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MLB 1996 Quickstart

1996 Modded Quickstart

I've been working on and off on a modified quickstart for the 1996 season for a few months now, got too far along with it and had no choice but to keep working on it, and I suppose now is as good a time as any to upload it. It's not meant to be some great work or anything, just a little improvement here and there on the default historical league setup. The fact that I'm still finding useful data for this means it's still not complete by any stretch of the imagination, but the setup is still a bit more realistic than the default. And before going any further, I'd like to thank the creators and publisher of this game for giving us one of the best sports sims on the market, and credit to places like Baseball Reference, the Internet Archive, and a few other places from where I obtained the data necessary for modding. All I did was find, sort, interpret, and enter the available data. Nothing original on my part here. I'm just a modder. Anyone with time and nothing better to do could have done this.

What you're getting:

Start of season MLB DL stints are accounted for, but not all injuries are known. The few newspaper articles I could find via Google mention injuries but most of the time fail to mention the specific injury.

I've never liked how some of the players are rated during initial game creation, with some players having better expected stats than they ever had during their entire career, so I re-rated most MLB batters using the neutralized stats from the Baseball Reference website. I stopped when I realized I probably messed up and would have quite a few regulars with sub-200 averages underneath the hood (that part in the player editor that states what the resulting stat output would be in a modern, neutral major league environment). Once I got down to the Mendoza line, I realized that I would have to do the same for all the AAA players in order for this to make sense, and I simply have no interest in doing that for free. Surprisingly, though, the stat outputs from the few tests I've run haven't really looked all that bad. The main players do what is expected of them. For what it's worth, I assume that OOTP historical players use some form of yearly ratings recalculation anyway, whether it be of the one- or three-year variety, so everything should be the way one expects it to be by the time 1997 comes around. If you're not thrilled with how the 1996 statistical output turns out, just reload and it. I've seen enough variety that you should eventually get what you're looking for. As for the pitchers, I didn't mess around with too many of them because it's too time consuming for very little reward. Most of them have the ratings that were generated during league creation other than a few that were so annoyingly wrong to me (velocity of Atlanta's Big 3, among others) that I had to do something about it.

Real coaches, and plenty of them. Other than 13 team trainers and several hitting and pitching coaches at the rookie league level, most real-life coaches from that era are in the game now. I haven't done much in the way of their ratings and strategy with the exception of the MLB and AAA levels, but they're there. To fill out the remaining staff vacancies, you can always use fictional coaches if you want to and be done with it.

Real contracts... sort of. Salary data is 95-99% from Baseball Reference, with the occasional contract option and monetary incentive gleaned from online articles from the time in question, so the starting payroll is more-or-less accurate, or at least accurate enough. Also, I didn't go through every player to fix service time, but I did enough to ensure that some of the real life arbitration-eligible players during the 1996 offseason won't automatically become free agents in the game.

Most minor league players are now either on their correct starting team or no more than one level off. Tangentially, I remember having to move several pitchers, some of whom were closers with good stats during the 1996 season, from the rookie leagues to AA while doing this. Even with the Internet Archive, finding MiLB transaction data for anything pre-2000 is nearly impossible with a few exceptions, so many players who were sent to extended spring training or the DL are still available on opening day. One just needs to accept that it looks bad for some organizations and move on, like when you see too many red arrows next to AAA pitchers or 30 players on some high-A team and only 21 in regular A. Just let the CPU deal with it.

I had some player histories around from another mod I was working on a few years ago, so I went ahead and added a few of them at the last minute. It's very hit-or-miss at this point, but what's there is there.

Retired numbers have been copied from the official OOTP modern quickstart and used for this mod, but with a slight twist: all references to events that transpired after the start of the 1996 season have been removed. Hey, this is 1996, not 2022. Some of those number were for players who were still active and in some cases still living on March 29, 1996.

I have the setting saved to prevent AI roster movement turned on. The first player coming off the DL occurs a few days after opening day, so remember to toggle the switch in the settings area to allow AI roster movement again after you get to opening day or at most a few days later.


Misc notes:
A few MLB players who had career ending injuries in real life but were on the disabled list are included on their respective rosters. The most obvious example of this in the game would be Kirby Puckett. I've given him his neutralized stats from 1995 should anyone want to clear his injury and use him, but he and other players like him are there for salary and budget purposes. Once those contracts are up, that's more money available for the teams in question than would otherwise be there a year or two out unless you're stuck with an owner who's cutting salary for whatever reason.

I read somewhere that the Cubs had a four-man rotation to begin the season, and that's why Steve Trachsel begins the year at AA Orlando. IRL he wasn't there for long. You may want to be in commissioner mode and send him up anyway if you don't trust the AI to handle things properly.

A few clubs still have a ten-man pitching staff, while most have moved on to 11 or 12 pitchers. I'm not sure how well the game handles that, though.

Players like Darryl Strawberry for whom I could find hard evidence that stated they began the year in one of the independent leagues are listed as free agents instead of being on the roster of the team that later signed them.

I had to give Reggie Jefferson (Boston Red Sox) a fake injury to bring their roster down to 25 players. He apparently sat on the bench uninjured for the first two weeks of the season, and I couldn't find a way to make room for him.

Ken Edenfield IRL began the season on the California Angels active roster and pitched in two games, but I couldn't figure out who else to send down in order to bring the total down to 25 players, so he's now at AAA Vancouver.

I read an article from the late 1990s recently that stated that the national media contracts were paying out about $12 million to each team, so I upped the totals for all teams from $6 million or whatever they were to the figure from the article. You may need to adjust the figures as the game progresses because when you import finances after the 1996 season, they revert back to $7 million per team. Honestly, I have no idea how finances are going to play out beyond the first year of simming. I've tried to make teams like Oakland poor enough to force the issue with regards to trading McGwire like in real life, but not so poor as to be unable to afford proper scouting and player development. So you may have to tinker around with it.

Other than that, if you dl it and try it out, I hope you like it.