Spring Training Games ?

[dave2309]

This my fifth year purchasing OOTP. I want to play and manage the 1975 Detroit Tigers with the 25 addition. If it's possible, how do I access the spring training season and play several games before starting the regular season? Thanks in advance.

[Pelican]

Unfortunately [IMHO!] the game by default starts you just before Opening Day. Which is odd, because in setup there is an option to have Spring Training, and a choice between one to five weeks length. But that only comes into play after you play a full season. For those of us who adore Spring Training, that is such a drag.

So, your options are to play or quickly sim through a season (presumably the one before where you want to start), or to forego ST that first year. [In theory, not easy in practice, you could delay the start of your regular season, in order to create a window for ST. That would require messing with a whole series of dates, a new schedule, later playoffs - changes that the devs discourage for newer users. For example, you could move Opening Day back to May 1, which would extend your regular season well into October, and post-season well into November. You'd have to figure out when you wanted the All-Star Game, trade deadline, roster expansion. And you would have to delay the start of the off-season, a key date in OOTP.]

In an ideal world, for me at least, you would begin in the off-season, in November. You could make trades, attend the Winter Meetings, sign free agents, and enjoy five glorious weeks of Spring Training. You could make full use of the new development lab feature to tweak player attributes. With this run-up, you would have a feel for your team and its players and organization, a rotation set up, full minor league assignments, by Opening Day.

In your case, I would suggest swimming through the 1974 Season, and then picking up after the World Series.

[dave2309]

Thanks!

[md40022]

When you think about it though, that would be kind of tricky.

OOTP normally has a release date just before opening day of that given season. That means 95% of free agency is already complete. Teams have already optioned some of their minor league prospects who were in camp back down to the minors, etc.

So for the OOTP season to then begin in November of 2023 (as an example) would that mean all of the real life free agency and roster moves that happened between November 2023 and opening day would be undone in the game? Granted, this was a "slow" offseason by typical standards, but when you think of all the under the radar roster moves that happen in the offseason, that would be a ton of stuff to go back on if the start date of the Sim would be November 2023.

I suppose they could offer it as an option for those who would prefer to play that way, but I just look at it like there's 100000000 roster moves made in the 2023/2024 offseason and the actual release date of the game itself is after 99.5% of those real-life moves are already complete. That would be a lot to undo in order to start a sim in November 2023.

[jcard]

DonÂ’t know if this would work and have not tested it myself, but I’ll just throw it out there as a rough idea if someone wants to probe its possibilities.

Say you wanted to play a standard MLB 2024 game. In the game creation advanced mode you change the game year from 2024 to 2023. This might make all of the player ages one year younger. Then disable development and injuries, disable the draft, disable scouting discoveries / independent and international FAs and posted players, erase or disable the schedule. Advance the game to the end of the season. Enable all settings and proceed. Once calendar turns to Year Two, game world will now be in 2024. Players will be appropriate age, and no development / aging will have occurred (since development was disabled), and no statistics were accrued. Enable or (re-import, if necessary) 2024 schedule. Reimport original preset injury file (since I think recovery might still take have taken place even with development off). Make sure spring training is enabled. Proceed with game.

Again, this is an off-the-top-of-my-head hypothetical model (not in front of my computer at the moment). I tried to at least think of potential issues and propose a possible means of overcoming them into a “process” that is really just a sum-of-the-parts combination organized into a potential series of steps. If there is a solution to be found, maybe some small part of the foregoing can help someone find it.