As I was putting this project together, there were several different areas I had to think very deeply about, in order to inject as much realty into the English baseball universe as possible (and reasonable). One crucial area is the makeup of the players themselves.
Being an English League starting out in 1888, there's no way any team was going to be a multicultural melting pot of white, black, Asian and Latino players. Practically every player at that point in history represented in a league like this has to be white. It's a terrible thing that Caucasian exceptionalism (for lack of a better term) stunted the game from the very beginning and hindered its growth for six-plus decades in America. As it turns out, a very similar situation existed in England in their own professional sports like cricket, football and boxing. There's no reasonable expectation that English baseball could have been any different. So right out of the gate and for the foreseeable future, nearly all players in the Baseball League have to be white. (Unlike American baseball, though, there was an isolated exception here and there through the early 20th Century. But it was absolutely uncommon.)
But even beyond the racial composition, think about what the very beginnings of the Baseball League entail. These are mainly industrial teams that have evolved from factory workers. Some of the players got paid to play before the 1888 inception of the League, but none of them can play baseball for an exclusive living. The work was far too unsteady in pre-League days. So, almost by definition, these players were actually semi-pro, as early American professional baseball players were at the start. So, of course, all the players have to come from England.
But even further to the point, because they are actually semi-pro players representing a club born of local industrial outfits, they all have to come from the city they play in. Right? Because it is completely illogical that a player would travel all the way across England to play baseball for a local factory team for £2 a week
at the most, which is what the best players made in those days.
When you tell OOTP to have all your players come from whatever country, and fill the roster with fictional players, the game has the players come from all over that country. That's obviously not workable for this league. Since they can't come from all over England, I had to manually change their place of birth by exporting the rosters, opening the .txt in Excel, making the bulk changes (don't forget the city code as well), saving the file as a .csv and importing the roster back into the game. Works like a charm.
Here are some sample rosters:
By the way, you might have noticed that Stoke Ramblers has no natural first baseman. Hey, I'm only "God". They have free will. If they want to play without an actual first baseman, that's up to them. No wonder they finished in a tie for eighth. Maybe they'll fix that for 1889.
