Had five players(college) from the first draft join "The Show" in our second season, some because of injuries to my regulars. I've done pretty good with my first two drafts. It's been rough sledding with 51 wins the first year, 52 the second season. I currently just finished my second season with the Expos. If you do 3, you'll get too many young, really good prospects, which isn't reality to me. *For the expansion draft, I usually protect anywhere from 22-25 players to make it more of a challenge, and always 4 years of service. 1st to expand, no specific reason, just what I do. Usually Montreal(which I take), then Orlando or Mexico City. I generally sim 5-7 seasons, then expand to two teams. So you can create a new team without and minor affiliates. You can set which level, league they are in and as many or few as you want. In 21 they changed it so you could control the minor league affiliates when setting up an expansion team. You can check the rosters and manually move star prospects if you want so they stay with the parent club. If you're even less finicky, you can just take extra teams oul of the Florida/Arizona complexes, most teams have 2 squads anyway and again so few guys get to the majors out of rookie ball in OOTP it's nobig loss. They should sign players themselves, but even if you have to create fake players, at the low levels most will never advance far in the system anyway because of the player creation modifiers. I used to create minor league teams a year before the draft and leave them unaffiliated. Not sure if this is still the case in v.22, but expansion teams didn't get a minor league affiliate at every level at first (and they were randomly stuck in the wrong leagues/divisions, but anyway). Hope that made sense.maybe one day expansion will get some more love and it can be more like how they did it the last couple times the league expanded, but for now it's a manual process. This gives some top talent to build from without the grind of moving 60-80 players on draft day and then managing all those teams and battling injuries and poor performances. What I have done is create 5 or 8 fictional players per expansion team and make their potential at least Very Good at creation and move them to whichever expansion team they were created for. It is not easy and I wanted to give up so many times because it took a long time to get through the season, but it built up some prospects for the new teams when they started out, but I did not see any advantage over just starting from scratch with nothing. When the season ended, I expanded the league and then affiliated those 4 teams with the new MLB teams and continued on build the team I wanted to run. I set those 4 new minor league teams to no allow the AI to make moves and I simmed a week at a time, and checked those new teams at the end of the week, only making moves when it came to injuries and update lineups and pitching staffs as needed. Then I looked at the free agent pool and manually moved players to these new teams until they had a full roster. I did this for each round of the draft until it ended. When the draft rolled around, I allowed my new teams to pick at the end of each round, so I would sim to the end of each round, then manually edited the player that the expansion teams picked and placed them on the appropriate minor league team. I have done this in the past but it was a lot of work, assuming you are playing with the modern setup, first thing I did was to expand the two lowest minor leagues by 2 teams each (to for my new team and two for the other expansion team) and did not affiliate them with any MLB team. The game cannot do this at this time, but there is a way to draft a year (or two) before your expansion team comes into the league, but it is very manual intensive.
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