NML
Well-Known Member
Today I’m starting a four-part series to introduce a new player to the WBL. This first section is very basic, and so someone familiar with baseball and OOTP probably won’t get much out of it. I’ve added some bolded “glossary” terms so if there’s something specific you aren’t sure of, you can reference it easily. Also, baseball is far from the sport I’m most knowledgeable about, so I could even be wrong about some of it! But hopefully someone new to the league with find some of this useful…
Section 1, Part 1 – Baseball and OOTP 101
I’m going to start with a, possibly faulty, assumption - that you at least understand the extreme basics of baseball (one team pitches while the other hits, most runs wins, etc.). But that’s about it – I’ll quickly gloss over the other simple things about the game and OOTP, and dive in on some more complex parts.
In our league, you start each game with 10 players: eight batters who both hit and field, a starting pitcher, and a designated hitter (or DH), who bats in place of your pitcher but does not play defense. You have the ability to set the starter, back-up, random spot starters, your pitcher rotation, and almost every other managerial decision there is to make in baseball in OOTP. You set these all before the game itself – one of our commissioners will simulate the league (almost) every day, and each sim covers seven days (generally 5 to 7 games). And just like real baseball, you play 162 games in a season against the other teams in the league. There’s also a pre-season, like in our sports, referred to as spring training. It’s about a month of games before the season starts against the rest of the league.
Our league is split into two sub-leagues – you might think of them as conferences like you see in other sports. Each sub-league has eight teams, with the top four who have the best record at the end of the season making the playoffs. The playoffs are a basic 1v4, 2v3 format for each sub-league, with the two winners facing in the World Series. These are played in a best of seven format. There’s more in these bits to unpack, which I’ll talk on in different sections. For now, let’s dive into the basics of roster management.
This screen is simultaneously one of the most helpful and scariest for a new player. I’ll work top left to right and down to break down these pieces.
The most important roster management is probably deciding who is on ur ACTIVE ROSTER. During the regular season, this is capped at 25 players. Generally, you want at least 12 of both pitchers and batters, with an extra 13th player able to fill in gaps on ur team or play a specialty role. These are the only players capable of playing a game for you during that sim, unless you have set ur roster management to CPU controlled – a quick aside here: generally, this is not a good idea, because the CPU lineup decisions are not normally optimal. You’d probably only want to do this if you were going to be gone for an extended period of time, but also consider reaching out to a commissioner to help you if that happens instead. It also sets the people you are able to pick from in the upcoming screens.
Next is ur 40 MAN ROSTER. This is one of the first baseball specific pieces, and there aren’t a ton of other sport equivalents. These are players within your organization – which refers to your active roster and ur minor league teams. I’ll talk more on minor leagues in a second, but you can add up to 15 additional players to this roster on top of those players currently playing in the majors for you (aka active roster). If ur like me, when I first saw this, my question was “why would I put a player on the 40 man?” I’ll touch on all the reasons you would have a player on this who wasn’t already on the active roster, but the main thing to keep in mind is this – unlike most sports, almost always, all 25 players on ur active roster will contribute each sim/week. In the NBA, a team is allowed 12 active players, but not all play every game (or even every week). In football, you can think of how lots of teams carry three quarterbacks while only one plays. That’s not the case for baseball. Each spot on a 25 man is important and should be utilized. So, what do you do with ur “back up QB?” You put them on the 40 man roster and they play on your AAA team (the top minor league). So, all the reasons someone would be on the 40 man and NOT the 25 man:
- They are just on the outside of the 25 man roster: Like the back-up QB example above, this is a player who you need as depth but is currently backing up better players. A baseball specific example would be a third catcher (teams carry two in the majors). If there’s an injury, you move this player back to the active roster.
- A short term injured player: when a player gets injured in the majors and they will be out for more than one sim, you’ll want to bring in a replacement. You do this by placing the injured player on the INJURED LIST (use to be called the disabled list). In our league, you can set it for 10 days or 60 days – if you do 10 days, that player remains on the 40 man. A 60 day would remove them from it. As a note, the number of days is from the last date they played, so if a player gets injured on a Wednesday and you put him on the IL on Monday, he’ll be able to be active after the next sim. You need to be careful here with when a player can be activated relative to his injury, and specifically relative to when he sim. Also, when a player comes back from a long-term injury, you’ll want to put him on a rehab assignment in the minors to shake off the rust. He’ll go to ur AAA team to get some reps for a few sims before you have to bring him back up.
- A player who is about to become a minor league free agent: so you’ve got these three minor league teams, which contain all ur prospects, back up players, and filler players. But you can’t keep them forever – as our league stands now, after six seasons in ur minor league system, a player is able to become a free agent and sign with another team. They don’t always, but if they are good enough for the majors, they probably would. And maybe you don’t want to lose them for nothing. By throwing them on the 40-man, they stay with ur team. In OOTP, if you go to Front Office > Upcoming FAs, you can see both major and minor league players who will be free agents after the season. The most common example of this would be a high school drafted player who still isn’t quite fully developed after six years, but still has the potential to play for ur major league team.
I’ll also want to touch on a few different contract/roster oddities here: SUPER TWO, ARBITRATION, and OPTION YEARS. Once a player gets a major league contract, typically by moving to the active roster for the first time, this “starts their clock.” That phrase exists because a player’s contract evolves over time - a player starts by getting three years of major league service on a minimum salary. A “year” refers to 172 days on the 25-man (or IL). That means that a player may stay on the minimum for longer than three years: if they spend a few seasons bouncing between the majors and minors before finally settling in, it may last five seasons. On the other side, there’s a group of players who won’t stay for three years – referred to as a SUPER TWO. A Super Two refers to the top 22% of players between two and three years of service. So if a player gets moved to the majors in May as a rookie, and then spends the next two seasons on the active roster full time, he will almost definitely qualify as a Super Two and no longer stay on the minimum.
So, what happens after the minimum salary? A player goes to ARBITRATION. You are probably familiar with the word outside of sports, and it pretty well defines it here. Once a player is out of the minimum salary years, they go to arbitration, which occurs at the end of the season. At this time, the team (aka you as the owner) will submit a salary that you feel is appropriate for the player, and the player will submit a number they think they are worth (a note: the game provides you with an estimate for the team side, so you don’t actually have to come up with this number). A neutral party picks which is fairer, and that is the player’s salary for the next season. A player goes to arbitration every offseason until they have six years of major league service. A team also has the ability to not offer arbitration, at which point they become a free agent. Teams also can release a player after the season (but before the pre-season!) during the minimum contract years without penalty. In many ways, an arbitration or minimum salary is a one year deal with a team option going forward. So, as you can probably tell, teams have a lot of control during the early years of a contract. A team never has to pay a player they don’t want to have, and almost always these years are well below market value - what they would get or you would pay in free agency. After they’ve reached six years of major league service, they can become free agents. At any time, if you open the Salaries tab under Front Office, you can see a player’s arbitration estimate for future years.
During this whole time, however, you can offer them a contract outside of minimum or arbitration. This almost never makes sense during the minimum years (I’ll talk about some outlier situations in a later section). However, sometimes it will for arbitration. Two options here: you can offer a player a one-year deal before arbitration hits – you will probably pay more than arbitration, but it will improve player morale – or you can offer them a multi-year contract. This has become more and more popular in real life and has existed for a while in the WBL. By “buying out” one or more of the arbitration years, you allow a young player to be locked up long term and not hit free agency. The most common situation is when you have a talented player who is still developing, but you want to lock them up because of that potential. You “buy out” the final arbitration year before that season and sign them to a five-year deal. This has some benefits and some cons. The obvious benefit is they won’t be a free agent after next season, but you can offer a new deal during the following season anyways. The bigger bonus is financially – a player that is still developing probably hasn’t played as well as they can, meaning their arbitration estimate is lower than their talent level, and by extension the contract they will sign is less than they would if they were playing up to their potential. This can help a team retain elite talent at a discount. But, there is a risk. A player may never reach his potential, and you’ve now locked up a player that you don’t want or who isn’t good enough to be stuck with you for another four years. They could get worse during that arbitration year, so you’ve overpaid for the whole contract. They could even get hurt and collapse, in which case you’ve locked urself up with a bad player for five seasons who you could’ve released with no penalty.
Finally, there are OPTION YEARS. Once a player gets a major league contract, they also get three option years. If a player goes to the minors at any point during a season, they use one of the option years. Once all three are used, a player cannot be sent to the minors without going through WAIVERS. This prevents teams from stacking talent in the minors that they don’t need. Let’s say you had a decent outfield that was ur fifth best, and he bounced between the majors and minors for three years as a depth player. Once year four comes around, he still isn’t good enough so you want to send him to the minors. This time, you will have to waive the player – he goes on the waivers with other players who are out of option years and their teams want to send them to the minors. Other teams can get that player for free (besides paying their contract) by “claiming” them. After a couple weeks, the team with the worst record who has submitted a claim on a player gets that player (and their salary). Keep in mind, that player is still out of option years, so you can’t acquire someone and then try and store them in the minors (without again going through waivers). If a player clears waiver, you still have to pay their salary, but they can remain in ur minor league system. You can call them back up, but if you want to demote them again they will have to go back through waivers. Keep in mind, any player you claim on waivers will retain their current contract and salary.
Okay, so we’ve finally moved to the next box. The next three are ur minor league rosters. If ur unfamiliar, each major league team has three minor league teams – groups of players under the umbrella of the team but not good enough to play in the majors. They are AAA, AA, and A, decreasing in general talent level as you go down. AAA is typically filled with veterans who are trying to catch on with a major league team, the depth players on the 40 man who aren’t currently on the 25 man, and prospects who you expect to break through to the majors in the next one to two seasons. A will be filled with recently drafted players, high school draftees who are only a few years out of school, or players recently promoted from the international complex (more on all that later). AA, obviously, covers the middle ground. You want an entire team at each level – they play from April until September (basically one month less than the majors) almost every day. I’ll break down the minors and subsequent strategy later, but the good news is this is something you can automate from ur manager options screen if it feels a little too overwhelming.
Most of the other screens we’ve talked about, with the exception of “Designated for Assignment.” These are players who have cleared waivers and need to be assigned to a team, players who have finished their rehab assignment, or recently acquired players who aren’t on a roster.
This covers some of the basics of baseball with a little bit of OOTP/WBL info. In my next post, I’ll touch on ur active roster - setting lineups and rotations, basic strategy in doing so, and some more on the differences in lineups in baseball vs other sports (hint: you don’t always play ur best players!)
Section 1, Part 1 – Baseball and OOTP 101
I’m going to start with a, possibly faulty, assumption - that you at least understand the extreme basics of baseball (one team pitches while the other hits, most runs wins, etc.). But that’s about it – I’ll quickly gloss over the other simple things about the game and OOTP, and dive in on some more complex parts.
In our league, you start each game with 10 players: eight batters who both hit and field, a starting pitcher, and a designated hitter (or DH), who bats in place of your pitcher but does not play defense. You have the ability to set the starter, back-up, random spot starters, your pitcher rotation, and almost every other managerial decision there is to make in baseball in OOTP. You set these all before the game itself – one of our commissioners will simulate the league (almost) every day, and each sim covers seven days (generally 5 to 7 games). And just like real baseball, you play 162 games in a season against the other teams in the league. There’s also a pre-season, like in our sports, referred to as spring training. It’s about a month of games before the season starts against the rest of the league.
Our league is split into two sub-leagues – you might think of them as conferences like you see in other sports. Each sub-league has eight teams, with the top four who have the best record at the end of the season making the playoffs. The playoffs are a basic 1v4, 2v3 format for each sub-league, with the two winners facing in the World Series. These are played in a best of seven format. There’s more in these bits to unpack, which I’ll talk on in different sections. For now, let’s dive into the basics of roster management.
This screen is simultaneously one of the most helpful and scariest for a new player. I’ll work top left to right and down to break down these pieces.
The most important roster management is probably deciding who is on ur ACTIVE ROSTER. During the regular season, this is capped at 25 players. Generally, you want at least 12 of both pitchers and batters, with an extra 13th player able to fill in gaps on ur team or play a specialty role. These are the only players capable of playing a game for you during that sim, unless you have set ur roster management to CPU controlled – a quick aside here: generally, this is not a good idea, because the CPU lineup decisions are not normally optimal. You’d probably only want to do this if you were going to be gone for an extended period of time, but also consider reaching out to a commissioner to help you if that happens instead. It also sets the people you are able to pick from in the upcoming screens.
Next is ur 40 MAN ROSTER. This is one of the first baseball specific pieces, and there aren’t a ton of other sport equivalents. These are players within your organization – which refers to your active roster and ur minor league teams. I’ll talk more on minor leagues in a second, but you can add up to 15 additional players to this roster on top of those players currently playing in the majors for you (aka active roster). If ur like me, when I first saw this, my question was “why would I put a player on the 40 man?” I’ll touch on all the reasons you would have a player on this who wasn’t already on the active roster, but the main thing to keep in mind is this – unlike most sports, almost always, all 25 players on ur active roster will contribute each sim/week. In the NBA, a team is allowed 12 active players, but not all play every game (or even every week). In football, you can think of how lots of teams carry three quarterbacks while only one plays. That’s not the case for baseball. Each spot on a 25 man is important and should be utilized. So, what do you do with ur “back up QB?” You put them on the 40 man roster and they play on your AAA team (the top minor league). So, all the reasons someone would be on the 40 man and NOT the 25 man:
- They are just on the outside of the 25 man roster: Like the back-up QB example above, this is a player who you need as depth but is currently backing up better players. A baseball specific example would be a third catcher (teams carry two in the majors). If there’s an injury, you move this player back to the active roster.
- A short term injured player: when a player gets injured in the majors and they will be out for more than one sim, you’ll want to bring in a replacement. You do this by placing the injured player on the INJURED LIST (use to be called the disabled list). In our league, you can set it for 10 days or 60 days – if you do 10 days, that player remains on the 40 man. A 60 day would remove them from it. As a note, the number of days is from the last date they played, so if a player gets injured on a Wednesday and you put him on the IL on Monday, he’ll be able to be active after the next sim. You need to be careful here with when a player can be activated relative to his injury, and specifically relative to when he sim. Also, when a player comes back from a long-term injury, you’ll want to put him on a rehab assignment in the minors to shake off the rust. He’ll go to ur AAA team to get some reps for a few sims before you have to bring him back up.
- A player who is about to become a minor league free agent: so you’ve got these three minor league teams, which contain all ur prospects, back up players, and filler players. But you can’t keep them forever – as our league stands now, after six seasons in ur minor league system, a player is able to become a free agent and sign with another team. They don’t always, but if they are good enough for the majors, they probably would. And maybe you don’t want to lose them for nothing. By throwing them on the 40-man, they stay with ur team. In OOTP, if you go to Front Office > Upcoming FAs, you can see both major and minor league players who will be free agents after the season. The most common example of this would be a high school drafted player who still isn’t quite fully developed after six years, but still has the potential to play for ur major league team.
I’ll also want to touch on a few different contract/roster oddities here: SUPER TWO, ARBITRATION, and OPTION YEARS. Once a player gets a major league contract, typically by moving to the active roster for the first time, this “starts their clock.” That phrase exists because a player’s contract evolves over time - a player starts by getting three years of major league service on a minimum salary. A “year” refers to 172 days on the 25-man (or IL). That means that a player may stay on the minimum for longer than three years: if they spend a few seasons bouncing between the majors and minors before finally settling in, it may last five seasons. On the other side, there’s a group of players who won’t stay for three years – referred to as a SUPER TWO. A Super Two refers to the top 22% of players between two and three years of service. So if a player gets moved to the majors in May as a rookie, and then spends the next two seasons on the active roster full time, he will almost definitely qualify as a Super Two and no longer stay on the minimum.
So, what happens after the minimum salary? A player goes to ARBITRATION. You are probably familiar with the word outside of sports, and it pretty well defines it here. Once a player is out of the minimum salary years, they go to arbitration, which occurs at the end of the season. At this time, the team (aka you as the owner) will submit a salary that you feel is appropriate for the player, and the player will submit a number they think they are worth (a note: the game provides you with an estimate for the team side, so you don’t actually have to come up with this number). A neutral party picks which is fairer, and that is the player’s salary for the next season. A player goes to arbitration every offseason until they have six years of major league service. A team also has the ability to not offer arbitration, at which point they become a free agent. Teams also can release a player after the season (but before the pre-season!) during the minimum contract years without penalty. In many ways, an arbitration or minimum salary is a one year deal with a team option going forward. So, as you can probably tell, teams have a lot of control during the early years of a contract. A team never has to pay a player they don’t want to have, and almost always these years are well below market value - what they would get or you would pay in free agency. After they’ve reached six years of major league service, they can become free agents. At any time, if you open the Salaries tab under Front Office, you can see a player’s arbitration estimate for future years.
During this whole time, however, you can offer them a contract outside of minimum or arbitration. This almost never makes sense during the minimum years (I’ll talk about some outlier situations in a later section). However, sometimes it will for arbitration. Two options here: you can offer a player a one-year deal before arbitration hits – you will probably pay more than arbitration, but it will improve player morale – or you can offer them a multi-year contract. This has become more and more popular in real life and has existed for a while in the WBL. By “buying out” one or more of the arbitration years, you allow a young player to be locked up long term and not hit free agency. The most common situation is when you have a talented player who is still developing, but you want to lock them up because of that potential. You “buy out” the final arbitration year before that season and sign them to a five-year deal. This has some benefits and some cons. The obvious benefit is they won’t be a free agent after next season, but you can offer a new deal during the following season anyways. The bigger bonus is financially – a player that is still developing probably hasn’t played as well as they can, meaning their arbitration estimate is lower than their talent level, and by extension the contract they will sign is less than they would if they were playing up to their potential. This can help a team retain elite talent at a discount. But, there is a risk. A player may never reach his potential, and you’ve now locked up a player that you don’t want or who isn’t good enough to be stuck with you for another four years. They could get worse during that arbitration year, so you’ve overpaid for the whole contract. They could even get hurt and collapse, in which case you’ve locked urself up with a bad player for five seasons who you could’ve released with no penalty.
Finally, there are OPTION YEARS. Once a player gets a major league contract, they also get three option years. If a player goes to the minors at any point during a season, they use one of the option years. Once all three are used, a player cannot be sent to the minors without going through WAIVERS. This prevents teams from stacking talent in the minors that they don’t need. Let’s say you had a decent outfield that was ur fifth best, and he bounced between the majors and minors for three years as a depth player. Once year four comes around, he still isn’t good enough so you want to send him to the minors. This time, you will have to waive the player – he goes on the waivers with other players who are out of option years and their teams want to send them to the minors. Other teams can get that player for free (besides paying their contract) by “claiming” them. After a couple weeks, the team with the worst record who has submitted a claim on a player gets that player (and their salary). Keep in mind, that player is still out of option years, so you can’t acquire someone and then try and store them in the minors (without again going through waivers). If a player clears waiver, you still have to pay their salary, but they can remain in ur minor league system. You can call them back up, but if you want to demote them again they will have to go back through waivers. Keep in mind, any player you claim on waivers will retain their current contract and salary.
Okay, so we’ve finally moved to the next box. The next three are ur minor league rosters. If ur unfamiliar, each major league team has three minor league teams – groups of players under the umbrella of the team but not good enough to play in the majors. They are AAA, AA, and A, decreasing in general talent level as you go down. AAA is typically filled with veterans who are trying to catch on with a major league team, the depth players on the 40 man who aren’t currently on the 25 man, and prospects who you expect to break through to the majors in the next one to two seasons. A will be filled with recently drafted players, high school draftees who are only a few years out of school, or players recently promoted from the international complex (more on all that later). AA, obviously, covers the middle ground. You want an entire team at each level – they play from April until September (basically one month less than the majors) almost every day. I’ll break down the minors and subsequent strategy later, but the good news is this is something you can automate from ur manager options screen if it feels a little too overwhelming.
Most of the other screens we’ve talked about, with the exception of “Designated for Assignment.” These are players who have cleared waivers and need to be assigned to a team, players who have finished their rehab assignment, or recently acquired players who aren’t on a roster.
This covers some of the basics of baseball with a little bit of OOTP/WBL info. In my next post, I’ll touch on ur active roster - setting lineups and rotations, basic strategy in doing so, and some more on the differences in lineups in baseball vs other sports (hint: you don’t always play ur best players!)
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