As anyone who has tried to incorporate them into a save would well know, the cursory treatment of NeL players is a real black spot (pun intended) on OOTP, one they will hopefully rectify sooner rather than later. Some NeL players import OK, but the vast majority do not.
To overcome this, I have spent many enjoyable (and occasionally frustrating) hours formulating my own methodology for making these players viable in the game.
My process revolves around a loose hierarchy of player quality.
The amazing (but sadly, it seems, now defunct)
Hall of Miller and Eric (HOME) website earlier this year released Major League Equivalencies for 99 of the top NeL players. These players make up what I call my "A-List". The validity of MLEs is something myself and the other lads working with me on this project disagree upon to some degree, with my opinion of them being slightly more favourable. Still, all of us realise they are (at best) only an interpretation of the uninterpretable. The NeLs were NOT the MLB. Nor were they AAA equivalent. They were what they were. The biggest difference between them in all of their various guises over the years and the MLB was depth, with the bigs stocked with a far higher average quality player and many more of them throughout the league. Statistical coverage was another big difference, although thankfully a lot of research has been and continues to be done in this regard to narrow the gap. This is completely ignoring the existential differences tolerated by black ballplayers over this period, as well as things like equipment and playing conditions.
Anyway, those 99 players are my A-List, each of which receives a full profile from me that covers all aspects of their gameplay and biographical details. I use a mix of the MLEs and undoctored data and create a career path by giving them CUR and POT stats from which the ratings are generated. There is, in all of this, a lot of both subjectivity (occasionally, objectivity...) and trial and error to get the desired finished products.
10 of these players joined the league at its outset: Buck Leonard, Alejandro Oms, Hilton Smith, Martin Dihigo, Leroy Matlock, Sam Jethroe, Cool Papa Bell, Spot Poles, Luke Easter, Pat Scantlebury and Charles "Chino" Smith. In each subsequent Draft, 2 more will be added.
(I should note here that any player who began in the NeL but eventually made it to the MLB post-"integration" (I use that term as loosely as I can) is deemed an NeL player for this exercise.
I should also note that the only NeL players excluded from the EL are those given the "Ballplayer" designation or for whom the full given name is unknown. That has left me with an initial NeL pool of 2740 players to go with the MLB pool of 3538.)
All other NeL players, classed "B" here, are simply taken on their merits as to how they are curated. Some receive full profiles as per the "A-Listers". Others receive a skeleton version thereof. Some merely get touched up in the editor to ensure an acceptable level of similarity to their IRL selves, culling outlier ratings and generally tidying them up, but nothing more.
So far I have done roughly 150 full profiles. I would anticipate this number will end up being somewhere between 700 and 1000.
Seamheads is my go-to for information. It is a simply unbelievable resource.
BBRef has upped its game but still needs to do plenty more, especially with biographical data in its Bullpen section. Same goes with
SABRBio. My treasured copy of James Riley's
Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues gets heavy usage, believe me, as does the
NLBeMuseum site that uses this book as its main reference point. The pieces in both the "Forgotten Heroes" and "Pioneers of Black Baseball" series on the
Center for Negro League Baseball are also incredibly useful. But I'll go anywhere on the hunt for info. I am an industrious type and will search madly for stuff if needs be until I am sure I either have what I want or have convinced myself that I can't have it because it doesn't exist.
Anyway, I thought some of you might be interested in all of this. It is a labor of love with the scales heavily tipped toward the "love" side of the equation. Happy to answer any questions / help out with those of you interested in doing something similar.
G
EDIT: This post updates how I rate NeL players for use in OOTP.