So, like many others, I'm looking to do an expansion league game because I'm a hipster and can't deal with just playing a normal game. I also have a fictional league game from 1900 onwards (first 5 years ghost simmed and then history cleared, no idea if that's still nessecary to shake out the kinks but I'm superstitious about these things), but that's neither here nor there.
The plan is eventually to have a 40 team league many many seasons down the road, and as such a 4 division per league structure is nessecary to set up. I wanted to do it with minimal disruptions to the current structure, except for consolidating some geographical cross league issues.
The teams I'm adding are Montreal because they deserve a team back, and Mexico City, for various reasons, including giving me an excuse to load up the Mexican leagues in addition to my usual of MLB+Japan+Korea+US&Japan Indies.
As such, these are the divisions I've come up with, and I'm looking for critique on them, in addition to suggestions for the new team for each division further down the line to reach 40 teams.
American League
AL North- Baltimore Orioles
- Boston Red Sox
- New York Yankees
- Toronto Blue Jays
AL Central- Chicago White Sox
- Cleveland Indians
- Detroit Tigers
- Minnesota Twins
AL West- Colorado Rockies
- Los Angeles Angels
- Oakland Athletics
- Seattle Mariners
AL South- Houston Astros
- Kansas City Royals
- Mexico City TBAs
- Texas Rangers
National League
NL East- Montreal TBAs
- New York Mets
- Philadelphia Phillies
- Washington Nationals
NL Central- Chicago Cubs
- Milwaukee Brewers
- Pittsburgh Pirates
- St. Louis Cardinals
NL West- Arizona Diamondbacks
- Los Angeles Dodgers
- San Diego Padres
- San Francisco Giants
NL South- Atlanta Braves
- Cincinnati Reds
- Miami Marlins
- Tampa Bay Rays
As you can see I've tried to keep things fairly consistent to the current alignments, but also moved the Rays and Rockies to opposite leagues to help with geography although I'm not sure if it can be rejiggered to fix that. The big thing I've done is put the Montreal team in the same division as the Nationals, as that seems to be the natural rivalry to set up (the other being Toronto). But I'm still not entirely satisfied, especially with the number of rivalries I've had to break up to fill out the new divisions.
So, any thoughts? I'm especially wondering if swapping Houston and Tampa is a good idea so that the end result is still only 1 team(Colorado) that's changed leagues in recent memory.
That said it's probably not something I'll start till OOTP18, as I'm content at the moment with my fictional save and the historical minors save I just started, never liked starting a modern save at the tail end of a season.