Quote:
Originally Posted by WhiskyTango
You can't stack expansion teams in a division. More than one will skew that division (and the others) for seasons to come.
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Not true. If you do like Pelican suggested and only protect 12 players (+ the under 3 year service time or whatever that option is), the expansion teams end up pretty decent. Both of mine ended up around .500 and they did much better than the White Sox franchise, Pirates, As, and Marlins. Shockingly, the Rockies got off to a great start and finished a somewhat respectable 73-89.
The NHL did something similar when they expanded to Vegas and Seattle. They wanted the expansion teams to be decent right from the get go and there's no reason MLB couldn't do the same.
Besides, in the two above, Portland and Charlotte were the expansion teams. The White Sox moved to Nashville. I never much cared for the team name and with them being so bad and Chicago already having the Cubs I decided they should go to Nashville. I also couldn't decide between Nashville and Charlotte and wanted both along with Portland.
The team I felt most bad for was Pittsburgh, but what are you going to do, stick them in another division just because that division is so strong? Nah, what they really need are new owners. I swear I don't hate the Pirates. I am rooting for them to get better, I love their ballpark.
The worst thing about this test was merging MLB into one league forced all 4 divisions to the left side of the screen in OOTP so when I was simming all you could see were the top 2 divisions and the wild card race. If I did this again, I'd keep the AL and NL just to prevent that, but just randomly pick which division went where.