Modern MLB League evolution: 2 team expansion
 

Hey Guys,

So, I am playing my Modern MLB universe, and in 2021, the league will add two teams. I will likely turn off the expansion after this.

Anyway, I am ok with 32 teams, but what ended-up happening is that they added on a team directly to the AL East and NL East Divisions, while keeping the league structure the same, so only those two divisions have 6 teams. It is kind of odd.

I checked a few articles on line about MLB possibly expanding, and they would be looking to move to 32 teams, however all of them have the league moving to divisions of 4 teams each or the 8 teams each.

Do you guys think this will mess the league up? (I candidly did not realize I had this enabled or perhaps I did, but this has not occurred). I think I have a back-up from right before this occurred, so I could restore from that point, but wow, I will lose a few hours’ worth of FA search, off-season personnel hiring etc.…

What do you guys think?


-Cal

I'd restore from back-up. Expansion is best off done manually.

Yea, I thought that could be the case. Actually, I meant AL East and NL East.


I am not really into manually adjusting the league, so I will likely need to turn it off from here out.

It certainly sounds like restore would be best here. You really haven’t lost all of that time, because any searching you did (to find FAs or whatever), the results should still hold true.


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There's nothing stopping you from realigning the teams/divisions to something more of your liking. Can be done in league setup. Just be sure to generate a new schedule after.

I started a league and expanded to 32. I copied the NFL style divisions. East, West, North, South. It allowed each division to be even.
Should be able to change that if playing in commish mode.

Thanks for the feedback guys.

It is true, that it may not take a lot more time if I restore.

I was thinking about doing something to align the divisions as Bluenoser and Drummer mentioned. However, I never play in commish mode and always worry about messing with the league set-up after starting my Universe. I play-out all of my games, so there is a lot of time invested in the save already; also, I sort of like having to navigate the MLB world once it is set-up, so this situation was sort of an outlier for me, and I have been playing OOTP for a while.

Candidly, as I touched-on earlier, I would have been fine with the expansion if the league would have realigned evenly. I wonder if this might be something that could be added as an option per the evolution set-up eventually.

FWIW, I'm currently playing a fictional MLB universe with 32 teams. I've eliminated the separate AL and NL and have it all under one league. 4 divisions of 8 teams, because with 8 of 4 you always have that one or two divisions that are just terrible, and I HATE the idea of an 80 win team making the postseason in any capacity. So it's 4 of 8 with 2 wildcards. Sort of an NFL format for postseason where the top 2 teams get a first round bye. Wildcard round is best of 3 (I also hate the idea that anything other than tie-breakers should be decided by a single game in baseball).Final 2 rounds are best of seven.
Just finished my first season. Division champions had 109,95,94, and 90 wins. Wildcards 96 wins each, so good results there.

Other details:
Due to the consolidation under a single league, I moved duplicate teams. The Angels moved to Vegas, the Mets to Montreal, and the White Sox to Indianapolis.
The two expansion teams are in Charlotte and Nashville.
The DH has been eliminated because this ain't softball. Baseball is 9 players.
Using 1987 stats. I'm pretty happy with that, too.

I'm having a lot of fun with this so far.

That is interesting Charley. Appreciate the read and I hear you about the 80 win team.

For me, I am trying to keep my MLB Standard game as close to MLB as I can.

And as a follow-up, my restore point was the first day of the off-season....where the expansion was announced! So, it looks like I am going to live with it: let me introduce the Columbus Swallows and the Indianapolis Lions.

As a result, I went back and took a look at the league expansions and structure from the past. The newest divisions are the "Central". And in the past, prior to 1993, MLB had 2 divisions, with 7 teams each. And prior to expansion, there were 8 teams per league all in "one division".

So, I thought, ok..., there is precedent for 8 teams and there is precedent for two large divisions (East and West). Therefore, I did what I have never done in the past, and altered the league structure based on that historical "precedent"; I moved roughly according to proximity all of the current Central Division Teams to the East and West divisions, and eliminated the Central Divisions. Kind of, Back-to-the-future. I also was sure to regenerate the schedule (thanks for that advice guys).

I now have the AL East, AL West and the NL East and NL West.

I want to expand to 32 teams but the playoff options are difficult with 4 division winners plus wildcards. It doesnt work great :(

I do one wildcard and have the playin game between the lowest division winner and the wildcard.

I don't really like the 4x4 system (I don't think it's true to what MLB would actually do) but when I have used it I have found that the NFL playoff setup works pretty well. Two wild cards in each league, playing the two lower-ranked division leaders in a 3-game set.

I expanded to 32 teams. I kept the two leagues, but I realigned them by geography. There are two 8 team divisions in each league. There are no inter-league games, teams play 14 games against division rivals and 8 against non-division teams (standard series is 4 games). There are no wildcard teams. After 162 games, it seems wrong that a wildcard team could win the World Series.

It's the beauty of OOTP, you can do whatever you want.