[David Watts]

Originally Posted by Matt Arnold

If you play with minor leagues on, switching the draft over to June after the first year can work.

Players are "created" for the first year they have stats for (whether that's MLB stats or MiLB stats, depending on whether you have minors enabled or not). So if you start a game in 1977, everyone who appeared in 1977 would already be created at the beginning of the game. The draft in November 1977 would thus be drafting for 1978 players.

If you play with minors off, then having a draft in June is not recommended, because players will come in when they first made a major league appearance. So Ronald Acuna Jr would appear in the June 2018 draft, and it's a little weird to plan your team around someone who comes in expecting a .900+ OPS mid-season. Hence why we prefer to have them debut at the start of the previous off-season, you can plan around it a lot more.

If you play with minors on, there's less concerns. Acuna would end up in the 2015 draft, so even drafting mid-season would be less of a shock. Although you still have foreign players enter through the draft, like 2001 Ichiro.

In any event, you can switch to mid-season, if you don't mind those cases depending on your league and setup. But since the initial season players have already been pulled in, that's why you see nobody in the first year (other than a few random free agent types who missed in the initial import).

So does this mean the game will import the minor league players at the end of the season as it does now and then hold those players till June when the draft takes place? Or, does changing the draft date change when the game imports historical players for the draft?