[tm1681]

I started the following fictional baseball universe for OOTP 23 (1st attempt was for OOTP 21-22) and have brought over the save file to OOTP 24.

This is the story of a pair of leagues that began with logos I was making during down time when I was doing remote work. They are analogues to the 1850s National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP), the concurrent National Association of Professional Base Ball Players (NAPBBP), and their resulting split in real life in 1871.

Details of how I decided on names and logos are in this thread. in the Mods forum.

THE NATIONAL BASE BALL ORGANIZATION IS FORMED

On January 22, 1857 in Manhattan's St. Nicholas Hotel, executives from various baseball clubs in New York City, Brooklyn, and elsewhere in the northeastern United States met to form the first group of organized baseball clubs: the National Base Ball Organization. In that meeting, guidelines for the first formal competition involving the sport of baseball were established:

• Starting in May of 1857, 48 clubs from the northeastern United States would form six "championship" divisions where each club would play the others in their division ten times over separate two five-game series - mimicking cricket test matches - over the course of the season. This would make for a total of 70 games played by each club.
  
  
• The six divisions were further separated into two leagues: the New York League, with two dozen clubs based in the state of New York, and the Northeastern League, with two dozen clubs based elsewhere in the Northeastern United States and New England.
  
  
• The winners of each of the three divisions would go to the playoffs, with the team having the best record in each league automatically moving on to the League Championship Series and the other two teams playing a best-of-five series to go to the LCS.
  
  
• The two league champions would compete for the Tucker-Wheaton Cup, named for the two men who wrote the Knickerbocker Rules for baseball (as in real life): William Tucker and William Wheaton
  

The original 48 teams were as follows:




























The men who ran and played a sport seen as a hobby for the well-to-do to spectate weren't sure what would come of their efforts, but at least there was now a concrete plan for well-run amateur clubs to regularly play one another instead of scheduling games on an ad hoc basis and doing almost everything very informally.

Surely this would make the sport of "base ball" better, and couldn't that only be a good thing both the short, and long, term?