[The Game]

Originally Posted by toxicavenger74

I have always set up my fictional OOTP leagues to be an Eastern League and a Western League in place of National and American. My reasoning is that if two leagues were to be setup today in a fictional country it would be aligned geographically much like the NBA.

However, here I am 8 years into my OOTP playing career and I am having an OOTP crisis because I feel like this is to vanilla and does not allow each league to have its own identity. If you look at MLB and even the NFL which have each league/conference spread throughout the country, they both have their own identity. Obviously, this is from historical mergers of competing leagues. But each league has a California footprint and a New York footprint along with Florida, Missouri, Texas. Each league has personality that I have found that a East/West set up never has

Lastly, one last layer that a complete East/West set up will never have is the opportunity for two teams from the same market competing for the championship such as the Subway Series or the I-70 series.

Anyway, after years of thinking that a complete geographic set up was the best set up I have come to a different conclusion and feel that competing leagues adds layers of complexity and identity that I love about baseball and will change the way I play OOTP.

What are your thoughts on this matter? Do you set up your OOTP leagues as Eastern League v. Western League or allow each league to have a complete national footprint?

For my ABF league it is North vs South. It originally was supposed to be a Civil War type of theme but I abandoned that early on. While LA, Houston, Atlanta, Las Vegas & Dallas are all in the south the North clearly has the larger cities of Chicago, NY & Philadelphia.
Eventually I will creat the American League which will have a team in NY, CHI, PHI & HOU along with 12 other cities the ABF is not in like STL, SEA, WAS & MIA. My plan is the AL with merge with the ABF and the original ABF with become the National League and the AL will stay as the American League. This will put 14 teams in each league meaning 2 ABF teams will go to the AL (expansion may change this)