I did a little experimenting last night. I loaded the World of Baseball download which seems to have nearly every league in existence and tried to play. Face Gen was turned off. Never got past the first day.
Next, I went to a prior back up of my current league, which was from opening day 2017, and lo and behold, I got through the entire season!
I even turned facegen back on in the middle, after making a new backup, and it worked fine. When I exited the game I got the same error message as I have been getting. On reloading, everything was fine although I only simmed one day this time.
My league was actually bigger in 2017, as I had deleted a league after this season (see prior post). This makes me wonder if something happened after I deleted that league? However, as noted, I did create and try to play a standard major league with the standard minors and it consistently crashed within a day or two.
I'm going to keep simming today from the backup start and see how it goes. Although I won't delete the indpendent minor league again, I am going to atempt some other changes that I made previously having to do with the age of players created for feeder leagues and some of the financials. If I crash again I'll follow up with a post, and if not I'll do nothing here.