[chucksabr]

Originally Posted by Caporegime

Chuck,

Absolutely outstanding work all around! I rarely follow dynasties here, but yours has me riveted. I was considering creating and simming my own English professional baseball league starting from the mid-19th century to the present that was based more on the historical timeline of cricket - a kind of "what if" baseball supplanted cricket at some point in England and the Commonwealth scenario.

However, your league makes my idea look positively ludicrous. Your storyline is at least a plausible and interesting one, and you've done a superb job with the uniforms, logos, and name files as well. I wish this were a mod or a template. If we ever get the ability to add international tournaments like the WBC to OOTP, this is the English baseball league I'd want in my universe. Great work!

Thank you very much for the very specific kudos. Plausibility was a major goal of the dynasty.

There are a lot of excellent fanciful dynasties in this forum, and they are ripping fun reads, so they were good choices for the OOTPers who went that route. My choice was to lead people to believe that baseball in Britain could very well have happened in just this way, which is why I took special care while setting up the dynasty in the creation story. I studied some of the history of how football took hold in Britain and applied some aspects of that to baseball, e.g., the professional vs. amateur aspect of that story. Plus, it helped a lot that cricket was already a popular bat and ball sport in England, which makes the possibility that baseball could have become popular there more real than, for instance, in Russia or in continental Europe.

Funny you mention ability to play tournaments because I've been kicking around a league cup idea that would be made a lot easier if tournament mode were available. Without that, I have to conduct it all manually, which may or may not even work. Stay tuned.

EDIT: I have to add here that if you really like the uniforms, I can proudly state that I had nearly nothing to do with them. All the uniforms save the returning Lincoln City team were created courtesy of forum member No Pepper, who has been awesome about generating dozens of kits and caps for this dynasty.

Originally Posted by Caporegime

BTW, I'd love to know your thoughts on the following: If baseball had fully developed in England along the lines of your dynasty IRL and achieved a level of popularity only surpassed by football (soccer), where do you see baseball's place in the rest of the Commonwealth today? Do you think it would've caught on elsewhere in the Empire? Would it have replaced Cricket at some point as the ball & bat game of choice? Would "Cricket-mad" India, for example, be "Baseball bonkers" India today instead? How about in Australia, the West Indies and elsewhere?

First of all, I don't necessarily concede that baseball would naturally by surpassed by football in popularity in Britain.

Anyhow, an ongoing subtext to the dynasty is that baseball indeed does become popular throughout the Commonwealth in the same way cricket has. I assert as much in this post:

How Baseballers Sustain Their Wages During The Winter (Please see the disclaimer in the previous post for context.)

So even though it is beyond the scope of the dynasty to report on leagues being played in Commonwealth countries, they do exist in the background and will be referred to in future posts as needed to move the story along.