Question using random debut
 

When using random debut historical, if you delete a player from the league, will they turn up at another time in the future? (I'm thinking as if the player never existed)
Also, did I miss a setting for how many players the game engine imports into the league for the initial season? I wanted to set up a league with 2 levels of minors, so I'd have a pool of players to promote from, but they wouldn't be sitting on a reserve squad, and kind of a catch all for those players with a brief, inconsequential MLB career IRL. As my inaugural draft turned out, I didn't even have enough players to fill out a AAA level.

You don't get a lavish number of players in season #1. That's unfortunate. As far as I know, there's no setting to determine the number of initial players.

But wait...there's more. Because I have a perverse sense of testing limits, I tried something I meant to try a long time ago. If you want a truly deep minor league initially, start a regular season up. Pick an era where a bunch of your favorites are just about to come up to the majors. Then, before hitting the start game button, go to advanced mode. In the historical tab, select Use Random Rookies from all eras. You WON'T get any more of the minor leaguers imported this way...but you WILL get rookies from all eras imported. Sort of a, "Start in 1964 with real rosters but then wait for Ruth and Cobb to appear" kind of game.

Initially there will be 44 players per team. This can not be changed when starting a random debut league. You MIGHT be able to expand or make smaller your league after creation which in effect would change the number of players per team, I have not tried doing that

Here is the random debut trick, if you want to have all the players in your league have started from year 1 of their career, not some as 35 year olds when RD first opens
Start your league
BEFORE the inagural draft, delete all the players


All deleted players before the inagural draft will come as rookie players like the rest later in the game


Now create enough free agents for how many per team you need. if you have 20 teams and 1 minor league, you might need 50 players per team so create 1000 players, be sure to have them "available for next draft"
I suugest to have the players be like 27 or 28 years old so they will phase out of the game in a few years for all real players


Then have your ID, you will have all fictional to start, but then EVERY mlb player will come into your game as a rookie, so you get full careers from everyone.
A bit of work but I think worth the work


Cheers

One thing you could do is pick a year to start, for example 2016. The inaugural draft for you league will feature 1320 random players at random ages(30 teams times 44 players per team = 1320).

Create your league.
Disable player injuries and the OOTP development engine.
Go to the rules section of your league and edit the amateur draft so it creates your desired number of players. Remember your teams already have enough players for 44 rounds, so if you have OOTP import enough players for a 35 round amateur draft, your league will end up with enough players roughly for a 79 round inaugural draft.

Now you want to fast sim the first season. Don't even pay attention to the results. Once the season is completed fast sim until you reach your leagues preseason. Once your in preseason, go to settings and erase entire league history. Then select the option for the game to release all players and create a fantasy draft.

The inaugural draft for your league will now feature give and take the 1320 players from the initial inaugural draft and the 1050 players you created for the amateur draft. So you will now have roughly 2370 players available to draft from. This would allow you to run a 79 round inaugural draft and have plenty of players to populate minor leagues.

Once you have run the draft you can turn injuries and the development engine back on and reset the draft so it creates less players for the rest of your leagues history.

The creating a league and then making smaller definitely works.

My current league was created using 1947 as the start year. It's a 12 team one subleague setup. I created 1947, deleted 4 teams and restructured my league to fit my setup. My inaugural draft featured 704 players and with 12 teams that allowed teams to select 58 players.