World Baseball Classic
 

I've expanded the WBC to December, and added 15 nations. I am wondering if anyone knows how to make the player pools larger for the countries that are smaller.

I have already turned the rejection variation down, and I want the countries with only like "18 players" to have more players to choose from. NOT GHOST PLAYERS. My fear is that one small nation with ghost players will win the whole thing and I then cannot sign the ghost players.

Ghost players are usually ghastly. There's not much chance that you'll want to sign any of them.

Ghast players are ghostly? :p

I tried splitting the US into 4 regions, and had Cuba not sneaked past one in the quarterfinals all 4 would have filled the semifinals. I'm trying 8 regional teams in 8 divisions this time.

Anyway, the only good thing about the WBC setup is that they play single-game round robin so the laggards can get lucky. But teams like Bahamas, England, Greece etc. with only 15-20 real players... brutal.

As to the OP, if there are particular countries you want to boost, give them a fictional league and they'll grow into real competitors over time. Or, consider a Premier 12-type setup. Supposedly smaller countries have better acceptance rates, but I haven't found that balancing out the crazy numbers advantage the US and even the DR/Venezuela have.

Ghost players
 

I literally went back and did exactly this. I created a league in a general area and had all of these obscure countries submit to their draft (England, Ireland, Bahamas). It seemed to work. Now I am just stuck between having them "Posted" by their leagues or do I allow them to feed into my amateur draft.

I've never tried the posting system. I guess it depends on how you want it to work; you could always set the league to not allow free agents to enter/leave, then they'll just sort of percolate along on their own until you need them for your tournament.

I remember making a "World Winter League" for this with different teams, I gave the league a low reputation and allowed free agents to go there if they wanted. So the US team ended up a funny sort of collection of castoffs.

Also, China's 0-5 so far in 2021 after losing all their games in my 2020 tournament. I went through the various leagues and changed some of them to add 1% or more draftees from these countries (and others) so helpfully they'll get better over time. France and England are 0-5 too and the Bahamas isn't any better this year. I've thought about international regional teams, but I don't want to mess with the .xml file and those don't correspond too well to regions I'd want. Like I use "Oceania" for an ANZAC team and that includes Guam, Samoa, etc. which doesn't make sense but for now they don't have too many players yet. I guess you could also add second nationalities to some of the countries, but then you'd have a "France" team with French and German players or whatever which wouldn't make much sense.