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Negro Leagues Total Conversion Mod


OTBjoel

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Does anybody here want to see a full Negro Leagues conversion mod? I'm looking for contributors to do everything but the rosters (I've got that covered). As a former member of SABR, I've got a pretty good hold of the Negro Leagues as I've been researching them for the last ten years. It's been one of my greatest interests within baseball. I think we will go with the Great Teams of the Past format, a'la the Total Classics teamsets. The Negro League players hopped from one team to the other so much that to limit one player to one team would really take away from the possibilities. If you did this then you can only have Satchel Paige on either the Kansas City Monarchs or the Pittsburgh Crawfords but not both. I think I will create a team for both and if you want to be a purist, you can take Satch off one of them. My stats will be a composite of what that player may have done in a 154-game season in his prime. Too bad John Holway's Negro Leagues register is not ready yet but when it is, this thing will need to be updated. But who knows when that will happen so we might as well get started. This teamset will be heavily influenced by the Negro Leagues teamset Jim Riley did for APBA and I'll include my own twist of my Negro Leagues universe I did for Oldtime. So... I need help with screens, uniforms, you name it. I'll still probably end up doing the teamset but without contributors, it won't be a full-blown total conversion mod. It's up to you guys. Let me know if you want to play ball with the best from the Blackball Era. With your help, "Smoky" Joe Williams, "Bullet" Joe Rogan, James "Cool Papa" Bell and others will come back to life. Surely the image below needs an updated face-lift. Thank stecropper for lighting the fire under my *** to do this.

SG.gif

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what would you need help with? i mean we've talked about this before but could never get it off the ground because no one could do the rosters.

also, if you've got a grasp on the rosters, i'm gonna definitely use your input on it since i have several teams of negro league players in my mod.

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i have a roster of great teams roster and am making an allstar roster with the best players from each team like an allstar team of pitt crawfords and more and homestead grays just let me know i can give u the great teams now.

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Homer,

How were you going to utilize the Negro League players in your mod. I've done all of this before. I'm just transfering my previous work in other games to this one. The difference is you can mod practically anything in this game. In my all-time set, I had the Monarchs, Grays, Chicago American Giants and the Newark Eagles as additional teams in the four divisions. (I used the four division format that I grew up with rather than the new six division alignment.) It was a pretty logical grouping as each of these teams represented dominance in certain eras of the Negro Leagues. It started off with Rube and Bill Foster's American Giants with the likes of Pete Hill and John "Pop" Lloyd leading the way. Later on, the Washington-Homestead Grays dominated (I grouped the Pittsburgh Crawfords greats onto that team as most of them played on both at one time or another representing the Pittsburgh area). Then the dominant pitching of the Kansas City Monarchs toppled the Grays in the greatest Negro World Series of them all when Satchel finally faced Josh in the big one. Other greats on the Monarchs were Hilton Smith, Newt Allen, Dobie Moore, Bonnie Serrell, Heavy Johnson, and Turkey Stearnes even played with them for a while. Then in the end, the Newark Eagles dominated with Monte Irvin, Leon Day, Lennie Pearson, Ray Dandridge and others. The Eagles make a great team because in an earlier era, they also had the "Dream" infield of Willie Wells, Mule Suttles, Jud Wilson, and Dick Seay. I put most of the latter-day great Negro Leaguers on that Newark team (Piper Davis and his Birmingham Black Barons were grouped in there).

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in my mod, i've the guys who played a good chunk in the mlb on their respective teams. i think it ended up being only like 10 guys. for the rest, i have the marlins, rays, d-backs and the rox. each of them have 2 25 man rosters full of negro league players (total of 200 guys). take a look at my spreadsheet again. if you see guys that would be more fitting let me know.

have you gotten to creating these players yet? i have yet to get to them, so there's no mbe files for them. but yeah, i would love your help/feedback on this.

i know that there's lots of guys who would love to see this mod come to fruition.

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Haven't started yet. Does anybody know of a way to import a CSV into MVP Edit? If not, maybe I'll create a file in the same format as the Lahman database and import it that way.

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The problem with including some of these guys is that the stats simply don't exist. There are stats for some of the younger Negro Leaguers who were involved in the integration movement but for somebody like Dan McClellan, forget it. That is unless you just want to make some stuff up which I personally wouldn't do because then the mod loses some of its integrity. That's why I want the Holway book to get done because I'm hoping that some new stuff has been found. There is a pretty good book by Dick Lester I believe that has a lot of stats for the later Negro Leaguers. I'm going to have to dig this stuff out of my library.

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yeah, i was gonna cross that bridge when i got to the part of actually creating these guys. don't know what i'll do yet, but yeah, any suggestions would be great.

by the way, i was looking through your archive...what should i use to open these ros files?

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Notepad will open them up Homer

that's just what i needed

I can help with portraits, but I have a question. There will be a lot of slots, what will we do with those extra slots?

what do you mean? if they're extra, they're extra. nothing needs to be done with them.

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Unlike some other mods, I don't want to completely redo the portrait/audio file. I think we should go with the portrait file that Total Classics had and then add on to it. I wish I were on this site when it got started but I wasn't so there's nothing I can do now but in my opinion, all mods should be backwards compatible to the original game. My models.big and portrait.big file are backwards compatible to all Total Classics mods as well as MVP05. I don't like having to swap out my entire data folder every time I want to copy a mod over. I should be able to just swap out the database folder if I want. This is a real long winded answer to the portrait question but I think we should add on to the total classics portrait file rather than replace numbers. I have portraits for most of the major players already so that's another area I don't need much help in as I've got a really intensive Negro League library. But every now and then somebody has a portrait better than anything I've got so you're welcome to send them in.

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Well, it looks like there's definitely interest in this mod so that's good. I wish I could share my library with everybody on here but that's not going to happen. I think the links will help everybody else get acquainted with the Negro Leagues who is not already familiar with them. I'll post some of the rosters I've done in the past. I'll put them in a spreadsheet to make it easy for everybody.

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Homer,

Can you PM pirate and Thome to let them know the ball is rolling on this. I've PM'ed Thome but he doesn't know me so I may not get an answer. I'm thinking we put in my Oldtime Negro Leagues mod into the MLB level and then put the GTP (Great Teams of the Past) into the AAA level. That way we don't have to do two mods. We can just play with either one in the same mod and just switch levels. The difference is, the GTP version will have actual rosters of great teams from certain years. It will be real rosters and real stats from the particular year. Only problem is the rosters will be thin and you won't have as many great players to pick from while playing with a certain team. The other mod will be more of an All-Time franchise greats team. The best from the Kansas City Monarchs, Chicago American Giants, Homestead Grays from all eras all on one team. This is the one that will have the stats extrapolated to look like a 154 game season. The GTP teamset will have stats from a 50-60 game season as that's all the official Negro League season typically had. The rest of the time, they were barnstorming so in the end, they probably played more games than the White Major Leaguers. Many times they played 2-3 games in a day in multiple towns so they could make ends meet.

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Thome wrote:

1. Atlanta Black Crackers (Home and Away) FINISHED 2. Baltimore Black Sox (Home and Away) FINISHED 3. Baltimore Elite Giants (Home and Away) FINISHED 4. Birmingham Black Barons (Home and Away) FINISHED 5. Chicago American Giants (Home and Away) FINISHED 6. Homestead Grays (Home and Away) FINISHED 7. Kansas City Monarchs (Home and Away) FINISHED 8. New York Cubans (Home and Away) FINISHED 9. New York Black Yankees (Home and Away) FINISHED 10. Philadelphia Stars (Home and Away) FINISHED

This is perfect because my Negro Leagues franchise teams has:

negro2.jpg

and here's the Negro Leagues GTP teams:

negro1.jpg

The only one we couldn't really use right now are the Atlanta Black Crackers uniforms. The key missing uniforms are the

a) Newark Eagles

B) New York Lincoln Giants

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I'm hoping that Thome will donate the uniforms he already did. Nobody else has really offered anything yet. I'm hoping Pirate will do some stadiums like he offered in another thread on the same topic. I may hand this one off back to Thome after I have uploaded the rosters. If you would like to contribute let me know and in what area.

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I'm hoping that Thome will donate the uniforms he already did. Nobody else has really offered anything yet. I'm hoping Pirate will do some stadiums like he offered in another thread on the same topic. I may hand this one off back to Thome after I have uploaded the rosters. If you would like to contribute let me know and in what area.

I don't mind doing portraits, with some help, though.

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Got any skills with faces? I've got most of the portraits covered.

Rosters in Excel format will be uploaded either tonight or tomorrow.

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