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David Ball · 08-17-2011, 06:29 AM

If you play with real transactions, so that some teams won't carry the fifteen-player minimum, is the game going to refuse to go forward until you fill the roster up to fifteen? I know some people do create games with real rosters, so maybe this isn't a problem.

At any rate, the chart LGO gives are totals of players used throughout an entire season. I don't think anybody in the '90's was ever carrying 21 men at any one time. Certainly not early in the decade, when for a little while there was a 13-man player limit. During the late '80's a few of the fat cat teams may have carried 18 --the Giants always seem to have had very large rosters-- but seven regular, three batteries and maybe a fourth pitcher or a utility player was about it for a poor team, and probably a lot of the others. In the '70's thirteen men would have been extravagant. I actually think the fifteen-man limit would work for most teams well into the twentieth century. The largest rosters in the late '80's were probably bigger than any in the '90's, because farming was practiced much more heavily in the '90's and you could control a player without having to pay him to sit on your bench and not get any better.

From a purist's point of view the problem is that, with brief exceptions, there was no player limit until some time in the twentieth century. For about a decade the limit on the number of players you could reserve at the end of a season acted as a kind of soft cap, but even that was removed during most of the 1890's, when clubs were known to grow so careless about the matter as to reserve dead men (well, it happened once that I know of). Today every team carries 25 active players and has a full 40-man roster, but in the 19th century both the number of players in uniform and the number controlled by what would be equivalent to our forty-man roster varied from team to team, so that no strict limits are really appropriate except what club management could afford and wanted to pay for.

I actually don't want to be a purist about it, but I do think that as you give the AI manager more players, it will probably become more inclined to practice aggressive substituting in a way that wasn't possible under the rules before around 1890 and even during the '90's wasn't really fashionable to the extent the AI wants to do it.

08-17-2011, 06:29 AM	#14
David Ball Minors (Triple A) Join Date: Jan 2006 Posts: 281	If you play with real transactions, so that some teams won't carry the fifteen-player minimum, is the game going to refuse to go forward until you fill the roster up to fifteen? I know some people do create games with real rosters, so maybe this isn't a problem. At any rate, the chart LGO gives are totals of players used throughout an entire season. I don't think anybody in the '90's was ever carrying 21 men at any one time. Certainly not early in the decade, when for a little while there was a 13-man player limit. During the late '80's a few of the fat cat teams may have carried 18 --the Giants always seem to have had very large rosters-- but seven regular, three batteries and maybe a fourth pitcher or a utility player was about it for a poor team, and probably a lot of the others. In the '70's thirteen men would have been extravagant. I actually think the fifteen-man limit would work for most teams well into the twentieth century. The largest rosters in the late '80's were probably bigger than any in the '90's, because farming was practiced much more heavily in the '90's and you could control a player without having to pay him to sit on your bench and not get any better. From a purist's point of view the problem is that, with brief exceptions, there was no player limit until some time in the twentieth century. For about a decade the limit on the number of players you could reserve at the end of a season acted as a kind of soft cap, but even that was removed during most of the 1890's, when clubs were known to grow so careless about the matter as to reserve dead men (well, it happened once that I know of). Today every team carries 25 active players and has a full 40-man roster, but in the 19th century both the number of players in uniform and the number controlled by what would be equivalent to our forty-man roster varied from team to team, so that no strict limits are really appropriate except what club management could afford and wanted to pay for. I actually don't want to be a purist about it, but I do think that as you give the AI manager more players, it will probably become more inclined to practice aggressive substituting in a way that wasn't possible under the rules before around 1890 and even during the '90's wasn't really fashionable to the extent the AI wants to do it.