legendsport's "The Completely Fictional History of Baseball" Dynasty

One of the best dynasties on OOTP is legendsport's dynasty. legendsport has an ambitious goal -- to retell the complete history of professional baseball. All of it. The minor leagues, the majors, hell...everything.

However, since he doesn't have every stat that man ever wrote, he'll do it with fictional players.

Add to this goal OOTP's league-customization capacities, the power of OOTP's Facegen, and some mods for both 19th century players (and 19th century whiskers!) one gets a fascinating record of an alternate baseball history that runs on a parallel track to our current one.

As I write this, legendsport's gotten as far as the 1883 season. Let's hope he achieves this ambitious goal!

A Baseball Mogul Renaissance?

A side note: CatKnight alerted me to an OOTP link by cephasjames, which you can find under the "logos" section on the left-hand side of the page. It is a multitude, a virtual cornucopia of team logo goodness, and I'm sure that most of those logos can be adopted to Baseball Mogul, to uniform building, or to whatever project you want to undertake.

Is it just me, or have dynasties really taken off and blossomed in Baseball Mogul? Yes, I know there's a multitude of great dynasties at OOTP which are not only more numerous but more detailed and of longer duration than most of BM's short-lived dynasties.

However, compared to what existed before at Baseball Mogul, it seems that everyone who has Baseball Mogul 08 is building a dynasty and posting the results. CatKnight has his great "Cardinal Sins" dynasty; there are two great Blue Jays dynasties by Overbay17 and walker60, skudplayer has a Washington Nationals dynasty, HoustonGM, jianoran, the list goes on and on and if I've not mentioned someone, please don't take it as a slight.

Even though BM has its limitations as a game compared to OOTP, it looks like BM fans are taking those limitations and are stretching them in new and interesting ways. After the beating that BM sometimes takes in some quarters, it's enheartening to see.

Free Agency House Rules

I have now opened a GeoCities account where I intend to collect and post the various house rules that people submit. OldFatGuy at the Baseball Mogul board has given me permission to host his Free Agency rules.

The current rules are at this GeoCities website (click the link). Yes, it's GeoCities, but it's free, and "free" is definitely within my budget.

When I get enough pages started, you'll see a link at the left that will direct you to all of the house rules.

Edit: heads up to Overbay17 for noting the busted link. It should work now.

Back on the DL

OldFatGuy wrote up some "house rules" for Baseball Mogul that I thought were quite remarkable. I want to find a place to host them, but I don't know where so that project will have to wait.

Probably won't get back to another blog post until tomorrow or Saturday. After all, I not only like writing about dynasties, but writing dynasties myself. More later.

"Once and For All, Why Not the Best?"

The above title comes from a song from the Jimmy Carter campaign in 1976. Why the title? More below.

Let's suppose you're drafting players for your BM/OOTP team. Normally, you can build yourself into an unbeatable dynasty in BM in two years, anyway, but let's say you're mired at .500 or below. Your problem, my friend, is pitching. You have no starting pitching to speak up, just a bunch of has-beens and never-weres thrown in the rotation to soak up runs for their ballooning ERAs.

The draft has come up and you're drafting in a fairly good position. It's finally your turn to pick, and it's time for your franchise to invest in the future.

The best remaining starting pitcher is Player A. He's okay, a sort of mid-range first round draft pick overall. Other better starting pitchers have gone before him, but Player A is still available and is ready for you to pick up the phone and call him and say, "Welcome to the Lugnuts."

However, there is an outfielder -- Player B -- who hasn't been picked yet. Player B is a top-range draft pick. In terms of pure ability, he's better than your starting pitcher, better enough for it to be noticed -- the reason he hasn't been drafted yet is that there's been a run on pitchers.

Your problem as Lugnuts GM/owner is that hitting isn't your problem. You've already got a core of outfielders that are good hitters and good fielders, and maybe a guy or two to back them up. Currently, Player B's about as useful as t*ts on a duck.

On the other hand -- Player B could be trade bait for a veteran starting pitcher somewhere. Furthermore, if lighting strikes and your outfielders pull their hamstrings or die rescuing kittens from flaming bourbon factories, in a few years Pkayer B will be ready to take their places.

So what do you do? Do you pass Player B up and take Player A, because pitching fills your needs, or do you take the best player available in the draft, regardless of redundancies?

More House Rules

With regard to the house rules thread, I'll provide some of the "house rules" for my "Even the Braves" dynasty.

1) No free agent can be signed for more than $5.3 million/year. This eliminates most of the superlative free agents. However, a free agent can be signed for up to $5.6 million/year on a roll of 1-3 on a d10 (ten sided die). One can reroll, however, every three game days.

One can sign a free agent for any price on a roll of 1 on a d10. One can also reroll every 3 days if one doesn't get a satisfactory roll. This rule, however, should not be abused.

2) Revenue sharing: currently, my "Even the Braves" dynasty has a primitive form of revenue sharing:

a) Revenue can only be taken from the largest spending team in the American League and the largest spending team in the National League. Second-place spenders are not affected.

b) For calculation purposes, one takes the larger of the following two values as team salary:

- team salary before Game 1
--team salary immediately at the end of the World Series

c) If the National League top team salary exceeds $160 million, the offending team is fined at a dollar-per-dollar rate above that threshold. The excess is then spread among the other teams:

Example: 11 team league
Top team salary: $171 million
Fine: $171 million - $160 million = $11 million
$11 million distributed among 11 teams = $1 million/team

Top team salary: $158 million -- no fine and no changes

d) If the American Leage top team salary exceeds $150 million, the offending team is fined 75 percent of the excess. The excess is spread among the other team:

Example: 8 team league
Top team salary: $159.33333 million
Fine: 75 percent of $9.33333 million = $7 million
$7 million distrubted among 11 teams = $1 million/team

House Rules and OldFatGuy's "Card" System for Baseball Mogul

One of the problems with Baseball Mogul is that the AI for each team acts the same. (In OOTP, each team has a priority that determines the goal of the team, giving each team different priorities.)

Since each BM team acts the same, all other things being equal, cash dominates and big-market teams build unbreakable dynasties. However, players have several advantages over the AI. First, players tend to be smarter, and most players can take the worst of teams and manage them to 1936-39 Yankees status within one or two game years. Second, players get first pick when it comes to signing free agents, and the players do not artificially tender several offers at once. They only sign you. (The second advantage might be the cause of the first.)

In one of the Baseball Mogul threads -- "A New Era is Born" -- rockiesfan4ever relates some "house rules" to make your Baseball Dynasty more interesting, particularly as it comes to the signing of free agents.

Here's what I do. I find I have to give rules for myself to keep it challenging too. My first rule is total number of FA I can sign. I base this on last seasons finish and it equals the number of places behind first I finish in the standings. So, if I finish 1st, I can sign 0, 2nd means I can sign 1, third means 2, etc. My second rule is I can only sign 2 (assuming I can sign at least 2 from rule 1) per day. Seems reasonable, most of the top ones are gone the first day. My third rule limits who I can negotiate with. It is a little complicated, but here goes.

I look at the player I wish to sign. I use a deck of cards which has 4 suits (and two jokers), and shuffle them and draw a card and that card tells me whether this player will negotiate with me or not. If I draw a joker it always means the player will not negotiate, so I fail to sign him. If I draw a spade it always means the player will negotiate. The other 3 suits are determined like this:
If I draw a HEART: This player will negotiate with me only if his ambition is less than or equal to 0 (meaning he's not concerned about team success) OR if his ambiition is positive than I must have finished no worse than second in my division. Otherwise, his ambition prevents him from negotiating with my team.
If I draw a DIAMOND: This player will only negotiate with me if his greed is positive.
If I draw a CLUB: This player will only negotiate with me if his personality "fit" with my team is above C. I.E., C+ or better.

Finally, when I get to negotiate with a player, I draw another card. If I draw a joker here, it means he changed his mind and won't negotiate. The suits determine how offers I can submit. If its black (Club or Spade), then I can only make 2 offers. If he doesn't accept my second offer, I lost him. If the card is a DIAMOND, I can only make 1 offer. And if that card is a HEART, then I can make 3 offers.

Sorry for the length. But you asked for ideas. That's how I do it that adds some randomness and some sort of realism (basing it personality and such), and adds a challenge to the human player. That last card I draw determining number of offers just it makes it more challenging financially. If you can only make one offer, you better make one you're sure he's gonna like.

I think it's a great set of house rules -- one of the great things about a great set of house rules is that you wish you had thought of it yourself. Furthermore, it makes great use of the "personality" statistics of Baseball Mogul under the personality tab of a player profile. These stats don't figure into the game, but under the house rules, they have a use.

All in all, a great set of rules. If you have your own house rules, share them in the comments. I'll add my "Even the Braves" house rules -- which are very short -- in a future post.