3/9/22, edited 11/18/22

Minor League Specifics

Welcome to the new American Circuits Minor Leagues.

Here are all the rules, new and old, that pertain to the minor leagues:

That’s it. The first one is a holdover from our previous no-minors days. It’s 15 players total. Not 15 on your AAA team, plus 15 on your AA team, etc. We’re keeping this rule as a parity measure (it makes it harder to build a super-team by hoarding talented prospects), and also because the majority of GMs were opposed to having full minor league rosters.

Unfortunately, there is now no way to make the game enforce the 15-player rule, so we will be on the honor system. I will check periodically to make sure no one is in violation of the rule, and will PM anyone who needs a reminder. I will also ask that you all be my “eyes and ears” and let me know if you happen to see any infractions. You can tell me in a PM so no one will know that you were the annoying busybody who blew the whistle on them. And it’s not a big deal—no one is going to get punished, unless it’s clear that they are repeatedly breaking the rule intentionally. Eventually we will all be used to the rule and will rarely need to be reminded.

One good thing about this is that when you sign a free agent mid-sim, you no longer need to message me to drop someone for you—you can just do it yourself before your next export. Just make sure you remember to do it.

Oh, and remember that while the IL doesn’t count against the 15-player limit, you may not “store” uninjured players on the IL. If they’re not injured, they need to be activated or released ASAP (this is not a new rule).

Regarding the second rule, there is no minimum age limit, only maximums. You can’t, for instance, put a 21-year-old at the Rookie level, but you can put a 19-year-old at AAA if you want to. OOTP is able to enforce age-limit rules. You will receive a notification in the game if you have a player who is too old to be at the level you have him at.

If you preferred Reserve Rosters and this whole minor league thing just feels like a big bother, you can instruct the A.I. to do most of the work for you. There are two ways to do this.

First way: From your team home page, hit your TRANSACTIONS tab,  then hit the ACTIONS button (it’s on the far right side of the window). Select Ask AI to set up complete minor league system.

That's all. The A.I. will place your minor leaguers at the levels and roles it thinks they should be in. Then it will wash its hands of the whole affair. If you want it to re-assess the situation at some later date you will have to do this again.

Or, you can use the second way, which is to give the A.I. full control over your minors at all times so you don’t have to worry about them.

To do this find the dropdown menu under your name (top of the screen; there’s FILE, GAME, and [YOUR NAME]; click on your name). Select Manager Options. On the right side of the screen there’s a section called TEAM CONTROL SETTINGS. All of these settings can be toggled between [Your Name] and Computer A.I.

But... DO NOT set the third one from the bottom (Minor League Free Agent Signings & Releases) to Computer A.I. This will cause the A.I. to sign every damn free agent available, and you’ll immediately be in violation of the 15-player rule. So keep that one on [Your Name].

The two below that one, Minor League/Promotions/Demotions/Strategy and Minor League Lineups/Depth Charts/Pitching Staffs you can set to Computer A.I. if you so desire. This will give the A.I. carte blanche to assign roles to your 15 minor league players.

Now, the fun part, or at least what I think is the fun part. The actual organization of the minor leagues.

Similar to the way we began the major league portion of the American Circuits, I’m opting to emulate real life but greatly simplify it. As you probably know, the real minor leagues are constantly in flux. Teams move, die, are reborn, switch leagues, and change their major league affiliation; leagues fold, form, merge, and change classification. One or more of these things is happening almost every year in the minors. I don’t want to work that hard, so I’m not going to try to make anywhere near as many changes as there are in real life. There will be a handful of changes every so often, so we’ll get the “flavor” of what the minors were/are like. Some teams will hold onto the same affiliates for years, some will change more often. It won’t affect anything you have to do as a GM, you’ll just notice that every few years you may see that one or more of your affiliates are in a different city and/or league.

We will start with something vaguely similar to—but in no way an exact replica of—the real-life minor leagues of 1960. Most of our minor leagues will have different names than the real minor leagues, but some won’t. I always liked that they called the South Atlantic League the “Sally League”, so I kept that one. I renamed the New York-Pennsylvania League the Pennsylvania-New York League so I could call it the “Penny League”. I’m a simpleton; things like that amuse me.

A rule of thumb that I will be using for as long as we’re doing this is:

• If a city/town had a minor league team around the time we’re playing, I will try, within reason, to see that it has one in our simulation
• If it didn’t, I won’t

So most years we’ll have minor league teams where they actually had minor league teams, but there will be exceptions. Some towns that lost their team for a short time won’t lose them, and some towns that only had a team for a year or two won’t get one.

In real life, there is a tendency for teams to have affiliates that are geographically close to the parent club. It’s a tendency; it’s not a no-exceptions rule. Since major leagues are national (international, technically) and minor leagues are regional, it isn’t possible for all major league teams to have minor league affiliates “in the neighborhood” at every level. But where it is possible, I’ve tried to accommodate. It is for that reason that some teams in our league will have affiliates in some of the same cities their real-life counterparts had affiliates. Sometimes, but not always.

As for team names, we’re talking four levels of 24 teams each—that’s 96 teams, plus all the new teams that will appear now and again. I decided I wasn’t going to try to come up with new names for all of them. I came up with a few. If a team had a really awesome name, like the Binghamton Triplets, or the Chattanooga Lookouts, or the Knoxville Smokies, or the Toledo Mud Hens, why would I or anybody else want to mess with perfection?

Presenting your 1960 minor leagues:

ADDENDUM

After we started playing with limited minor leagues, we discovered that OOTP was ill-equipped to deliver what we were hoping for. We came up with a weird little workaround, and the details are here.

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