Next I go to the RULES tab and make the following settings:
Under roster rules I set my active roster to 24 players and reserve roster to the lowest setting possible which is 15. I wish you could set it lower as ideally I would like just 3 or 4 players there as quick injury replacements. Any one who sits on the reserve roster does not get to play anywhere and my whole purpose of adding these minor leagues is to get them playing.
On the Trading rules side I select enable trading and I like to allow all of my leagues to trade so I check off yes to allow trades with other major leagues
From Amateur Draft settings be sure to disable automatic creation of free agents. We don't want fictional rookies.
Image Step5.jpeg below is showing how this screen should look when done changes.
Next we click on the Financials screen
Start by clicking on
ENABLE FINANCIAL SYSTEM which brings a lot more choices.
I Select 1894 from the dropping select which settings to import which gets me 1894 numbers. I also use the mass-adjust current financial values and select a factor of -25% for the AA leagues. I do -10% for AAA and -50% for the A leagues I create. My thinking is this should give the independent minor league teams I add a lower revenue and expense base than MLB.
Scrolling down my MLB Attendance baseline is 3615 for the current season. I lower the Southern Association one to 2500 to again hopefully lower revenue.
I leave enable financial system checked and I also want to check enable reserve clause era rules but before I do so I need to click on a couple of other items that will disappear after clicking reserve clause.
Those items are shown in
IMAGE step6.jpeg and are ALLOW FREE AGENTS FROM OTHER LEAGUES as well as ALLOW PLAYERS TO BE PURCHASED BY OTHER LEAGUES and I set a flat $100 as the fee for all my minor leagues in this era. I keep it low because I don't want to stop capable players from getting to the major leagues in my sim. I also set it to NO free agency and NO Arbitration.
I do not worry about changing anything on the Team Revenue or Team Expenses and Salary settings on the other side of the screen.
OPTIONS SCREEN
On the left side all I do is check to enable Automatically adjust league strategy when advancing to next season, import adjusted financial settings after each year and automatically adjust league total modifiers after each season for accuracy.
You could rename or change eligibility for any of the Southern Association awards if you like.
On the schedule side I tend to set my schedule to 140 games right now with the idea I will leave it that way until I need to fold the league when the real Southern Association is imported around 1932. User choice if you want to allow rainouts. I normally set a 3 week spring training for my minor leagues. I usually change the name of my playoff to something like the Southern Series but leave everything else at default. Since I changed my schedule length to 140 games I need to click on league schedule and either import one or generate a fictional schedule.
I should add for those who want schedule accuracy there are a number of schedules around that you could manually add. For example I have downloaded an 1895 Southern Association schedule which I believe came from "joefromchicago"'s great thread that can be found here
http://www.ootpdevelopments.com/boar...d.php?t=248744
See
image STEP7.jpeg below for how this screen should look when done editing.
I make no changes on the Players screen or Stats & AI screens as changes I did on previous screens have us all set. A new feature in OOTP19 is two-way players. It is enabled by default but you may wish to disable it if you like. I am leaving it enabled as there were a number of two-way players especially in the early years.