Need Some Help with Early Historical Minors

[Charlie Hough]

This may be due to limitations of the minor league database, plus the fact that minor league affiliations didn't start until much later, and OOTP may be unable to deal with all the minor leagues and teams that changed frequently in the early decades of baseball.

However, I created a game beginning in 1916, which is supposedly within the range of OOTP's historical minors feature, but no minor leagues were created. Instead, there is a large number of free agents who didn't play the 1916 season in MLB and played in other leagues instead. But those leagues and teams don't exist in the game. Not surprisingly, MLB teams' extra players are on reserve lists rather than the minors, since there were no affiliates yet.

Is this by design, based on current limitations with the historical minors feature? Does OOTP just import historical minors players as free agents during this early era, but it doesn't actually create minor leagues and teams?

In what year does OOTP start creating minor leagues and teams automatically?

I know this has never been possible in OOTP previously, but if I want to have some semblance of the independent minor leagues during this era, is there a way to create the required minor leagues and teams to match the team IDs in the historical minors database and get OOTP to assign the right players to those clubs automatically?

If you start with created minor leagues, will this potentially conflict with OOTP later adding those historical minor leagues and teams in the future?

I'm just trying to figure out a good and manageable way to handle this, so there isn't a massive pool of free agents with no place to go, but those historical minors players are still in the game with independent minors teams, and they can be signed by MLB clubs.

I suspect that this would take a lot of manual work, and maybe there's no way to get it to happen in OOTP. But if anyone has any clues or tips, they would be appreciated.

[ldambrosa]

Charlie, although the MiLB teams database starts in 1914, it is only Federal League in '14 and '15. The 1st "real" minor league is the Texas League in 1919, followed by the Negro League in 1920 and the PCL in 1921. The International League comes in 1927, the Blue Ridge League in 1929, then they start coming fast and furious. The American Association doesn't start in this world until 1933.

However, if you use the database converter that someone uploaded, you can get into those ODB files and you will see that DATA for minor leaguers goes back to 1884. You would have to manually update those leagues/teams if you want to keep up with them.

I've tried turning on the "Maintain Real Minor Leagues" button AND creating my own minor league. The game will delete what I've created as soon as it hits the next off-season.

I've also tried turning on the "Import Real Historical Rookies" for both minor leagues that I've created and the game created. In both cases it imported real rookies into the PCL -- in the 1920s, when the PCL is actually in the game. I doubt it would work before then because there is no tie between the MiLB data which contains only a team name and the league structure which has a team ID. So I think your choices are to let it do it's thing or put a lot of work into building that pre-1930s MiLB system.

It's funny this came up because I am doing a lot of work trying to decide if I should start my next random players league in 1903 or 1884. 1884 looks like such a lot of work for a very unstable minor league.

[thehef]

Hey Charlie, give these threads a read:

https://forums.ootpdevelopments.com/...d.php?t=286497
https://forums.ootpdevelopments.com/...d.php?t=276256

Tiger Fan did a great job of explaining how you can have minors prior to when they are introduced in OOTP... I haven't read through these in awhile, so I don't know the diff betw the two threads... (As I recall, there's a lot of the same info in them, but there are some differences.)

Originally Posted by ldambrosa

I've tried turning on the "Maintain Real Minor Leagues" button AND creating my own minor league. The game will delete what I've created as soon as it hits the next off-season.

Yep, that's what happens. The way around that is to edit your milbteams.csv, milbleagues.csv, and era_stats_minors.txt files to match the setup of the minors that you want to see, because OOPT reads these files each time the game proceeds to the offseason (usually in late-Oct right after your postseason is complete).

Note, though, that OOTP does not read these files at game creation. So if, for example, you've modified the files above so the PCL appears in 1910, you'd need to start your game in 1909 or earlier (if you start your game with the 1910 season, the PCL wouldn't appear until 1911).

[thehef]

Also check out this thread, https://forums.ootpdevelopments.com/....php?p=4968766, specifically the last post (mine ).

[Charlie Hough]

Thanks to both of you for the great insights and links. I also found this brief link where there was confirmation of the created fictional Texas League and PCL seamlessly becoming their real versions once OOTP introduces them.

I'll start looking through all of these previous threads. The option to add fictional minors with real players looks very promising, and I'm amazed at Tiger Fan's work on this and his timeline and guidelines for setting up the early minors.

I wish I had been aware of all this before I started my new 1916 save. I'm having a lot of fun managing the 1916 St. Louis Browns, and we're off to a massively winning start. I don't want to start over at this point. Even if I could add fictional minor leagues to this existing game, I would probably have to do it in the off-season, and that means 1916 would be a "lost season" for a lot of those free agents in the database. That's a bummer.

Tiger Fan's insights should be preserved forever, so I've done a PDF output of all of those threads, so I can have them saved in the cloud in case anything ever happens to the forums or those threads.

Now will be the hard work of starting to learn all of this and then test and implement it with a new saved game.

[pstrickert]

Charlie, would you be willing to share that PDF?

[thehef]

Good luck! Be sure and report back. Your hard work will help build the knowledge database!

[Charlie Hough]

Originally Posted by pstrickert

Charlie, would you be willing to share that PDF?

Sure. Here's an initial merged PDF file that I created to include the core pages of Tiger Fan's two different threads on this topic.

Sorry that the PDF is so huge and the pages are so wide. I use a widescreen monitor, and the PDF capture tool that I use sometimes renders things on a large scale to ensure the highest source quality. But when you reduce the view zoom in a PDF reader, the text can get a bit distorted. Also, when you first load this in Google Drive, it will take an extra 10 seconds before the full file is rendered and everything zooms with proper clarity. I can try to re-do everything and scale it down if needed.

[pstrickert]

Looks good. Thanks, Charlie.