[PilotMan]

Alright I'm going to take over this thread for a little bit because there is a story that I want to tell, but it's not worthy of it's own thread. So without further ado, I give you American Baseball.

American Baseball begins in 1975 in an alternate baseball universe. There is no MLB nor has there ever been. Instead baseball is still divided into east and west geographical leagues of equal size.

In the east you have the Atlantic Baseball League. The ABL is a 12-team ML divided into 2 divisions. They have one level of support, a AAA level league called the ABL Developmental. Players are drafted every year from a pool that is fed by both Collegiate and High School leagues, dubbed the American Collegiate Association and East Coast High School respectively. Undrafted players are free agents.

In the west you have Pacific Championship Baseball. A 12-team ML divided into 3, 4-team divisions. The PCB is also supported with a AAA level minor league system called the PCB Minor League. They too hold a draft simultaneously with the ABL. Their players come from the Universities of the West and the West Coast High School All-Stars. Teams from the East and West, never player one another and are considered completely separate entities.

Since baseball is divided along coastal lines, where all the money and high exposure athletes are baseball in the midwest has developed much more of a grassroots organization. Teams from Kansas all the way to North Dakota, and Rapid City to Kentucky, have banded together to create Prairie League Baseball, a completely unaffiliated independent league. Players are signed from the available free agent pool or developed locally. The PLB is a 32-team league, with 2 separate subdivisions, broken up into 4, 4-team regions with most teams playing only games against their more local opponents to keep costs down. With much less revenue coming in than their ML counterparts they don't compete for the top talent but sometimes players can emerge from the PLB and make an impact and sometimes players can actually play in the PLB and make more money than they would fighting for playing time in the minors on the coasts.

And that's where we begin.