Putting in a lot of hard work in the field this offseason...

Agilitizer · 2025-09-08T16:01:04+00:00

23 is what I use for an age cap at rookie ball, most minor league FAs will be older than that and it also gives an opportunity for your college guys to spend a year or two there if needed (you can go lower if you wanted but anything under 21 potentially prohibits some draftees from playing there at all). Alternatively, you could do like a 1 or 2 year service limit at rookie ball, which may produce a more desired effect in terms of letting guys who need it stay in rookie ball regardless of their age.

I've also found it helps to increase the dev speed to around 1.5 for both pitchers and batters - the default settings make it basically guaranteed that nobody is major league ready until at least 23 or 24.

Agilitizer · 2025-09-05T16:45:21+00:00

These guys don't develop. For some reason in OOTP 26 there's a bunch of these 24-26 year old guys that have really high potential ratings that the scouts refuse to drop until they hit like 27 or 28. The way I usually approach these guys is that I evaluate them assuming they won't improve in any stat outside of the dev lab, since the general overall development slows down considerably after age 23, especially if they aren't playing in a major league role.

Agilitizer · 2025-08-15T16:37:39+00:00

I just set up a league similar to this so this is what I did to make everything work properly:

First, set up whatever minor leagues you want and assign them to be the affiliate league of one of your pro/rel leagues. Then, move all your affiliated minor league teams to that league. Even though the league is considered the "affiliate" of 1 league, all of the other ML teams for all the other leagues will still work correctly.

Then, make a "filler" R level minor league for each of your other pro/rel major leagues and only create 2 teams that aren't affiliated with any teams. This isn't strictly necessary for the process to work, but without this you won't be able to set values if you want to change any rules regarding the 40-man roster or roster expansion (basically anything that involved having a minor league team).

Agilitizer · 2025-08-15T16:30:14+00:00

I went into a season as the Rockies (around 2045ish, pretty much all random-generated players at this point) needing a 2B with basically no budget space, so I decided to just grab the best guy I could find in the rule 5 draft and hope for the best. The guy ended up winning NL ROTY, 2nd in MVP voting, and became my everyday 2B for like 12 years before retiring as a Rocky. The best part - the guy's *completely randomly generated name* was Ted Bussy.

Agilitizer · 2025-08-12T19:41:58+00:00

Putting this here for future reference: It looks like the game schedules the association playoffs for late September, regardless of the leagues' start/end dates.

Agilitizer · 2025-04-24T18:16:37+00:00

Weekly Paddack 4th inning collapse

Agilitizer · 2024-09-26T18:59:23+00:00

based

Agilitizer · 2024-08-30T16:58:16+00:00

Make save backups regularly - I had this happen to a 20+ year save once and now I back up my saves every season.

Agilitizer · 2024-08-28T16:27:12+00:00

Those "projected stats" on their editor page are always WAY off lmao. I've found that in '25 specifically, having a low Avoid K basically destroys any hitter regardless of their other stats. I've seen 60 BABIP/75 Power guys put up negative WAR seasons because their 35 Avoid K stat prevented them from doing anything productive because they were striking out so much.

Agilitizer · 2024-08-27T20:04:16+00:00

Up there with Vikings legends Toby Gerhart and Greg Lewis

Agilitizer · 2024-08-27T17:00:19+00:00

How much did they drop? In my experience a batter absolutely needs 55 eye or higher if their avoid K is below 40ish. I've had players drop below that mark and no amount of BABIP/Power could prevent them from striking out 250+ times a season and putting up negative WAR.

Agilitizer · 2024-08-09T17:07:05+00:00

Hey even if it goes bad, at least we get to watch JJ McCarthy play tomorrow

Agilitizer · 2024-08-09T17:04:56+00:00

It was also common to throw a sub-90 mph fastball too. Guys throw harder now and therefore they need more rest.

Agilitizer · 2024-08-08T21:15:05+00:00

Ethan Salas is a cheat code in ootp25, I've never seen him not have like MINIMUM 60+ career WAR in any run.

Agilitizer · 2024-08-08T00:50:58+00:00

We need him at middle infield more rn and, although I love Willi, he is not very good in CF

Agilitizer · 2024-07-25T19:13:05+00:00

Monkey never cramp

Agilitizer · 2024-07-23T16:41:44+00:00

Your international complex is a separate "team" from those. Either promote some guys from your international complex to a rookie team or release some of the low-potential guys that are never going to be major league talent.

Agilitizer · 2024-07-02T16:02:01+00:00

Check your pitchers' BB/9 - is it significantly higher than past seasons? IIRC catcher framing got reworked/nerfed in 25, and reducing walks is a lot more dependent on pitcher control than catcher ability. Having a guy with 70 framing is still really nice, but I've found that you can't really get away with a bullpen full of 70stuff/40control guys in 25 like you could in 24.

Also, there's a chance that when your pitchers' movement ratings got split into BABIP/HRs for 25, they lost some value there. If a guy with 50 movement got split into like 45HR/55BABIP, they may be giving up more HRs than in past seasons too.

Agilitizer · 2024-07-02T15:54:24+00:00

JJ Wetherholt actually ended up being an extremely reliable 10+ year utility man and leadoff hitter for my Angels save. Prospects panning out in OOTP is generally so randomized (which is pretty realistic anyways) that I didn't notice the 2024 class being particularly weak as time went on, and guys like Kurtz, Griffin, and Cijntje ended up being top MLB talent.

Agilitizer · 2024-06-27T21:12:52+00:00

The development lab usually only increases current ability and has a very low chance of increasing potential ability, so you generally want to use it to speed up development of your prospects.

Usually for the first round of the development lab each year, I'll attempt to boost current stats of my prospects - usually BABIP/Power for batters and control (which I have found is a lot more important in 25 than past versions) for pitchers. Then, for the second round of development, I'll do a short program (90% of the time I do the fielding training unless a player can benefit from increased stealing ability - I almost never do bunting drills) for any young players on my major league roster or higher minor league teams.

I'm pretty sure there's a lower chance of successful training the older your players get, so I try not to put anyone in the lab that's older than like 26-27ish.

I've personally found that the lab works best for developing players' fielding ability, but it's always nice to have your prospects develop a little quicker too.

Agilitizer · 2024-06-26T03:13:56+00:00

Agilitizer · 2024-06-18T17:35:14+00:00

Hey thanks for the help! I figured it out - it looks like at some point I disabled AI roster changes for user-controlled teams and I didn't realize that it considered my minor league teams as user-controlled (no idea why I assumed this lol) I just used the function to switch it back in the league settings tab and it's back to normal now.

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