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Originally Posted by ALB123
What the heck?! I can't believe I forgot about this league. I swore that I manually subscribed to this thread, but apparently, I was wrong. What a great first season...Congratulations!!  
What a huge undertaking it must be, huh? You definitely did the right thing by staying out of the league, I think. Working as the GM of a team or Manager and most certainly doing both jobs would increase the amount of work tremendously, I would think. Being the Commissioner of a league like this must be plenty of fun.
You really came up with a cool premise for the league. It cracks me up seeing players from such different eras playing together. I remember Wally Backman from when I was a kid...it gives me a chuckle to see how he's been crushing it at the plate in the Footnote League. Go Wally!! Go!! Oh yeah... Jimmy Archer from the Philadelphia A's team. He died, in real life, one year before Wally Backman was born.   And Marquis Grissom... He's my centerfielder on my 1991 Yankees team. I love it. 
OOTP allows us such wonderful customizations, but I really wish they would expand upon the simple options to allow us to really fine tune various options. For instance, if you select that you'd like to use players from all eras randomly, or however it is worded, it would then be so nice if all of a sudden there were checkboxes next to decades. 1900s, 1910s, 1920s and so on, up through the 2010s and 2020s. Of course, the 2020s wouldn't offer too many new players, but in OOTP 25 it will. It would make it so much easier to setup a league, similar to the Footnote League, where perhaps you only want players from the 1900s thru the 1940s & the 1980s, for example.
Hey luckyman... I don't know if I missed it somehow, but what did you end up doing in terms of minor leagues? You wrote that you were still trying to figure that out, if I'm not mistaken. Just curious...that's all. 
Oh...and did you say there was a yearly draft? If so, how the heck does that work? Like, is the Draft filled with people from all eras? |
Thanks bud, glad you are enjoying it. I'm still tinkering with the reportage as I want more colour to soften up the dryness of statistics. But there is so much that goes on it is hard to take it all in at times, so it is a work in progress. Is there anything you'd like to see more of in the updates?
I certainly was blessed with that 1901 season, what an absolute ripper it was. Wally sure did carve it up but I'm not 100% sure that wasn't also because I failed to ensure some of the modifiers and totals had taken effect. There were 7 .400 hitters as opposed to 1 IRL - Nap Lajoie, and the anomalies in the 2B / 3B / HR totals were huge. In the end, though, such is life. It is my first historical league and first RD league, so mistakes were bound to happen. I just have to be more diligent in making sure fewer do. The temptation - with my goal being to get it through to the modern day, a huge undertaking with such high level of detail in the updates - is to rush it along, but that is when I start missing things. So the goal is to try and do 10 seasons per IRL year, which gives me about 5 weeks per. That seems to be about the Goldilocks Zone, but at 52 the though that I'll still be slogging away at this aged 65+ is somewhat daunting (not to say presumptuous!!).
I, too, dig the premise. As much as I love the big names their absence is a great differentiator and changes the whole tone of the league by promoting everyone else up the hierarchy of excellence. And I love doing the little Spotlight pieces as well, I think that adds some real flavour to the whole enterprise. With each one of them that I do I find myself keeping an eye out for news on those I have featured and going to check their profiles on a regular basis. A few big names have snuck through (those Damn Yankees Jeter and Mattingly come to mind
) but I think I have got the admission / exclusion process down pat now so hopefully there won't bee too many rogue trespassers on these Elysian Fields of the underappreciated. There was no way I was going to control a team and leave my grubby fingerprints all over the joint. This way I merely get to spectate, report in a non-partisan fashion and gently nudge the league in directions I feel beneficial whenever needed.
Rosters / MiLB are a huge problem. For 1901 I set up the Postscript League, an Independent League affiliated with the FL, so that each team had one MiLB franchise to promote / demote / replenish / develop players. But the AI just refused to staff the teams properly, leaving some teams with just one starter and non-filled rosters despite there being a plethora
(tell me, what is a plethora?) of available FA from which to choose. Then there is the issue of releasing good players and replacing them with poor ones. Maddening! But I am reluctant to interfere too much as I want it to be as organic as possible. So I only wave the commish sceptre when absolutely necessary, when to not do so would be detrimental to the league.
My original plan was to introduce a new MiLB level every so often until I have AAA / AA / AA / R. But with the issues I mention I really don't know how to proceed now. So I'm just going to leave it as is for the next few seasons and see how things evolve, then react accordingly. The other aspect of this is the more MiLB levels, the more things to keep an eye out for, increasing the workload and almost certainly taking my attention away from the major league level, which of course is the main purpose of setting up this endeavour to begin with. Already I see myself cutting the Minor League reporting out of the updates, as I'd have to do so eventually if I was going to expand, so all I really need is a functional way of maintaining the right number and right qualitative spread of players available for the bigs.
Which brings us to the Draft. The temptation is to just keep pumping new blood into the system but that would be a mistake. For starters the players' longevities would be adversely affected and with expansion only happening a few times, and being a long time off from 1902, all it would do would be to increase the number of players sitting unused as FA. So I am doing a Rookie Draft with 10 Rounds in 1902 (and, yes, with random debut players from 1901 to 2000; I just feel that really adds spice to the league rather than keeping the various eras together over time) but then will only hold one whenever I feel the pool needs refilling or some new blood needs to be added. Does that sound sensible to you?
So there will be a few changes along the way but hopefully WYSIWYG for the duration.
Thanks again for following bud, nice to know there's one of you out there! Keen for any insights you may have to make the experience of following the Footnote League as enjoyable as possible.