Project Isekai no Yakyu - Alternate universe league in Japan

[tehsuigi]

This is the biggest/dumbest project I've taken on in OOTP modding. If this doesn't get me to learn how to use eriqjaffe's uniform maker, nothing will.

isekai (異世界) - Japanese term for "different world," a style of fiction where someone is transported to, and has to survive, in another universe. Think of Inu-Yasha or Spirited Away.
yakyu (野球) - Japanese term for baseball, literally "field ball." It's been said that if Horace Wilson didn't introduce baseball to the Japanese people, they would have invented the sport organically.

Therefore, Isekai no Yakyu - baseball in another world - takes place in an alternate universe from ours, where an alternate 12-team league plays in Japan and occasionally exports players to MLB. And more importantly, doesn't violate any Japanese intellectual property rights.



The Project Contents

• 12 all-new fictional team identities, inspired by alternate names and slightly different circumstances for the teams in [LEAGUE REDACTED]
• Historical variants for the 12 teams, including relocations, redesigns, and one very contentious merger
• An independent league with fully fictional teams in further-flung locales
• A South African winter league to keep your prospects in game action
• And a quickstart at the ready for you to get rolling in the new universe, complete with familiar faces from MLB/MLBPA licensed data

Add the JPBO into Your Existing Save
Uniforms, Logos, and League Template for 26
For FastSpring/standalone, unzip to My Documents\OOTP Developments\OOTP Baseball 26\ - the subfolders in the zip will put everything into the right place.
For Steam, unzip to Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\Out of the Park Baseball 26\data instead.
Then in-game, use Game Settings > Global Actions > Add a template to this game to add the JPBO; close and re-open your save to see the uniforms and logos present.

League Template for 25
League Template for 24
League Template for 23

Quickstarts and Ballparks
26, including MLB, KBO, Partner Leagues, and WBC plus players in the licensed data set on the related JPBO club
JPBO Ballparks (built by SilvaM and Flying_Canuck, Ringo and I just removed the troublesome trademarks)

25, including MLB, KBO, Honkbal, and Partner Leagues
24, including MLB, KBO, and Partner Leagues
24 Historical, set in 1950 including MLB and MiLB
23, including MLB

Other Downloads
B-Sides Uniforms and Logos
Suid-Afrikaanse Bofballiga (without JPBO logos on shoulders)
Modern Uniforms and Logos, pre-23 template
The timeline to make changes manually to your historical game
Working schedules, just in case
Socks to patch any 25 games

Latest Update
Happy Pi Day and Happy OOTP 26 Launch Day! New league template and a patch file with only socks for any OOTP 25 players now up and ready to roll.

Credits

• 39_Ringo for collaborating on the designs and creating the B-Sides
• Gaijin Baseball on YouTube for fact-checking my divergences from reality and suggesting team identities
• dishnet34 for moral support and being a sober second set of eyes
• silvam14 for granting permission to include his Japanese ballparks (minus certain trademarked materials) in our mod
• Flying_Canuck for the same
• pauwoo for creating the A Set league template for 23
• SlayerMathis for the hard work deleting the duplicate personnel in the 24 A Set Modern QS

[Flying_Canuck]

No License issues here! I'll be looking forward to this one

Let's go man!

[20_range]

thank you for doing this

[Sizeman21]

Sounds like a great project. I recently re read your Midori No Ya Expansion dynasty with Shizuoka, always a great dynasty to get your imagination tingling!

[39_Ringo]

I'll be helping out with my own sector of the project. There will be two available timelines, mine and Suigi's, with slightly different teams although we have agreed to keep the same structure and teams shared across both timelines will have the same uniforms in both quickstarts.

[pauwoo]

Looking forward to it! And agree with the above - that was one of my favorite dynasties over the years.

[Ty Cobb]

Well done!

[tehsuigi]

The League

The Japanese Professional Baseball Organization (JPBO or Nihon Puro Yakyu Kikou) has its roots in earlier professional leagues in the land of the rising sun, with a few members predating the shutdown of all professional games during World War II.



The logo depicts a fictional player about to swing his bat in the O of the wordmark, itself reminiscent of the Japanese flag. His batting stance was strikingly unconventional at the time of the logo's introduction. "Yeah, like anyone's going to set home run records with that leg kick," quipped one of the team owners. Still, fans have lovingly dubbed the silhouette Oh-san after the letter.



The Sub-leagues
Since American personnel were instrumental in setting up the nascent league during their occupation of Japan following the war, JPBO officials configured the league to have two separate, and independent, sub-leagues that would meet in the championship series for the Maru Plate.

Since the majors were organized into American and National leagues, the JPBO naturally has the Nihon (Japanese) and Zenkoku (national) Leagues. Given that N and Z can look close to each other when rotated, the designers at each league chose stark colour/font differences and added visual aids. The Nihon League's more dignified look belies its position as the senior circuit, while the Zenkoku's bright magenta helps it stand out against its more popular counterpart.

[tehsuigi]

@Sizeman and pauwoo: thanks for the kudos on the Midori no Ya dynasty. That was my way to not zoom through the sim, slow down and remember some of the guys. I miss Shigejiro Matsumoto and Koji Kashima, y'know?

[darkcloud4579]

bless you for this concept!

[tehsuigi]

The key to an alternate universe is finding out the divergent point. Where that reality separated from ours. And sometimes, it can be as simple as one old rich guy being stubborn.

Japan's oldest professional baseball team started against MLB all-stars, but grew in prominence through barnstorming in America and joining the precursor league to the JPBO. During this barnstorming, Lefty O'Doul, a player-manager in San Francisco, suggested to team representatives that an Anglicized, more evocative, name would make them a better draw at the box office (and increase their pull). Thus, the Japanese team picked up the nickname of one of Lefty's former pro clubs as a way of saying thanks.

Back in Japan, the team owner had a new name waiting for them, based on a Japanese military order. The players wanted to continue honouring Lefty's involvement by keeping the name, especially since they played so well under it. The team owner relented put his foot down, and told the players to find a new team if they brought the subject up again.

Thus, we come to our first team in Isekai no Yakyu, playing in the nation's capital and in the Nihon League...

Tokyo Golden Kites, nicknamed the "Kinshi"

Colour scheme is crimson and gold, directly influenced by the Golden Kite award (the kite in question is a predatory bird, not an actual kite).
The main logo is actually from a logo pack that 39_Ringo chose for his simming, and it suits the idea so well we agreed to keep it. Turns out it's from the Denver Gold of the USFL, and I don't have compunctions about pinching from defunct leagues.
Wordmarks and alternate jersey front use Porter in a non-commercial manner. Home and road jersey fronts use Fancy Block from the Uniform Maker.


Three uniforms are provided here:

• Home white uniform
• Road grey uniform (most JPBO teams prefer team-colour road uniforms, but the Kinshi are stuck in their ways)
• Crimson "Kinshi" alternate uniform

Author's Note: how the heck do I do strikethrough on these forums?!

EDIT: After getting some feedback that Porter is a bit too modern for the jersey font, I agree and re-did it with Fancy Block.

[tehsuigi]

Divergences can be happenstance as well. A flip of the coin can change the fate of a baseball team, just as much as any person (or victim of Two-Face).

Two baseball teams played in Nagoya as the league was getting ready to form; although it's a major metropolis, it's no Tokyo or Osaka and can't support that much professional play, so one of those two had to fold at the end of an early 1940's season. The remaining team was just known as the Nagoya club.

When the JPBO mandated nicknames for teams to participate in the league, the team decided to opt for the Zodiac sign of their new team owner bring back the name of the team that ended play to participate in the Nihon League...

Nagoya Dolphins

Since the Nagoya-based club in the (redacted) borrows the colours and look of the Dodgers, I think it's only fair the Dolphins get to borrow from Miami's football club, adjusted to be a bit more primary-colour.
The mascot is a recoloured and adjusted from a Water/Flying porpoise Fakemon I found on deviantART. Shrunk the fins and fixed the dorsal so it looks less like an airplane.
The font for the hat logo and shoulder on the home jersey is BankGothic, and inspired by the logo for CN Rail, rotated 180%. Jersey font is Courgette, one of the swooshier standards in EriqJaffe's uniform maker.


Only two uniforms here - home and road. Fear the teal.


EDIT: Went back and adjusted the primary logo so it looks more like a dolphin.

[Ty Cobb]

Nice looking work, sir!

[tehsuigi]

Thanks, Ty! Trying to keep this in homage-but-not-directly-aping-anyone territory.

As alluded to in the original post, World War II still happened in this alternate universe. Which means there's still scars from the conflict, and how places recover from them can be the point of divergence.

Hiroshima was granted a franchise in the JPBO right at the league's commencement, participating in the Nihon League, as a way of injecting tourism and levity into the still-rebuilding city.

To symbolize their perseverance and rebirth, Hiroshima's team would be named after the koi that swam upstream near the city's castle the Western mythology of a bird rising from the ashes, even though it didn't really mesh with the symbolism in Japan.

Hiroshima Phoenix

With the Kites using crimson and gold, the colours you'd expect for a phoenix, Hiroshima's colour scheme uses a different blend of the five hues of the Fenghuang: yellow, black, white, and green primarily, with red appearing only on the alternate jersey.
It took every ounce of willpower not to just use Ho-oh from Pokemon as the main logo, but I am using its palette! Main logo is a random find from the internet, overlaid on a baseball (b/c this is a baseball team)
Just like the [team redacted] borrow their cap logo from the Reds, the Phoenix pinch from a different NL Central team - the Pirates.
Primary font is Norican, arched upward to infer an ascent, except on the alternate where it's flat.

Three uniforms:

• home white
• road grey
• alternate "phoenix feathers"

[tehsuigi]

I had something written here, but the dang forum ate it. Something about how divergences don't even need to involve the baseball team to work.

Our first Zenkoku League team has a checkered history, starting in Tokyo before moving to Sendai, and then Kawasaki after the Astrals went to Yokohama. After putting up with that place for way too long, they found a new home across Tokyo Bay in Chiba.

A team naming contest was held, and one of the popular entries came from a manga where the ace pitcher protagonist plays for a team in Chiba. In that manga, the team was utter trash, so team officials declined to use it to avoid negative connotations the team would go from trash to champions, and the licensing rights were speedily acquired.

The fans' love affair with their team, and reputation for being the loudest cheer section in Japan, started early with the

Chiba Pirates

That main logo by inktycoon already came in navy blue, which I already had in mind as the primary colour for this club. No recolours at all!
Fonts are all Skulls and Crossbones by Joanna Vu.

Anytime you do navy pinstripes, you draw comparisons to the Yankees, but since the manga team had a sharply-raked diagonal team name, we've done something similar here on the home jersey. The navy road jersey is what gives the "Navy Navy" cheer squad its redundant sobriquet.

[tehsuigi]

Sometimes, alternate universes go beyond unreality and into areas of supernatural powers that even I won't tempt.

Naturally, when the Golden Kites needed someone professional to play against, opposition sprang up in the west. Just as the Kanto and Kansai regions of Japan have jostled for prominence and power, so too have their baseball clubs.

The winning team name suggestion came from a railway employee who had recently visited Detroit Chicago, a similarly industrial city mirroring Osaka, and thought that their ballclub would be worth emulating.

Little did he know he was siccing two curses from our universe on this team, but it's not like the fans notice. All of the Keihanshin area adores their...

Kansai Cubs

Oh jeez, where do I even begin. Just like how the [REDACTED] doesn't match the Detroit Tigers' look, I had to stray from the Chicago Cubs vibe with a few key adjustments. Note also that the team plays in Nishinomiya, not Osaka proper, and thus tries to represent the entire Kansai area (Osaka, Kyoto, and Kobe).
The main logo is a recoloured Boston Bruins alternate logo. Cap/small logo is Toronto Subway by Quadrat, a font I purchased years ago and have made good use of since. Jersey font and patches are in Dela Gothic One.

Three uniforms in this pack:

• home white with a left chest logo
• road blues with team name on front, geography on the sleeve
• and a black alternate jersey in homage/mockery of the [REDACTED]'s hideous summer jerseys

[39_Ringo]

My side of the project is more closely about exploring the potential of something like the J.League, where teams are more spread out to represent different metropolitan areas of Japan.

With that being said, founded in 1950 as a way to get Fukuoka "on the map", the Fukuoka Clippers were one of two franchises based in Fukuoka at the start of the JPBL, and while they got off to a hot start, finding their way to the first two Japan Series, they could never seem to get over the hump, and regressed to mediocrity or worse throughout the next 30 years as the rival [TO BE SHOWCASED LATER] took a stranglehold on the city after a slow start. As a result, they moved to Shikoku and became the...

Matsuyama Arrows! in 1978, capturing their first Japan Series title in 1981, with the next coming in 2018. Despite the struggles this team gives them on a regular basis, the residents of the island of Shikoku are some of the most dedicated in all of JPBL.

The logo is taken from what I believe to be a 2009 Icethetics team concept called the St. Louis Archers. The logo font on the uniforms is Jockey by TypeTogether.




uniform_Matsuyama_Arrows_1976-2023.zip

uniform_Matsuyama_Arrows_away_1976-2023.zip

[tehsuigi]

I admit, it's hard to separate fact from fiction with these write-ups. I draw too close to the real teams, and it feels like a lesser effort. This divergence point is a matter of degrees...

Our next Nihon League team started in Shimonoseki, then moved to Osaka after that until a permanent home in Kawasaki was built. The team drew poorly there, blamed almost entirely on the quality of the stadium, and relocated to Yokohama in the late 1970s. The team was always named the Whalers (and yes, they will borrow Hartford's look when I get there), but as the 1990s rolled on and Japan took flak for its ongoing whaling practices, team ownership decided a new name was in order.

The new name would reflect the futuristic Minato Mirai project being built on Yokohama's waterfront, and give an optimistic glance to the future. Heck, the team tried to refer to Yokohama Bay because of that, but that often wound up with Bay getting added to the team's actual name.

Yokohama Astrals

I clearly had Buzz Lightyear and the LGMs on my subconscious when it came to this set. And y'all aren't even going to get the super-90s-space-program designs until we get to the historical stuff!
Font is American Captain, main logo borrows from CatalystStuff on Freepik, and features six starbursts for the six districts of Kanagawa prefecture. The starburst itself is a repurposed Office 2010 clip art.

Three jerseys in this one, and the alternate_textured file made my ZIP go over 3MB in size...

• Home white
• Road purple, with a wordmark that's a scootch too big
• "Galaxy" alternate; clearly Yokohama found the screen printing equipment

[three_eyed_owl]

Looks great so far! The team identities look great. They're grounded in reality yet exist all on their own.

I'm very eagerly awaiting to see more and more of this as Project Isekai no Yakyu and its world takes shape!

[tehsuigi]

Thanks, 3 Eyed Owl! Hope you like the next one.

This one has to be the smallest divergence of the bunch, but how it got to the present day is a twisted tale in and of itself. Not all of this is fictional!

The modern-day Zenkoku League franchise we're showing below was among the earliest professional teams in the Osaka area, but they weren't using this name when they joined the league. They were the Hyogo Gladiators, and they played in the same part of town as the Kansai Cubs. A new owner in the late 1980s moved them into the Kobe area, re-christening them the Thunder. All the while, a completely separate team in Osaka in the Zenkoku League was using this identity after renaming from the Divers.

These two clubs would then merge, citing financial hardship and a shrinking market, in the early 2000s, touching off a firestorm of player and fan anger. It was only through re-expansion of the Zenkoku League with the addition of the Sendai Woodpeckers that things calmed down.

And to add insult to injury, the Thunder franchise would be the one that continued on with the others' name and ballpark. Got all that? Good. Here's the...

Osaka Bulls

This one came to me fully formed because I was craving beef curry. There's a restaurant chain here in Toronto called Gyugyuya, and that is basically their logo.
SF Fedora is the font used here.
Colour scheme is in reference to both bulls "seeing red" and a prior incarnation of [TEAM REDACTED] in [LEAGUE REDACTED].

Three uniforms here: white home, grey road (and please let me know if the greys need to get darker or if it's fine as is!), and red alternate.


EDIT: I realized that the Bulls are the only JPBO team to not use a letter as their small logo (there is an in-universe reason why), so I quickly make this up from their cap logo if that bugs you.


EDIT 2: Further throwing a wrench into this entire plan is that the Bulls in the JPBO have won 7 rings and 17 pennants...and the Gladiators/Thunder have zero championships and only six pennants. Since that's closer in-line to what the IRL equivalent of the team that got nerfed did, the merger will wipe out the Thunder, or at the very least just force them to move to Sendai.