Okay, I am writing this as a guide or primer to new OOTP managers. The league site is Know this site because it is essential to learning this game. Once you pick a team, you will see several reports on your teampage. I will give an example: Padres Team Page has this: AVAILABLE REPORTS : Ratings Report Top Prospects Report Batting Stats Pitching Stats Fielding Stats Minor League Report Team Salary Report Team Financial Report Team Coaching Staff Report The ratings report is, IMO, the single most important report for you to look at. It lists all of your players and shows their actual (numerical ratings) talent and projected talent. The talents are as follows: brilliant, good, average, fair, and poor. As you can imagine, someone with a brilliant in a category is at the top while someone with a poor is at the bottom. If you see a player who is brilliant in homers but their numerical rating is like a 4 or so, then that tells you that they are developing into their talent. This is normally true with prospects. If you can understand this report, you will be way ahead in learning how to play this game. Prospects report tells you who the game feels is your top 10 prospects and lists their talents - another important one to know. The next 3 are stats and not as important as others. The Minor League Report is critical as it tells you how your prospects are doing and will tell you when they are ready to move on to the next level. Salary report is also crucial as it lists your players' contracts and tells you who will be a Free Agent at the end of the season. Most new guys completely forget to resign their FAs. I did that for like the first 2 seasons. Financial report lists your revenue, fan interest, payroll, but most importantly how much money you have to resign your own FAs and how much money to sign existing FAs. If you only have 10 million to use to resign your own FAs, then obviously you cannot offer A-Rod (for example) a contract that is 10 million plus a penny. The next section is this one: TEAM NEWS : General News Injury News Transactions News Player Development Team History Injury news tells you who is out and for how long. Player development is very important as it lists who has received talent increases and talent decreases for your team. As for the rest of the stuff, I'll have to talk about it later as I am running out of time (for now). Teams that are available are the ones on the league site that say "Computer Manager" for the Manager name (except for Oakland as Castor just gave them up). Also, it is a very good idea to ask people like me, Chuck, The Cat, Heath,etc (those who have been in the sim for a while) any questions you have about the league, especially on trades. Having a "trade advisor" is probably the smartest thing that a new guy to the sim can do. If you are interested in joining, let me or Chuck know or post in this thread. Good luck!
Oski..... Take a look at the teams and choose one you would like before someone else snaps it up. Most team pages are updated so anyone that say computer manager will be yours. Take a look at the Line-up thread and you'll get a pretty good idea of what you'll need to do. You can also thumb through the Trade Talk thread but I would pass along and trade ideas by one of the senior members before you accept anything. Guys like Chuck, Manny, Cat, and DHR are pretty helpful and won't let you make any moves you'll regret later - that is until you get your feet wet and then all bets are off.
The Cubs are a very solid team right now. Buck just meant that it looks like they're available. Although, I must warn you, the NL central is usually among the tougher divisions in the sim. Buck is making the Astros a top notch team again, and Chuck and his Reds have been solid in this sim. But that won't last long now that I'm the Cardinals again. I guess I should cut down on the trash talking, now that he's the commish. You'll catch on...it's not hard. There are plenty of guys that will help you to know everything you need to know.
Okay, a couple of other things to add as I talked about the OOTP site, now I need to talk about the OOTP related threads here on the BBS. There are 5 main OOTP threads: 1) Lineups 2) Trade Discussions 3) Transactions 4) Spring Training 5) Re-Signings The Lineups thread is where you post your lineup (duh!), but you also make all your moves there such as calling people up from the minors, placing guys on the disabled list, releasing players, setting your rotation and bullpen, and setting up a depth chart just to name a few. After every sim, Chuck posts the results to league site. It will upload and this takes a little bit of time. When the upload is completed, you will see that the date on the main page has changed. You then can click on your team link and review what has happened in the past sim with your team and if you need to make any changes. It used to be that if you made any changes, all you had to do was go to your original post and highlight in red your changes. However, with edit turned off, you obviously cannot do that, so you just have to make another post. The Lineups thread is by far the most important of these 5. Trade Discussions is just that. You discuss players you would like to trade or would like to have in that thread. You can also use email and the chat room to discuss trades. However, don't post trades in that thread as the transaction thread has its own thread. We do this because it makes things easier to track. Once you agree on a deal with someone, you post the trade in the transactions thread and the other party (is supposed to) will confirm it. It is very rare that we will have a trade voided, but once upon a time, we had a guy that was constantly doing stupid deals, so we had to void several of his trades. If you are NEW, please consult with a manager who has been in the sim for some time if you are thinking about a trade. There is no shame in asking someone to review a possible trade with you. On bigger deals, I will still from time to time ask other managers that I deal with what their thoughts are on the deal. Also, you cannot offer deals to the computer teams, but you can place players "on the trading block" and see if the computer teams will offer for them. I classify computer offers as one of 3 categories: 1) 60% of the time you will get an offer in which the deal is even for both sides 2) 35% of the time the computer will try to tear you a new one 3) 5% of the time the computer will make an offer that you will not believe as it is too good to be true Spring Training thread is done once a season and is used to try to improve players' weaknesses in certain areas. You are given up to 5 players (I think) and allotted 20 points. For position players, the categories are contact, power, strike zone judgment, and defense. For pitchers, the categories are pure stuff, control, velocity, and stamina. This is also the time that if you want to change a SS into a 3B, you can do it by saying "Learn New Role" and allocate points to it...just make sure that you have everything add up to 20. Now why would you want to do this? Take for example, reliever Kevin Walker on my team, the Padres. If you look at his ratings, he is solid in everything except walks, where he has a "3" or a fair. If you look at the spring training thread, you will notice that I wanted a "10" for his control. I am hoping by placing that many points on his control will help raise his numerical rating for walks. It may not have any effect, but a lot of times it will work. The danger, though, is that your player may decrease in something else. That is why many managers say "auto" for their ST. The final thread is the re-signing thread. This has only been a recent thing and used to be posted on the BBS near the end of the season. However, you don't have to do your re-signings on the BBS; you can do them in chat. Basically, you look and see at whose contracts are up at the end of the season that you want to keep. You also have to check your financial page to see how much money you have to re-sign people. Then you post in the re-signing thread something like "Padres: I would like to see what Oliver Perez, Jake Peavey, sean burroughs, etc, want" Chuck comes back and tells you that they either want an offer or gives you a contract. If they want an offer, then you have to say what you think is a fair contract like "5 for 3" (5 million per season for 3 years). If they tell you the contract they want, you don't have to accept that. You can try to see if they will take something lower. My advice for a new manager is not do this until you get a feel for contract negotiations. The last thing you want to do is piss off a player and they do get pissed in contract negotiations if they think you are lowballing them. Once again, if you have any questions, let one of the senior mgrs know.
One thing about ST though. You can not raise a players numerical talent beyound his talent, so if his talent is crap doing ST on that area wont help you much. I dont think that numerical values have been linked with talents yet, so here is the limits. Poor: 0-2 Fair: 2-4 Average: 4-6 Good: 6-8 Brilliant: 8+ Some players though may never develop into their talents - these are the eddie griffins of the world. Most players however eventually will find themselves in the range I posted, some will even improve their talents (talent development, also known as t-devs), and then they can surpass their initial ratings ceiling. You also have some players with split talent that could be better vs lefts or rights pitchers/batter. It is their total talent that is displayed in their profiles and can not be passed. To illustrate this I'll show the profile of one of my players - Tim Spooneybarger : http://users2.ev1.net/~chkemp/ootp/1202.htm Avoiding Runs : 7 Avoiding Hits : 8 (VS. RHB : 7, VS. LHB : 8, Talent Good) Avoiding Doubles : 6 (VS. RHB : 9, VS. LHB : 4, Talent Good) Avoiding Homeruns : 7 (VS. RHB : 6, VS. LHB : 7, Talent Good) Avoiding BB's : 4 (VS. RHB : 7, VS. LHB : 1, Talent Fair) Getting Strikeouts : 7 (VS. RHB : 5, VS. LHB : 8, Talent Good) As you can see from this segment from his profile his talent in awoiding walks (BB's) is fair, with a range I posted over as 2-4. But his ratings vs right hand batters is in the good range (6-8) with a 7, while his ratings vs left hand batters is poor with a 1. Checking splits for you batters is more important though as you have to leave the decisions on who of the relievers to bring in when to the computer and hope that it uses your relievers to your liking. For batters though you can set a lineup/depthchart of which players you would like to start/use vs left and right handed pitchers. http://users2.ev1.net/~chkemp/ootp/364.htm This is an example of the type of players you would like to keep away from your left lineups. Most guys however will have pretty even splits and can be used fairly even vs boths. One more thing to think about with splits and lineups. Left Handed Pitchers (LHP) pitch better to batters that bat left (if the ratings are even) and RHPs pitch better to batters that bat right. This of course also does that even batters bat better vs pitchers that pitch vs a his least favorite type batter.
The FA period was just a few days a go - it is always just before the draft, so you will have to consentrate on next years FA to get good FA's. But however, anyone can sign claim unsigned FA's. You can find these at the free agents list. Those come cheap, and will only sign for a one year deal. The first one to claim them will get the players remaining. You can claim them when you post your lineups or if you want to claim one before you post your lineup you just claim the player in the transactions thread. "Sign xxxx to a contract"
One more thing that you might notice others doing in the lineup thread is to set promotion games. OOTP has 5 types of promotion that will increase you fan support and long term attendance and also increase attendance for that one promotion game. 4 of those can be done monthly (glove, bat, cap, pitcher?), and one is a once a year thing (retro day). Nothing increases fan support as winning though, I have found out so usually you gain almost the same fan support for just winning games (you need to win the promotion game for the fan support to go up anyway), but the financial gain otherwise for the one game usually covers the cost of each promotion type so you should really do a couple of them each month (or even 4). You will see most tell Chuck to just set the promotion dates on random (only home games of course), but if you want to monitor your chances of winning the promotion game you could check the upcoming schedule link to check for games with better chance of being won, or even check the boxscores to find out who pitched your last game, and count your way in the rotation for a series vs said team where you have a favorable pitching duel. Of course you will then end up winning the games you're supposed to lose and losing the games you thought you would win. I had did that one season and I had a much better win ratio on random than I did on selecting games myself.
"Nodding Head Doll" Day or Bobblehead Doll Day is the other one that can be done monthly along with glove, bat, and baseball cap.
Quick question. Can I play a SS at 2B? Do I have to change positions during spring training? What about a 1B playing 3rd or vice versa?
It depends...click on the player's profile, and see if he has any range at positions other than what he is listed as (under "Defensive Ratings"). You can play the player at any of the positions listed there. Otherwise, you can put a player anywhere you want (like putting a pitcher in the outfield), but it is not recommended and will probably hurt your defense.
