Quote:
Originally Posted by CatKnight
What's your criteria for deciding when/if/where a team should move?
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In this particular universe, my only criteria was 1) poor results over a period of time, signaling a long-term ownership group that may or may not have done well with the club. I also started to consider more and more, the idea that 2) baseball should be represented around the country, rather than having multiple teams in cities, when say, a team in a adjacent locale could still blanket that area.
For instance, Green Bay. They were close enough to Chicago, that I believe some of the old fan base would support the ballclub so long as it began to become successful.
Same with San Jose's move from Los Angeles.
In a few random cases, it was just me going "that move would make sense and I have a uniform to match that locale or could make a good looking one."
But that one is usually after considering other things.
The realism in terms of what we consider today to be a real-life market versus what we don't is not employed here. Because I believe cities that have minor league clubs would support a major league team provided it was close enough to a population centre and given that MLB had revenue sharing to ensure that teams weren't provided with a huge advantage by simple matter of geography in the case of say, New York or Philadelphia.
That said, the current alignment and team locales are pretty much fixed at this point, as I can't really see too many other places to move teams to or teams to move. Will it happen? It might. But,
I think looking at the map, you can see that we have a good part of the country covered and that's my preference for baseball and what the original premise of this dynasty was about anyway.
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To that end, the only region that's technically underrepresented is the Caribbean, but I preferred to keep MLB an essentially American league, with the exception of a Canadian team represented. Other countries don't let their top flight leagues go willynilly across borders and I felt ours shouldn't either out of respect for other countries leagues and simply out of convenience for ours.
I also pour pretty heavily over population projections and because I've been to all of the lower 48 states, I tend to use ancedotal research in determining which markets can support teams from what I've seen from them.
So there is a method to my (seeming) madness.