[ptFri217]

I've tried all kinds of custom fictional leagues over the years, but couldn't get any to really stick, and I think I know why... I tried making leagues where I could control a team I had some ties to, but the leagues never felt like they could be real. I actually typed up some of my past leagues, but deleted them because they would be another couple posts of their own. The tldr of it though is that I found myself wanting to change either the cities or nicknames of teams in the league, and could never get them to feel "right" to me. They were all also state/regional leagues, and it drove me crazy that in my alternate universe, there was still baseball out there in other regions that wasn't in my game. To avoid both of these problems I was having, I made my current league!

I am absolutely hooked on my current fictional league, "Baseball City". I decided to fully lean into the fictional aspect of fictional leagues. I'm from Illinois, but currently live in Mississippi, and wanted my new universe to represent my favorite aspects of both (and every location in between).

For team locations, (I don't have a map for this yet, it's more just in my head), Baseball City is an obviously fictional "dream-like" city, based off of St. Louis AND the MS River. The city has elements of Illinois, Missouri, and Mississippi. The teams all have suuuper generic names, which helps me not have to urge to change them. It's actually freeing in a way. My biggest problem when trying to create a fictional country, was again, having at least one city not feel right to me. Staying generic is boring, but definitely best for this chronic tinkerer. We have north, south, east, and west, and the downtown region is split between Old Town and City Central (to get to 6). To go with the 4 directions, is geographic terms loosely associated with the MS River, but also with rivers in general.

For team nicknames, I made a list of old school minor league names that I liked, and realized that they're all descriptions of people. So, I gave my generic teams all names that their residents might be known for in this fictional city. We have:

Old Town Villagers (the location of the first settlers who played "base ball")
City Central Municipals (new town, where the mayor's *commissioner's* office is)
North Ridge Highlanders (because the north has higher elevation? Don't love it but it doesn't feel "wrong", probably because Highlanders is such a timeless name)
South Delta Ramblers (a rambler is someone who wonders the country side, like rural MS for example)
West Bank Brewers (because someone in this city has to make the beer!)
and my team - East Valley Lineriders (much like taking the metro from IL across the river to Busch Stadium, their citizens all ride the metro lines into the city)

Teams play each other team in 4, three game series (60 total games), each series spread across one week. I made a custom schedule to have a game every night of the week, cause this is Baseball City after all. Every team plays at different times on Saturday, and a featured game is played on Sunday afternoons. With this setup, all the games can be played in just one stadium shared by the city, "Players' Field" (big help on not breaking immersion with the one generic OOTP stadium). The playoffs are three game series ladder style, with all 6 teams making it, so nobody's ever out of contention, but the regular season and seeding still matters a ton.

I turned financials off to keep the game simple and further lean into the "dream-like" aspect of the save (I also do math all day for a living and don't want to use that part of my brain when I'm OOTPing). To start, players were created with MLB nationality percentages, and I've edited the setting for drafted players to have those percentages as well since there obviously can't be international free agents. With players from all over the world coming to Baseball City, my save has tons of Field of Dreams vibes So far, I've watched every game between AI teams, and managed all of mine. It's been addicting to watch the Municipals fend off the Villagers, and the whole city feels alive. I would like to make a dynasty report sometime, but don't think I can post consistently enough right now.

So that's the world I created, Baseball City, where the beer is cold, and the 50k capacity stadium sells out 7 days a week!