams from Lahman, and save them to a newly created master.csv?

[Comedian2004]

Originally Posted by Raidergoo

Let's see if I got the gist of it.

You propose to extract select teams from Lahman, and save them to a newly created master.csv?

Yes, that is the plan.

And modify the years before saving them in a new data bases.

[Comedian2004]

Well, the idea behind the idea is to see what is the greatest team ever, not what is the greatest franchise starting at a certain year.

[metsgeek]

I would love something like that

[PTBNL]

Why stop there...how about starting in 1901 but with players who actually debuted in 2005 (or latest yr in DB) 1902 would be 2004, etc wtc. Beats the manual way I am working on it now

[Comedian2004]

Program is coming around OK, I have never tried programming drag and drop and so I had some difficulty trying to get that to work, so I improvised and did it a different way.

The first version of the program will be as so:

Three windows across the screen. 1st window lists every YEAR TEAM from 1871 to 2005. The next window has a title of League 1 and the last one has a title of League 2.

You scroll down and click on a team in window 1 and it moves it to window 2. If you click on a team in window 2, it moves it to window 3 and if you click on one in windows 3, it moves it back to the original team list. Not as easy as drag and dump, but it works.

If the first version of the program, I have it where you can just create two leagues. I will later on fix it so you can have more leagues. The reason just two, is a couple reasons. One is that I do not even know if this will work or not. I do not want to write a bunch of complicated routines for nothing. The other is that it makes it a lot easier for me to write this first routine.

So far, it is working perfect. Once I drag the teams over to the leagues and hit the create button, I have it go through the league and pull out all the players on each of those teams in the lists. It works as I had planned. However, pulling the names out is not want I want, it is just for testing. That is the next step.

So now that I can identify each team that I selected inside the master league file, I need to now modify every record in the file.

1st, I will change all selected leagues to the desired year and rename the team. So, the "Detroit Tigers" from 1968 will become the the "1968 Detroit Tigers". The team year will be changed from 1968 to 1950 (Or whatever year I selected in the program). Now, the abbreviation. That could become a problem, as the 1984 Tigers and the 1968 Tigers will have the same abbreviations. I think I may just rename all the abbreviations in this league to ML1, ML2, ML3, etc. and write a better solution later.

I will also have to change the LEAGUE and DIVISION ID in the file to match how it is laid out in my program.

The player files will modify the players line for that year. So, the 1968 Norm Cash, I will change his TEAM ID to the one in the layout league, change the 1968 to the desired year I selected. I then have to go through all the files that need to be changed, fielding, pitching, etc.

All this is then wrote to the new database. This actually will not take very long at all to do.

One thing I have to do is to change all of the other years on everyone else. I think I will change them to 2020 or something like that or we could have duplicates. For instance, if I change the 1968 Tigers to the 1950 Tigers, then we will have two 1950 Tiger teams in there.

I do not see the program being used to create more than a single season replay. It is designed to gather some of the greatest teams in the world together and have them play 154 or 162 game schedule against each other.

I do plan on having a save feature, so I could create a league with the top 30 teams and save it as a template. Then load the template in, delete some teams and add different teams.

There will be some major problems with this, as you are combining teams from different eras. There is just not a way to have the 1905 White Sox play the 1999 Yankees in a computer ran league. But then again, who knows. I would like to pick teams by decade. So, pick the top 20 teams from the 1990s and let them play each other.

One question is the players names. If you have the 1968 Tigers and also have the 1961 Tigers in the same league, you will have two Norm Cash's. Of course they will be listed on different teams. I am debating on renaming the players. Norm Cash68 or Norm Cash '68. How does that sound?

After working on this program a little, I have learned how complicated of a task that the league structure is in OOTP, not to mention the playoffs, etc. It really makes you use the noggin'

[glenn]

In the first post you indicated that the ratings would be based on their remaining career. Are you modifying the remaining years of that player to the same team ID? So Norm Cash would be modified to team ML1 for 1969-74 if the 69 Tigers were picked, but if the start year was 1950, it would be 50-55?

Then if the 61 Tigers were chosen, would Norm Cash of 61-74 be assigned ML2?

If you renamed the players Norm Cash 1968, wouldn't you have to create a second Norm Cash in the master table, along with renaming the player ID's in all the tables?

Definitely sounds complicated. Best of luck.

[Comedian2004]

The selecting of the remaining part is up to your selection when you import the database in. I guess you can use whatever preference you want, but since you are seeing who is better, the 1968 Tigers or the 1999 Yankees, and you are not going to be running a 2nd year, I would assume that you would want to use the remaining years, instead of career totals or peak totals.

Yes, you would have a second Norm Cash in the master file. That should not actually hurt the import, as they will have different IDs. But, I want to be able to import 2 teams with the same player on them. That is why I want to rename Norm Cash to Norm 68'Cash and Norm 61'Cash, so you can see the difference in the leaderboard.

The modified years would be correct, as you mentioned. I should know how it works later on tonight.

We will see.

[Comedian2004]

Well, I got all the coding done to change the data and create a new database, but it totally bombed out with no explanation what is wrong. This is not going to be easy, but I will keep trying.

[Burto1945]

Not to go too far in the past, but did anything come out of this? It sounds like a great idea, I'm just not sure if it is possible in this incarnation of the game.