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Metropolitan Baseball Association 1871-72 Offseason Report
Metropolitan Baseball Association president and New York Empire Citys owner Harry DeMille declared the inaugural 1871 season a success, with every franchise turning a profit and drawing more spectators than their non-association counterparts. The 1871 campaign was viewed by most franchise owners as a test to see if the all professional, closed-association concept would work. Well, it did, and DeMille has some plans to expand the MBA's influence in 1872:
First up is the relocation of the Colonials and the Dukes. The Colonials will move from Hartford, Connecticut to the major hub of the New England region, Boston, and play the 1872 season as the Boston Colonials. Likewise the Albany Dukes, sharing a crowded market with the Troy Trojans, will head south to Philadelphia to become the Philadelphia Dukes. Both clubs pulled lower attendance numbers than the other six.
The next change for 1872 is the expanded schedule. All clubs will play 42 games in the upcoming season, a 50% increase from the previous 28-game schedule.
Finally, it's worth noting how I plan on approaching league evolution and other changes during the offseason. I purposely started this league in a small geographic area and put teams in small markets so I could emulate the way leagues constantly changed in the early years. I won't ever be folding teams, but I plan on relocating teams frequently until they settle into sort of the 8 largest cities east of the Mississippi and north of Washington DC.
So what I plan on doing is using the league ERA at the end of the season as sort of a random number generator. If it ends in 0, no teams will change. If it ends in an odd number, I'll consider one team for relocation. If it ends even, two teams could possibly move. As for which teams relocate, I look at the teams with the worst attendence and determine if there's a suitable, larger market for them to move into. If New York had the worst attendence, they probably wouldn't move, because there isn't a "more desirable" market available.
I'm also expandin each team's stadium capacity after each season. They all start around 1500, which is fine for now but the crowds are going to quickly outgrow them. So during the offseason each team will get new seats equal to the number of regular season wins they had multiplied by 5.
As for schedule expansion, I'm trying to keep in line with the average number of games teams played in real-life major league baseball. By the end of the decade the schedule will be up around 100 games.
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