[Le Grande Orange]

I was thinking of something similar, but instead of using the latitude/longitude values, the cities.txt file would have a couple of additional values added to help place cities into proper divisions, and construct more realistic minor leagues.

I envisioned it working by taking, for example, the United States and dividing into four regions (northeast, southeast, central, west). Each region is then subdivided into two subregions. Cities/towns are assigned to a region/subregion based on their location. Then, when constructing a league, these regions/subregions are then used in appropriate combinations to select the member cities/teams.

If, say, you were creating an 8-team major league divided into two divisions, then four cities would be chosen from the northeast/southeast regions, and four clubs from the central/west regions. If you were creating a 12-team league with three divisions, then it'd select four cities from the northeast/southeast, four from the central, and four from the west. And so on. Using this method, the divisions are geographically sensible as the league is created.

A similar method is used for the minor leagues. An AA league, for example, would have member cities drawn from only one region, and cities could be drawn from the two subregions within that region to create divisions.

(A further refinement would see the number of minor leagues at the various classification levels more closely mimicking the real-world minors. With a 30-team major league, for example, there'd be two AAA leagues, three AA leagues, three High A leagues, two Low A leagues, two Short Season A leagues, etc. A simple lookup table could define how many minor leagues of what sizes there'd be at each classification level for a given size of major league, with the proportions mirroring the real-world MLB-minors proportions. This would extend to the lower levels of minors not directly matching the majors in terms of teams on a one-to-one basis [e.g. there are only 22 Short Season A teams even though there are 30 MLB teams]. The result is fictional leagues having a much more realistic distribution of minor leagues and league sizes.)

The exact definition of what states constitute a given region or subregion are, of course, open to debate. I would suggest definitions which provide the best likelihood of leagues being created which mimic real-world leagues. In any event, the definitions could be changed by the user by entering a different region and subregion identifier for a given city in the cities.txt file. Wholly fictional worlds could be created by simply dividing a list of imaginary cities into regions/subregions as the user chooses.

One thing to keep in mind in regards to selecting cities for a minor league is that, generally, minor leagues these days have a much wider spread of city sizes making up the league than is the case in the majors.