The Heisenberg League

[Makonnen]

In the 1990s, an online friend, Lev Polinsky, floated the idea of The Heisenberg League.

The notion was a Strat-O-Matic league where managers never truly knew the real-life identity of their players. This would introduce a significant "fog of war" concept into the league, where you were unaware if the promising 24 year old 3B is Bill Madlock, Scott Rolen, or Tim Wallach (all with similar WAR at age 24).

A handful of us submitted lists of names to Lev--mine were, if I recall correctly, jazz musicians--and like so many sports replay projects, it never happened, at least that I know of. Life intervened.

I always thought it was a great idea ...

So welcome to a revival of that idea

Strictly, this is a cross-era historical replay league--so players from 1871 through 2022 are included in the initial draft class of roughly 2,500. The league has 3 leagues of 16 teams each, with each team also having a single minor league affiliate. There is a promotion/relegation system between the 3 leagues. So, 96 teams in total (48 MLB teams in 3 levels; 48 minor league teams).

I am about 2/3 of the way through, no joke, importing and renaming the 2.5k players for the initial draft pool. It's a lot. I think a launch somewhere between Thanksgiving and the end of January is realistic.

So I'll track some of the progress here as we build towards opening day.

I am also very open to people who would like to GM a team in this concept. I'm working on figuring out how to totally mask the player identities, so it's not totally clear to me how the process would work, but I'm confident it can work.

Regardless, I think it will be interesting tracking a league over time that is "blind" in this way.

More to come ...

[Makonnen]

Oh heck. Clearly the wrong forum for this particular project. I am going to go post in the Fictional forum, if a mod can delete this thread, that would be great!