[Le Grande Orange]

Suggestion

Allow separate leagues to be associated together under a higher-level grouping.

Reason

Better historical accuracy and more freedom for the player.

Priority

Extremely high (I feel this addition is a crucial one).


This "league assocation" idea was first proposed by cephasjames, so credit goes to him for the initial concept, but what follows is my fleshing out of the idea.


The Proposal In Detail

It's time for the use of subleagues to represent what were really separate leagues to end. Subleagues are still useful for recreating conference-like structures such as those found in the NBA or NFL, but for recreating baseball history and for user flexibility, they are lacking.

The real AL and NL, for example, often used different rules such as roster limits, and certainly had different league totals and statistics each year. But this league individuality cannot be recreated in OOTP at the moment since subleagues don't allow this level of uniqueness.

To get around this, league associations are the answer. This is how I envision it working, using MLB as an example.

First, you'd create your NL, and then you create the AL as a totally separate league. Both are completely individual entities, each with their own rules and option settings, and with their own league totals and financial settings. So, if you wanted the NL to have a 23 man active roster and the AL 25, you could do that. But as these leagues are separate entities, by default they cannot trade players between them, they cannot hold a common amateur draft, nor can they play any interleague games or post-season championship. These individual leagues do not respect the contracts of other leagues, and thus will try to lure players away from other leagues by offering them more money to jump leagues.

You decide you want these two leagues to be able to interact. What you do then is create an association and then place the two leagues in it. So, you'd create an association called MLB and put your AL and NL as members of this association. By putting them together in the MLB association, this allows the leagues to now interact in the following ways: 1) the leagues can now trade players between them; 2) the leagues can now hold a common amateur draft; 3) the leagues can now play interleague spring training and regular season games against each other; 4) the leagues can now hold a post-season championship series between them, and 5) the leagues now respect each other's player contracts and will not try to get players to contract jump.

This kind of associating together of leagues mimics quite well the real way in which the AL and NL operated.

I would allow two kinds of associations: a major league association and a major-minor association.

The major league association allows only those leagues classified as major leagues to form an association, and allows the kind of interacting mentioned previously.

The major-minor association is intended to reflect the real-world NAPBL, or National Association as it's also known. You would pick the major leagues and minor leagues you want to put into this association. When together in this association, it would allow the following: 1) a Rule 5 draft can now be held involving all the member leagues; 2) players can now be optioned from major league clubs to minor league ones; 3) major league clubs can form affiliations with minor league member clubs; 4) minor leagues can now trade players between them; 5) minor leagues can now play interleague games between them, both in the regular season and spring training; and 5) minor leagues can now play post-season series against each other.

The use of league associations also allows an interesting game play possibility: outlaw* leagues. Historically, leagues which were not signatories to the National Association were not bound by the rules of the Association, which meant the clubs did not have to respect the contracts or territories of other leagues. If a well-financed outlaw league decided it wanted to lure players away from other leagues, it was free to try and do so, just like the Mexican League did in 1946-48. The catch for the players was if they jumped their contracts to go and play for an outlaw league, they were no longer allowed to play for National Association member clubs (though they could apply for reinstatement).

An OOTP player could mimic this real-world history by setting up their own outlaw leagues inside their baseball universe. The league assocation concept certainly adds some interesting possibilities, along with being more historically authentic.

*Today, outlaw leagues are known as independent leagues, and do not try to directly compete with the major leagues. Instead, they aim to co-exist with the majors and fill a different niche in the sports marketplace.