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Yeah, you can't retroactively change it. The league history has either been loaded at game creation (the Wizard toggle box) or, if a standard game, it's pre-loaded. In a historical game, you can have more impact on the going-forward years.
So, a player has a stat line that says "BRO" and if you are importing to historical team, instead of having a draft each year, the game looks to put him on the BRO team. The records/stats for Brooklyn fall under the franchise of LAD so they stay with the team when 1958 comes and going forward. If you are a fan of an AL team you may have noticed that some, say, Red Sox records, actually belong to 19th c. players on Louisville. In real life those teams have no relationship. Louisville should die and the Red Sox start fresh in 1901 but for gameplay purposes, the team evolves into the Red Sox, same as Brooklyn seamlessly becomes the LA Dodgers.
At this point, I'll pause and mention there are two Team.csv files. One wrapped up inside the histroical.database.odb and one outside of it. The one inside sets up the game. For the future years, the one outside can be altered because that is the one that the game checks in each subsequent season. Folks may remember that the alt Teams.csv that did a find/replace on Guardians for Indians only changed the outside file - so your first year, on Day One you had to make manual change of the name in the Team Settings but thereafter auto-evolution of the league referenced the amended Teams.csv with "Indians" in it.
So, if I wanted a timebreak for Montreal, I think I would experiment with having the Teams.csv the same through Montreal's last season but where the 2005 line says WAS and then WSN (the same as the MON franchise), I'd change that WSN and all subsequent franchise IDs for the Nats as WDC or some new (not previously used) franchise ID. Keep the WAS so that it gets Ryan Zimmerman etc. if playing with "Import to real team" on. My hope would be that the WAS code is disassociated with the WSN code and is only ever tagged to WDC. Now, what happens if you play from 2004 to 2005? I guess we could find out, but I think all the Montreal players from 2004 get released as FA and it will do an expansion draft for a single team, the new Nationals. Then I'd pick a year I want the Expos to come back and add them back with MON and WSN in the Teams.csv file, add another fictional team too that year to balance the schedule, and let them expand because you have tricked the game into thinking this is a historical expansion. Say we chose 2022 as that year. The real test would be if the game sees the MON and WSN IDs again and those old records tie back in despite the break.
It would be interesting to see if that worked and maybe I will when time permits. Just remember to save a copy of your Teams.csv and put it to the side to restore when you want to play a regular, not alt-Montreal verse again. Also, as I said, not sure what happens once you get to current year and thereafter. My experience is deeper in historical alt universes.
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