Detroit Tigers Fans

[tcoots423]

Most of you, if you have read my posts know that I'm a Detroit/Toronto fan, Detroit hits closer to home because that's where my family is from. I watched the Tigers during the years they weren't all that great(1995-2004) and of course since 2005 when they became contenders all the way up to today and still LOVE them. Had a signed ball from Bobby Higginson, Brandon Inge, and Carlos Guillen.Grew up listening to my Grandma(Born in 1912) talk about Ty Cobb, Al Kaline, Lou Whitaker, Alan Trammell, and when she passed I got all of her Tigers stuff and still treat it way better than anything else I own.

But my real question is... when you play OOTP as the Tigers, regardless of what year you start... what do you make you main objective? Im going to start one soon in 2015 and I know I have two Huge contracts(Justin Verlander and Miguel Cabrera) that I have to think about..so... What do you guys/gals do?

[r0nster]

my main objective is to win the world series every year!!!!!! I tried to trade verlander who had a better career than he would in real life with his 3 injuries but nobody would take him and I kept Caberra. He ended up with 3000 hits but I let him go via the FA at end of career due to him asking way too much money I was willing to spend just to keep attendance up. Did get him back at minimum wage the following season. I traded half the team away in the first season including minors got gutted too.

[Hockey13Playa]

I am from Michigan and am a Tigers fan, oddly enough I never played OOTP as Detroit. I've only been playing since 2013 and felt they were just to good so I've always played as bottom feeder to mediocre teams.

What I wanted to chime in and say is no matter what version of OOTP I play, or how my game unfolds the Tigers ALWAYSSSSSS suck after the first season I play. I swear the game always makes crazy moves for Detroit and the team ends up becoming absolute trash lol. Now that being said I know you wouldn't handle the team the way it always ends up but I thought it was worth mentioning they do a complete 180 in my game ALL THE TIME lol

[sreem]

Much like Hockey, I am a huge Tiger fan but I've never tried playing as them. Check that, I did try starting a franchise with them in last years version, but I couldn't stick with it because I expected MY team to behave like the RL team.
I prefer taking over a small budget expansion team, now thinking about starting a fictional league.
All that said, I would concur with Hockey....the Tigers seem to trail off after the first couple of seasons in my games as well. I don't believe that OOTP has a very high opinion of Mr. Dombrowski (seems neither does Mikey I. either).
IF I could muster up the intestinal fortitude to attempt running them again, I would focus on rebuilding the farm system, and trading for journeymen to compliment the big budget contracts that are already on the team. Just my 2 cents.

P.S. - Tram and Sweet Lou were the best 2B/SS combo I've ever seen. I still remember being at Travis Fryman's first game and being so pissed cause I thought he was going to replace Tram.

[jpeters1734]

I never could get into the ML leagues unless it's filled with fictional players. I just can't deal with things like Jaff Decker ALWAYS unseating Starling Marte in LF every game.

[kingtut313]

I prefer to take over troubled, small budget or terrible teams but I started a career with Detroit this year and I'm still going in it.

It's 2019 and Verlander is as dominant as ever and Cabrera is still the best hitter in the league. So I really haven't needed to get rid of either one.

My objective is to win the World Series while taking over the 2015 Tigers because they are built to win now. Their initial farm system is horrible so that takes a few years to build back up.

[Tram2Whitaker]

As a lifelong Tigers fan, I never play as the Tigers. It's just too personal. I never want to see anyone go, and I don't want to be responsible for the next 43-119 season.

[NoOne]

the tigers are setup to fail in 16 in ensuing years - kinda like real-life. you can eek out another couple good seasons with their aging talent, but after that it's a steep decline. they have no talent inthe minors and their payroll is way too high.

i've seen them do well, so it's defintiely not built into the game for them to suck. i think they just get a new owner and new gm quite early in a sim, and it's a crapshoot if they are any good, and they need good ones to recover.

I keep verlander and cabrera - verlander is impossible to trade, and cabby still has many good years left.

i try to get rid of heavy contracts and get either a cheap/young mlb player or some prospects - onus on filling out a playoff-caliber 25-man roster, obviously.

nathan, v martinez, soria. ~$34 million.

definitely try to get rid of verlander - way too much money for the average of what you will get (if you replayed those years 1000 times over).

i quit using real players, too. the way they are rated and how their ratings are distributed are significantly different than fictional created players. your league gets all out of whack for a couple decades. if you only play 10 years, you won't notice much, if at all.

Once the pre-made real-life prospects for the draft run out, things slowly start to change over 30 years as minor leaguers matriculate through the system and reach the mlb replacing existing players. so, you can see why it is a very delayed effect. first, it takes years to get to fictional created players, then they have to develop, then it takes numerous years to replace real players. even if you tick "automatically modify league total modifiers," you will still have jacked up stats for individual players.

E.G. fictional players strike out significantly less than 'real' players. so, once the quantity of these fictional players increase in the league, older players will start striking out more than they ever have in they're career, and it has nothing to do with the individual's talent change, but rather the fact that the LTM for K's has increased to maintain similar league-wide levels.

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1-100 scale should be used comparisons, even if you don't play that way. this isn't about playing:
If you want to see the types of differences i talk about, start up a fictional league. Look at All MLB player list. sort by various ratings. you can delete all mlb players, then refill with fictional players many times over to see the distribution possibillities. e.g. someitmes you have 5 81+ players for a specific rating, other refills you see 2.

when you delete make sure it says the correct total (25*# of teams in majors), then refil. do it enough to understand distribution and basic ranges of each individual talent rating.

now compare talent distribution/ranges etc.. to real players in your existing league. even if you have played a few years, no big deal. you will still see the difference in ratings - if you have played enough years to have more than a few fictional players in the majors, try to ignore them or just create a new league to see the info better.
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after the league cycles through all the real players, it will normalize and it is clear sailing from there.