Somewhere far away from here, in the island country of Lokasi, baseball fever grips the population. The Lokasi have their own culture, language, and baseball traditions that I'll do my best to chronicle here.
This is a recreation of a league system that I originally conceived of nearly a decade ago, and first posted in this forum in 2017. I recently got a new computer, and it occurred to me that I could revisit this project, but fix all the little things that I thought I should have done differently. So, the graphics look a little better, the names are a little easier to pronounce, there are more teams, and the financial balance is a bit better.
I have spent the last month or so re-running the simulation under these new conditions, and just reached the start of the 2021 season. I had planned on getting to 2025 before posting here, but with 30 years of history recorded I'm ready to get after it. Many of the teams that will be featured here are different from those who were a big deal in version 1 - there is one team that was a juggernaut in the original version who now play in the 11th tier of the pyramid!
Here's a map of the islands. Lokasi is about the size of Spain or the Philippines, and is home to around 44 million people. Its precise location is undefined - who's to say that it's even on Earth?
(a larger version of the map is available
here. Contains all cities with a population of at least 100,000, as well as the smaller state capitals)
Lokasi is divided into 18 states, including the capital district of Shunna (as if DC were a state). The largest city, Ransu, is home to around 7.5 million people (over 1/6 of the population) and is culturally similar to New York. That is enough to make the state of Ransu the largest by population, closely followed by the southern state of Tsawemoko (in broad strokes, Tsawemoko is similar to California).
The league system is structured as follows:
If you do the math, you will find that there are over a thousand teams at play, and over 50,000 games per year - a lot of baseball! The top two leagues are nationwide, and the further down you go the more fragmented it becomes. The State Leagues encompass up to 3 additional tiers depending on the state, so there are teams playing at the 11th tier of pro baseball (semi-pro in this case). The 9th, 10th, and 11th tiers are administered by the states themselves, so promotion from the state leagues has a quirk: you can only be promoted from tier 9 to tier 8 if a team from your state is relegated from tier 8, allowing you to take their spot.
Geographically, the 2021 Elite League and Second League will stack up like this. Each team has a logo corresponding to the first character of their name in the Lokasi syllabary (a writing system similar to Japanese kana, and specifically inspired by the Cherokee language). Many characters look similar to our letters, but only because they're nice shapes. For example, the four EL teams that use an L-shaped symbol are actually those whose names start with a plain 'A'.
There are a few other weird things that will come up - the 30-man rosters, the fact that the Lokasi observe a 12-day week, and more - but all in due time.
In the next post, I think I'll get straight into a preview of the 2021 EL season - who are these teams, their key players, their history, and what should we expect in this upcoming season?