European Baseball Championship Sim

[raysox 1,186]

 

Hey guys. Giving this new subforum a try! So OOTP is a great game. For those of you who don't know, it's a big baseball sim with a crazy amount of mod potential. After winning back to back World Series with the Rockies, I wanted a new challenge. That was to take the Australian Baseball League and try to make them as good as other Pacific leagues. It was an uphill battle that I got bored with.

 

Now, I had a second idea. You might be asking who are the teams above? Well they are the 6 members of the new Great Britain Baseball Association, or GBBA. I figured I could start from scratch and make this league as good as the Italian and Dutch leagues, which are in game.

 

So here is who we have. A few of these names were generated by the game my first attempt, and they were so good they stuck.

 

With a fresh start league, I have expansion turned on and we can go from there. The inaugural draft stacks teams, which I can't fix. Then after that, the draft levels match the country's reputation. So these guys play 100 games starting in April, and the two best teams play in the Queen's Cup. Eventually it'll expand to a North and South divisions. 

 

In year one this is what happened. Newcastle and Southampton were the class of the league. Running away with it, and finishing a game apart. These teams are incredibly evenly matched. Newcastle became the first champion after beating the Southies in a win or go home game 5. I messed up and didn't see the final game of the season. I regret it because it was a walk off 2 run home run. Doesn't get any more dramatic than that, folks!

 

So that's where we are. I'm going to skip a few years. I added the Israel Baseball League to the mix, which is the same teams as the league of the same name that played only one season. Ideally players will be traded on an open market between leagues, and Netherlands and Italy will catch up with the two newbies.

 

Expansion is off in Israel, but when the GBBA expands, I'll take suggestions on names. One major thing I just did was reset the salaries and stuff to a more reasonable limit to the teams. England was overpaying players based on what I think would really be good for spreading the wealth. "Superstars" make around 100k a year, then it scales down from there.

 

Until then, enjoy!

 

[CodeG 58]

Interesting.... I had a similar idea awhile ago with OOTP. But was never sure how to incorporate it into the OOTP system

[raysox 1,186]

30 minutes ago, CodeG said:

Interesting.... I had a similar idea awhile ago with OOTP. But was never sure how to incorporate it into the OOTP system

Yeah so how I did it was create GBBA, then added other leagues before generating the game. You can create leagues mid save so that's why Israel joined a year after.

Simmed season 2, nothing crazy happened and it was really just setting up the schematics of the leagues. The seasons start at weird times of the year, so going into year 3 I'm trying to get everyone on the same timeline with a 100 game season. Some good things happened where the free agents were posted as a pool of all 4 leagues together. So there seems to be some lateral movement when the salaries are comparable. My next goal is to import the branding of Netherlands and Italy.

[StaatsBrett 85]

If you want any  stadiums  the ootp forms has some good ones and also didn't you do a rays stadium once?

[Roadrunner8ball 50]

I already commented on Twitter a while back about the logos and I'll say it again. All are top notch and I'm very much interested in where you take this story-wise down the road.

[cubsfan2015 111]

Very interesting idea. Will be watching very closely.

[RoughRiders99 31]

This is great! I was sorta waiting for you, Raysox, to start something up on this new sub! 

I plan on doing the same thing with OOTP, but not quite yet. Down the road, for sure. Keeping a close eye on this! 

[osctheg 65]

I will definently keep an eye on this, could be very fun

[raysox 1,186]

 

So after a long time figuring out some OOTP things, I think we're finally able to move on! I'm laying down the ground rules with this. It'll work out a lot like the Caribbean Series. The 4 playoff winners of the leagues will move on to a round robin tournament simmed in the single game simulation module. I'll randomize the 4 team names and that order will determine the home teams. I'll post results when it happens.

 

I'll automatically add some prize money for winning too.

[RoughRiders99 31]

That's awesome! Just out of curiosity, how did you set that "tournament" up in OOTP? Is it all in one file or do you export/import and use separate game files? 

[raysox 1,186]

You can sim single games under the same menu as skip a week/play game etc is. At the bottom you can do single games vs any team in the game, best of whatever series, or a whole 162 games between two teams

[Jaffa 342]

Go Hull Black Wolves, that's what I say!

 

Folk claimed to have encountered a monstrous werewolf in these parts last year, but clearly it was just the local GBBA club's mascot on his way home from the ball game.

[raysox 1,186]

Finally had some time to sim the 2018 season! The regular seasons were tight, except for the Netherlands which was a runaway by Curacao Neptunus. The regular season champions won the playoffs. The GBBA playoffs were eliminated this season because I had simmed the season and then the playoff roster broke and I had to quit and reload.

 

The European Championship was the first chance to see teams together. Israel probably had the deepest rosters, and it showed. Their insane spending lead to a thumping of Curacao and they coasted from there. Other than that, the other games all stayed close. Modiin pulled away late in every game they had, just due to the lack of bullpens of certain teams. 

 

Going into the offseason, all of the best players are English or Israeli. I balanced the balance of the teams out, so the Dutch and Italians should be able to sign good players who are still cheap.

 

The draft classes coming in aren't good, so I expect these 5 star players to bounce around to the highest bidder and drive up salaries. There are several Latin American players coming in as international free agents with good potential, so sooner or later they'll be hot commodities. Also COventry is the worst run franchise I've ever seen. Once they traded for a 5 star starting pitcher from Israel from 2 players, then released him the next day, and he went on to sign for the team that traded him. Gonna try and fix them going forward.

 

Is there anything you guys want to see moving forward?

 

[raysox 1,186]

So I did another season real quick for the night. Going into this season, I changed a few rules for leagues. Italy and Netherlands had a limit on foreign players and that they couldn't trade with other leagues. Setting all leagues to 10 foreigners lets them stock up on some free agents while still remaining true to their country. This resulted in Italy and Netherlands improving at the top of their roster. The seasons played out very different to the previous season.

 

All but Modiin were new champions, just squeaking out a title campaign. by under 4 games in each over the defending champs.

 

But in the 3 playoff series, underdogs won. San Marino nearly won the Italian League, and made up that difference and then some in a 4 game series. The Oosterhout Twins upset Curacao(who literally had a WAR change in the offseason of -38), and then went on to beat UVV. Then in the biggest upset, the Blue Sox beat the best team in this save convincingly.

 

While this set of European Championship games didn't have the extra innings games like the last one did, I felt the overall quality was better. Very few blowouts and non-regular season champions resulted in a championship that came down to a 4-0 Newcastle and 3-1 Blue Sox series to prove who really has the best pair of hose. Newcastle went undefeated but snuck by in nearly every game.

 

Going forward, I'm forcing expansion on Italy. The new team will be the Grosseto Gryphons, a real team in Italy that wasn't in the top league when this game decided who is up. Italy was playing less games in the same amount of times as everyone else due to a forced bye for a single team in every series. The expansion draft will hurt the teams, but with a full offseason of moves to make with other leagues means they can retool their roster.

[Cbj111201 5]

Have you thought about making an association if or when you add more European leagues?

Also have you thought about adding new leagues in the future?

[raysox 1,186]

It's funny you say that because I was thinking about it this morning. The diamond logo I made is easily expandable to 1 and 2 more points.

 

Germany/Czech Republic would be the first league and Spain will be the second league. I'm not sure when a good time to expand, but I think it might be this offseason. I have a few different choices.  I could just create 4 teams and the only thing is one has to be Czech and one has to be at this stadium. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armin-Wolf-Arena

 

But there is a weak European league that tried to get Italian and Dutch teams to play, but it ended up being 2 German teams and a Czech team. Most places have baseball teams, but the only thing that'd stop me from using them is accessibility to logos. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_League_Baseball

 

if I brought Euroball into this I'd rename it an all encompassing Central Europe league and take teams from the Baseball bundesliga

[StaatsBrett 85]

I would add  teams that are apart of sports clubs such as fcb, bayern Munich and others since in reality this would probably be the only way for baseball to go big in Europe because of the cost accompanying building brand new fields and practice facilities and stadiums. 

[RoughRiders99 31]

Great updates as always. Very excited to see the future of the league expansions and new leagues as well. 

 

Questions: what is the source of the players in those leagues? Where do they come from? Do you have a minor or feeder leagues? How do you deal with potentially incomplete rosters for some teams if you expand too quickly? 

[raysox 1,186]

1 hour ago, StaatsBrett said:

I would add  teams that are apart of sports clubs such as fcb, bayern Munich and others since in reality this would probably be the only way for baseball to go big in Europe because of the cost accompanying building brand new fields and practice facilities and stadiums. 

That's a good point. I think I have the 6 teams I want down and now I need to act on it. I think as of right now I'll pass on it due to teams existing. It is an option for Spanish teams though, which I need to look into.

 

59 minutes ago, RoughRiders99 said:

Great updates as always. Very excited to see the future of the league expansions and new leagues as well. 

 

Questions: what is the source of the players in those leagues? Where do they come from? Do you have a minor or feeder leagues? How do you deal with potentially incomplete rosters for some teams if you expand too quickly? 

England has a u23 system but I'm not entirely sure they're getting any developed players from it. All the leagues have the same dates for drafts and roster stuff, so I have a big draft day but players normally aren't great. The game is good with regulating roster sizes and stuff. So a 40 man date happens late July. Each team has a reserve roster, but there's enough free agents to fill that spot if they don't have the players.

 

i finished season 3 and I'm gonna play around with a league and manually moving the winners to it after the season. Gonna do an unofficial test run this offseason and see how it'll work going forward. I found the ticked check mark that messed up the English baseball playoffs so that's back for this season

[RoughRiders99 31]

Awesome, looking forward to this! Keep up the good work, sir.