[Garlon]

Set up your league and clear all the rosters of all teams. This makes all players in your created league a free agent. Go to MLB>Transactions>Free Agents>Actions>Delete all free agents. You then have an empty league.

You could add the team ID to your text file so that the players will load directly to their destination team. For example, say that the owner of Yankees will get 2001 Barry Bonds. You can set up the file with a third column so that it is bondsba01,2001,NYA. You can find the team abbreviations for each team by selecting the team then Home>Settings. You want the Historical Team ID, not the Historical Franchise ID. If you made up your own team names, just put a unique abbreviation in the settings for each team and have that correspond to your text file.

To load your text file (not a csv file), go to MLB>Transactions>Free Agents>Actions>Import historical players. Then click the option that says Click here to select file. Navigate to your text file and load it.

I suggest when creating the league that you go to Create New Game>Historical then Select the season in history you want for the league and keep it set to Default Mode as the play mode. You may need to create additional teams if the year in question does not have all of the franchises you want.