Minor League Placeholders

11/18/22

Minor League Placeholders

What they are and why they exist

  • We began this league with a Reserve Roster and no minor leagues. The advantage of this is it makes managing an organization much easier and much less time-consuming. Rather than having to keep track of a hundred or so minor leaguers, most of whom have zero chance of ever sniffing the major leagues, a GM only needs to keep tabs on a small number of prospects. We set the limit at 15, so each team’s “system” contained no more than 25 major leaguers and 15 “minor leaguers” or “reserves”.
  • Some of the league’s GMs liked this system, others started clamoring for minor leagues.
  • The main arguments for having minor leagues were a) the ability to track a players’ progress through stats, and b) the ability to have a player gain fielding experience (for some reason, in OOTP players on a Reserve Roster gain experience in pitching and hitting, but not in fielding).
  • A few people advocated full minor league rosters, but only a few. As some people had joined this league specifically because of the relatively low micromanagement requirements that a Reserve Roster allows, I took full minors off the table. I asked the league to come up with a compromise.
  • Incomplete minors were proposed. As you may know, OOTP allows you to simulate minor league games without having all your roster spots filled. When the game simulates a minor league game, it fills the “holes” with what it calls “ghost players”. Essentially, if you only have five players in your batting order, the game will put ghost players in the other four spots so it can play the game. The ghost players don’t show up as individual players in your team stats, but their performance will be included in your team totals. They’re like invisible players that you don’t have to manage.
  • This seemed like a good compromise and it passed overwhelmingly.
  • Unfortunately, when we started simming, we found it was not all it was cracked up to be.
  • The game showed a strong tendency to use “real” players over ghost players, regardless of what managerial instructions you gave it. We thought if you had two starting pitchers on a team and you put them in a 5-man rotation, the game would use each of those two pitchers once every five games, and start ghost players the other three games. Nope. Instead, it started the real pitchers on short rest. Like, sometimes one day of rest, and sometimes NO rest. So when some teams’ prospects started three games in five days and then went out for five months with a throwing-related injury, it was real hard to not to think the overuse may have had something to do with it.
  • Before you say “Well, did you try adjusting the ‘SP Bench when fatigue %’ settings?” or “Did you try benching the pitcher for the first half of the sim?” or “Did you try different rotation settings, etc?" Yes, we tried everything. The game didn’t care. It’s programmed to favor real players over ghost players, and there’s no way to dissuade it from doing so.
  • So we figured that if the game likes “real” players so much, we could give it some real players to play with. We call them Minor League Placeholders. Generic bad pitchers that we can plug into the holes in our rotations so the game won’t use our real pitchers on short rest. It worked. It’s a kind of a pain in the butt, but it worked. So for now, we’re using it.
  • Following this season, we may drop the placeholders. We may drop the minor leagues. Who knows what we’ll do, that’s next season.

Rules for their use

  • Minor League Placeholders are optional. If you don’t want them, you don’t have to use them. But if one of your prospects starts 20 games in May and his arm falls off during his first start in June, don’t say you weren’t warned.
  • Under no cicumstances may a placeholder be released, traded, promoted, or demoted. Placeholders are never to be used at any other level other than the one that bears their name.
  • Placeholders are only necessary on minor league teams that have a) between one and four starting pitchers, and/or b) a pitcher or pitchers that the GM wishes to be used exclusively in relief (because the game will try to use relievers as starters if there’s an empty spot in the rotation). It is highly recommended that you have a placeholder in every empty rotation spot (e.g. Rotation spots 1–2: 2 real pitchers, Rotation spots 3–5: 3 placeholders).
  • You don’t need placeholders on a team that has no pitchers, nor do you need one on a team that has a full five-man rotation.
  • You don’t need placeholders in the bullpen.
  • If your placeholder requirements change—for instance if you move a real pitcher from one level to another and that creates a hole—post your needs in the minor_lg_placeholder_requests channel in Slack. Leave the rotation slot or slots that you need filled empty, and I will add placeholders as necessary before the sim.

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