Alternative History MLB Universe Template

[Young Drachma]

If nothing else, the history is mondo interesting. Satchel Paige is all-time wins leader, Doc Gooden is less than 30 wins behind him for #2 and Babe Ruth hit almost 1,000 career home runs and no one else even has 700. Here's the scoop and here's the file...

I took over an old historical league file I had from a fast-sim alternative history league I ran for a while. Starting in the late 1920, I simmed pretty much all the way through 2004. I did expand the league several times, as well as induce some moves. For the most part, though, teams were to end up in cities that have them though not all of them are in that particular manner.

Here's the alignment. It's currently two leagues with two divisions each of eight teams for a total of 32.

The top two teams in each division advance to the post-season and play in a best-of-seven game Division Championship Series, with the best-of-seven game LCS to follow and a World Series (best of seven) after that.

In 2000, we experimented with making the Wild Cards the two best teams in each league regardless of division, but went back to this format in 2000.

Prior to 1995, we simply had the division champions face off in the League Championship Series and 1962 is when division play officially began.

Expansion occurred in 1947, 1965, 1977 and 1995 each time with four teams being added to the bigs.

Here is the current setup as of the 2005 season:

AL EAST
Baltimore Orioles
Philadelphia Athletics
New York Yankees
Miami Marlins
Minnesota Twins
Chicago White Sox
Boston Red Sox
Washington Senators

AL WEST
Texas Rangers
Houston Astros
Denver Bears
San Jose Missions
Kansas City Royals
Portland Beavers
Seattle Tigers
Anaheim Angels

NL EAST
Tampa Bay Giants
Philadelphia Phillies
New York Mets
Cincinnati Reds
Pittsburgh Pirates
Toronto Blue Jays
Cleveland Spiders
Atlanta Braves

NL WEST
Chicago Cubs
Arizona Diamondbacks
Milwaukee Brewers
St. Louis Cardinals
San Francisco Seals
Los Angeles Dodgers
San Diego Padres
Detroit Wolverines

With the Angels moving to Anaheim, ownership sold the club and the AL and NL agreed to allow a league swap of teams for the first time in modern baseball history, which moved the Dodgers to the NL and the Portland Beavers to the AL.

This was done to ensure that the AL didn't have a monopoly on the Los Angeles area with both the Dodgers and Angels in the same league and gave the moribund Seattle Tigers a regional rival in the hopes it'd ignite their fanbase.

The expansion era franchises are:

Anaheim Angels (Los Angeles Angels) 1947
Kansas City Royals (Oakland Oaks) 1947 (Moved to Kansas City in 1959)
San Diego Padres 1947
San Francisco Seals 1947

Milwaukee Brewers 1965
Portland Beavers 1965 (Los Angeles Stars) (Moved to Portland in 2005)
Chicago White Sox 1965
Houston Astros 1965

Miami Marlins 1977
Cleveland Spiders 1977
Texas Rangers 1977
Detroit Wolverines 1977

Arizona Diamondbacks 1995
Philadelphia Phillies 1995
Minnesota Twins 1995
San Jose Missions 1995

Here are the team moves in this particular universe:

Toronto Blue Jays
(Philadelphia Phillies became the Philadelphia Blue Jays in 1958 and moved to Toronto in 1959. A stadium and ownership dispute sent the team packing for Jersey City in 2000 and Hartford from 2001-04. They moved back to Toronto for the 2005 season.)

Tampa Bay Giants
(The New York Giants moved to Minneapolis in 1947 and moved to St. Petersburg, FL in 1993.)

Atlanta Braves
(The Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee in 1947 and to Atlanta in 1965.)

Denver Bears
(The Chicago Whales moved to Denver in 1959 and became the Denver Bears.)

New York Mets
(The Brooklyn Dodgers became the Cleveland Blues in 1923, a vestige of a move from the online league phase of the file. In 1949, the Blues moved back to New York and became the New York Metropolitans and shortened it to the Mets in 1962.)

Los Angeles Dodgers
(The Louisville Black Caps moved to Brooklyn in 1927 to become the Brooklyn Black Caps. In 1932, they adopted the departed Dodgers moniker and in 1995, the Dodgers moved west to Los Angeles after only two playoff appearances since 1970 and their last title coming in 1964 wore down the local faithful who balked at building the team a new stadium, while an investment banker in Los Angeles agreed to build the team a gleaming new ballpark near downtown.

Seattle Tigers
(The Detroit Tigers moved to Seattle in 1965. Detroit rejoined the bigs in 1977 with the expansion Wolverines were granted to the city. The Tigers franchise remain the only original franchise to never win a World Series. They've won five AL pennants in franchise history, in 1917, 1958, 1960, 1962 and 1988.)

[Peregrine]

Sounds interesting Dark Cloud, will give it a try. So one thing I've never been sure of in OOTP - is there an official way to quick sim through many seasons at once? Or do you basically have to keep going the normal way manually through many years.

[Young Drachma]

Yeah, you can set a date to sim into the future with it and it'll just sim automatically. Not manual and since version 10, it's a pretty speedy process on the whole so long as you have box scores and all that stuff off and keep it to normal or low stats.

[Peregrine]

I gave this file a shot DC but after I started the league and loaded the template I kept having the game crash - happened three or four times. Finally I decided to start my own historical alternative league - currently in 1960, just had four new teams come into the league - Seattle, Dallas, Kansas City, and Atlanta. Needed a new West Coast team to balance out the recent move of a team to Los Angeles. I think the Red Sox will do well there.

[Young Drachma]

nice! I'm in 2007 and just expanded by 4 more teams again to 36 total. Finally have 3 divisions of six from two divisions of 8 in each league, but playoffs haven't been expanded beyond 4 teams.