Is there any service that offers what I want?

[Webslinger]

So I signed up for a Gold membership and discovered that Baseball Mogul online doesn't offer what I want:

1. The capacity to build a one division league comprised of 6-8 player teams using current MLB players with the top 4 teams going to the playoffs (without computer team owners), and

2. an initial draft where every MLB is a free agent (all teams start with an equal amount of money; all cities are equalized).

I don't really care about the $14.95 I paid for, but does anyone happen to know of an online (baseball simulated) league service that does offer what I want?

There's no way to accomplish this in Baseball Mogul online, right?

[scooter12321]

I am not aware of any game that can accomplish what you are looking for. I would suggest Emailing Clay (BMO's owner) and letting him know this is something you would like to see added. i think his email is in the general forum somewhere.

[daves]

So I signed up for a Gold membership and discovered that Baseball Mogul online doesn't offer what I want:

1. The capacity to build a one division league comprised of 6-8 player teams using current MLB players with the top 4 teams going to the playoffs (without computer team owners), and

Your right. BBMO does not offer this. It would be nice to play in a 1955 league format. But the earliest season the game goes to is 2002.

2. an initial draft where every MLB is a free agent (all teams start with an equal amount of money; all cities are equalized).

Equalized works. You have to have an offline draft and manually move every player. This will take a LOT of work and many GM's don't want to put in the effort.

[Webslinger]

Equalized works. You have to have an offline draft and manually move every player. This will take a LOT of work and many GM's don't want to put in the effort.

Yeah, I saw what a big pain that would be.

I've emailed Clay. Guess I'll see what he says.

Anyway, thank you very much, Daves and scooter12321.

[Sturge]

A long time ago, back in the early internet, I played a game on Prodigy called Baseball Manager. The first online fantasy baseball game I played. It was one division with 10 teams. However it used real life stats to determine a game's outcome as opposed to a simulation like BMO. All players were FA in the beginning with a draft with sorted lists (not live).

I just googled it. Looks like MLB actually bought the rights to this game. Not sure how much the game is as I remembered it but here's the URL.

http://bbm.mlb.com/

What killed this game for me is that each game a player had could only be used once. And these were separated between games they faced a righty or lefty. Lefty stats were VERY hard to come by and people learned to load their pitching staff with lefties. You get easy wins against teams that couldn't come up with enough lefty stats. I played an express version that didn't use righty/lefty but it just wasn't the same.

[CatKnight]

There's another option. Don't some of the leagues just use BM2007/8, as opposed to BMO? I'm not sure how it works, but it seems to.

IF that's true, then you could set up an 8 team league.

The problem is the game's playoff engine won't let you take the top four into the playoffs. The only way I see that happening is say.... 3 divisions x 4 teams each = 12, in which case BM would use the 'real' wildcard format.

I just checked OOTP. It won't let you do 1 division/4 teams in playoffs either. What you could do is 8 teams in 2 divisions, and each division leader plus two wildcards advance which, except in rare circumstances, would simulate what you want.

That's a fictional player database though. I'm not sure how you'd import the 'real' player database they have into a fictional league.