FAQs and QTSBAMF
(Frequently-asked questions and questions that should be asked more frequently)
When I started this league I knew it was going to be different than a lot of leagues, because I wanted to try some things the other leagues I had been in had never done, and I consciously wanted to avoid doing some of the things they’d done. Some of the things I wanted to try have worked out, some haven’t. It’s been a learning experience for me and everyone else who has been in the league. We’re not done evolving. I don’t expect to ever be done evolving.
We’re still probably similar to other online leagues in more ways than we’re different, but the differences can sometimes be jarring to people. That’s what this page is for. You have questions, I have answers. This page will probably always be a work in progress, just like the league is. I’ve divided the questions into sections to make it easier to find what you might be looking for.
Got a question that isn’t here? Hit me up.
Sections
The Reserve Roster
The Draft
GM Latitude
Troubleshooting
Miscellaneous Topics
Q: Why is there a Reserve Roster, rather than minor leagues?
A: Mostly because I’m cognizant of the time commitment necessary to be in an online league, and I lean towards eliminating things that are time-consuming, tedious, or not entirely necessary. In my opinion minor leagues check all of those undesirable boxes. 40 players (25 Active/15 Reserve) are a lot easier to keep tabs on than 150.
Q: Why only 15?
A: Partially for the reason alluded to in the previous question (less work/less time) but also as a parity measure. In my experience, in every league, some GMs are better than others. That’s fine, but limiting the extent to which the better GMs can dominate the league is good for the league as a whole. The better GMs are better at recognizing and acquiring good players, and limiting the total number of players they can control makes it a little harder for them to dominate the league.
Q: But do players develop on the Reserve Roster?
A: Yes they do, exactly as they would if they were playing regularly in the minor leagues, except they don’t gain fielding experience. You have to play them in Spring Training to develop their fielding.
Q: Isn’t it harder to build a team with such a small pool of prospects?
A: If it is, it would be a very slight difference. Think about a typical minor league system. At any one time, how many of the players among those 150-ish are ever going to play in the major leagues? How many are going to fill a useful role on a major league team? How many are going to become starters? How many of them are going to be good? How many of them are going to be stars? I don’t know the answer to any of those questions, but more than 15 of those 150 players even becoming useful role players is highly unlikely, in my opinion.
What the 15-player Reserve Roster does is eliminate the 135 players in your system that are either never going to make the majors, or be limited to the most marginal of major league careers.
This league has been running for over 20 seasons. Many teams in this league have been able to rebuild from a complete mess to a contender, some of them more than once. The tools to rebuild a franchise are there. If you can’t rebuild a team with a 15 prospects, do you think you’re going to be able to rebuild it with 135 bums?
Q: Why are there only five draft rounds?
A: I prefer a quick draft, for one thing, and for another, we only have 15 Reserve Roster slots. They fill up fast, and it doesn’t make sense to draft more players than you have room for.
Q: Why do you delete the future draft classes?
A: I don’t want to spend my time looking at future draft classes that will evolve by the time I get to draft from them. One draft class at a time is plenty for me.
The version of OOTP we used when the league started only displayed the draft class for the upcoming/current draft. This, in my opinion, was very much a case of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. OOTP doesn’t allow commissioners to turn the multiple draft class “feature” off, but it does allow them to delete the players, so I do. The next draft class gets generated every off-season.
Q: Why do you generate enough players for seven draft rounds when there are only five rounds?
A: Because the more rounds you generate for, the more quality prospects you get. Over time, the quality of draft pools in an OOTP league gets worse. Doesn’t really make sense to me, but it’s built into the game. The easiest way to negate this tendency is to increase the number of players you generate. At this stage in our history, seven rounds of players for five rounds looks about right. At some point, we might need to change it.
Q: Do you ever edit players?
A: Under certain circumstances, yes, I do.
I edit all “Fragile” players in the draft pool so they will be “Normal”. OOTP’s player development feature randomly reduces several players, young and old, to “Fragile” or “Wrecked” status every year; we really don’t need anyone starting out that way.
Years ago in our history (late ’40’s/early ’50’s) the game was generating a lot of relief pitchers and not nearly as many starting pitchers. In real life, there were very few pitchers who pitched exclusively in relief at this time (almost all pitchers both started and relieved). For about three or four years I edited a handful of relief pitchers in the draft pool every year, increasing their stamina and/or giving them a third pitch so they could be used as starters. It’s no longer necessary to do that, so I don’t do it anymore.
After many years of watching OOTP include a high quality two-way player in every other draft pool, I finally accepted the fact that the programmers had no clue (or just didn’t care) how extremely rare these players are in real life. A few seasons ago I began the policy of splitting these players into two players, a pitcher and a non-pitcher. We have grandfathered in the existing two-way players, but we won’t be adding any new ones.
I don’t edit players once they’ve been drafted, ever. Players are only edited when they are in the draft pool and thus not yet the property of any team.
Q: Can I change my park factors?
A: Yes, but only once in awhile. In real life teams do move into new stadiums, or remodel their old ones. But they don’t do either frequently. Decide what you want and I’ll make the change for you. Please don’t ask me to do it again for another decade, at least.
Q: Can I change the name of my team?
Q: Can I move my team to a different city?
A: Here’s what the answers to these two questions come down to: while many people stay in a league for decades, most do not. I don’t know how long you’re going to be in the league, but I do know, God willing, that I’m going to be running it for a long time. A big part of my vision for the league is that it maintains a look and feel that is realistic, rather than fantastic. If I allow you to give your team a name that no real-life top-level professional sports team would ever choose, or move your team to your home town of 3,708, which is 113 miles from any major population center, those unrealistic decisions become a part of the league’s history forever, whereas you might leave after one or two seasons. I know there are leagues out there that have commissioners who don’t care about those kinds of details, but this isn’t one of those leagues.
All of the team nicknames in this league have some cultural, natural, or historical significance to the city, state, or region the team plays in, as most real-life team nicknames do. The teams all play in large cities or in suburbs of very large population centers, as all real-life major sports franchises not named the Green Bay Packers do. We have had one team change its nickname in this league, and we’ve had two teams move, both times from smaller cities to larger cities, and both times because the relocations fit well into a planned expansion/realignment. So I never say “never”, but for some things I say “almost never”.
Q: You keep saying you’re missing export from me. What’s going on?
A: It’s most likely one of two things: 1) you didn’t export. or 2) your export is invalid.
I always look at the Export Tracker before I collect exports in OOTP. Usually, it shows a few exports missing, and usually, those are the exports that OOTP tells me are missing after I collect exports. If your export isn’t showing up on the Export Tracker, it probably means you didn’t export.
If your export is showing up on the Export Tracker, but I’m reporting a missed export from you, it probably means you exported, but the export you sent was invalid. What makes an export invalid? Most likely, it’s because you exported without first downloading the latest league file. If the league file that I’m working from (in other words, the last one I uploaded to the server) has a different game date than the one you were working from when you sent your team export, your export will show up on the Export Tracker, but it will not be valid. I can import it, but OOTP will not load it. There’s no way to force the game to load an invalid export.
So If you believe you’re exporting and I keep saying I’m missing it, do the following:
- Start checking the Export Tracker every time you make an export.
- If the Tracker isn’t showing your export, export again. Sometimes an export will fail (the network might down or there may be connectivity issues); in these cases, OOTP will tell you your export didn’t go through, but if you’re in the habit of clicking the “OK” button right after exporting, you could miss it.
- If OOTP is telling you your export went through, but it’s still not showing up on the Export Tracker, let me know ASAP (by the way, I’ve never heard of that happening).
If I keep reporting a missed export from you in spite of the Export Tracker showing you’ve exported, do the following:
- Before downloading the latest file, take a screenshot of your game screen that displays the game date.
- Check it against the game date in the commish_announcements in Slack. If it’s not the same date, you know what happened: you exported from a file other than the latest one, resulting in an invalid export.
- If it is the same game date as the one listed in commish_announcements, let me know ASAP (I’ve never heard of that happening, either).
I have no knowledge of any reasons other than the two stated above for team exports to show up as missing or invalid. If I keep reporting missing exports from you and you don’t know why, we need to first eliminate both of these extremely common occurrences as the cause before I spend time investigating any other possibilities.
Q: Is the league going to expand again?
A: We have no plans for any further expansion. I can’t see us considering expansion options again until the 1990’s, if then.
Q: What’s your beef with the Preseason Predictions generated by OOTP? A: OOTP automatically generates Preseason Predictions twice a year: at the very beginning of Spring Training, and on Opening Day. Both of these sets of predictions are essentially worthless. Why are they worthless? Because they’re based on the way each team is set up at the time that the predictions are generated, and no team is set up properly at those times.
The first set of predictions is generated at the onset of Spring Training, but before exports have been taken for Spring Training. Most teams look like Swiss cheese at this point. Many GMs don’t touch their lineups or rotation until Spring Training. OOTP doesn’t know what your rotation is going to be, or who will be in your starting lineup. If there are holes, which there will be for most teams, it guesses how these holes are going to be filled. Its guesses may be good guesses, or they may be miles off. But either way, the game is making predictions based on what it thinks you might do, rather than what you actually will do. Multiply that by 28 teams and you can surmise that these predictions are going to be off by a good bit.
And that first set of predictions, as bad as it is, is usually better than the second set of predictions. The second set is generated on Opening Day, but before exports have been taken for Opening Day. What does a typical team look like at this point? Well, nothing like it will after exports are collected, most likely. In Spring Training most GMs are starting their starters infrequently, if at all, and their lineups tend to be filled with backups and players who may not even be on the team when the season starts. OOTP doesn’t know that; it thinks that’s what your lineup is actually going to be for the upcoming season. And that’s what it bases its predictions on. That’s why the “Top Hitters” and “Top Pitchers” lists often exclude players who are probably going to be among the top hitters and top pitchers. If OOTP doesn’t see them in your lineup or rotation after the last Spring Training sim, it thinks you’re not going to start them. And then it bases how your team is going to fare if they’re not starting. How accurate do you think those predictions are going to be?
I would love to prevent OOTP from making two sets of useless predictions, but I can’t. However, I do make it generate a third set of Preseason Predictions that is based on something relevant. After I collect exports for Opening Day, I delete the Spring Training-based predictions and make the game generate a new set. This set is actually based on the way every team is set up at the beginning of the regular season. It’s based on what you are doing, not what it guesses you will do.
Is this third set of predictions the absolute gospel? No, of course not. If you have injured players who aren’t in the Opening Day lineup but will be when they’re healthy, OOTP doesn’t know that and can’t predict it. It can’t predict trades you will make, or what players you may bring up at some point during the season. And of course, it can’t predict the random element; it doesn’t know that some teams are going to outperform reasonable expectations, or underperform. But having done this for several years, I’ve observed that predictions based on Opening Day lineups and rotations are often pretty good. They’re certainly better than the ones the game generates automatically, by far.
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