[Nunyer]

The year is 2052. China and India are the big economic powerhouses on the planet. America has seen decades of relative stagnation. Fuel costs are high, wages aren't rising... it's sorta like the 1970s... except for roughly 40 straight years and with less disco music and unkempt body hair. Over this time, professional sports have seen a drastic decline in popularity. Young people from the early part of the century, raised with entertainment options from video games and the internet, are generally not as strong sports fans as their parents were. With the economy never especially bright, the middle classes have been shrinking and many people have been slowly priced out of stadium seats. Owners and players engage in repeated cycles of strikes and lockouts, fighting over the remains of the dying golden goose, and more and more fans are alienated.

Facing lower revenue and rising fuel costs, in the early 2020s, the western teams decide to break from MLB and start a regional league... no longer able to justify cross country road trips involving prohibitively expensive air travel. With this region of the country being primarily Spanish speaking by 2030, they siphon off the majority of the Latin based talent from Central/South America and Caribbean.. enjoying generally higher attendance, allowing for higher salaries and offering the players a home where Spanish is the primary language.

By 2025 the remaining rump of the MLB is next to collapse. The talent pool has been greatly diminished, the revenues can no longer support the palatial ballparks, big time corporations are now buying luxury boxes for cricket matches in India and soccer in China. By 2029 the southern teams have followed the west and have gone regional. In 2033, with only eight teams remaining in the northeast and midwest, the final official MLB games are played. The Cubs go 125 years without winning a World Series. The Pittsburgh Pirates win the final three championships. Dogs and cats get along fine. Carrot Top is now considered a comic genius by the people of France. It's insanity.

With the reset button now fully pressed, baseball goes about slowly rebuilding at the regional level. In 2042, Northern League Baseball is formed with 18 total teams running from the eastern seaboard to Chicago in the west and to Virginia and Kentucky in the south. Some teams share a direct lineage with their MLB predecessors, a few MLB teams have survived as regional, minor league teams and will form affiliations with NLB teams... but all teams at the top level start with new names and mascots to avoid the stigma from decades of labor unrest and an ugly league wide death spiral.

League Setup:

18 teams, 2 divisions
2 wildcards
Both playoff rounds will be best of seven
DH enabled

Three levels of minors (AAA, AA, SA)

The divisions will be geographically based by western and eastern. I will run an unbalanced schedule, as to reduce travel costs, I would think Chicago would want to avoid as many train rides to New York as possible.

Star players will earn $1.5m - $2m per season, minimum salary for a scrub is $120k or so. Top team payrolls are around $20m. Stadium capacity league wide is between 20-30,000 seats. Foreign players will be capped at 10%.

I will shortly be taking control of one team and provide the story primarily from that perspective, with news stories sprinkled in from around the league, country, world, etc. The game world has been simulated ahead, to the year 2052. Generally speaking, I like to have fun with this kind of stuff. The backstory is a bit of a downer, a necessary evil to give myself a clean sandbox to play in, but the mood will be much lighter going forward, most fake news stories will be based around the premise of me making myself chuckle while I write it.