What's the ideal number of teams in a league?

[Doc_Giggle]

Is it 24? My current universe is gigantic (1203 teams), with the league I operate having 36 teams, and I feel the more teams you have, the less scarcity of talent you have, and it's a lot easier for you to just scoop it all up at the AI's expense. Once this gigantic universe inevitably crashes, my next idea of a universe was doing a stats only Canadian league (Maple Leaf Baseball... keeping it MLB), and I was debating the number of teams I should do. 30 for keeping with modern MLB, sure, but if I'm doing all my own scouting, I feel like 24 might be more realistic to get an easier grasp on the league, as well as making it so there's a scarcity of talent that'll be harder for me to hoard.

What has been your experience?

[DreamTeams]

12 teams has proven the sweet spot for me. I've found that in just a couple of season I get to know the whole league and form an attachment real quick. Not everyone's cup of tea, of course, but I love it.

[Syd Thrift]

I'm doing a 24 team league. Usually I'm at around 16 but this works too. I don't know how many teams is too many but yeah it's somewhere between 31 and 1200...

[kq76]

24, 6 teams a division.

And I agree completely that the more teams the easier it is to take advantage of the AI. I'm struggling with this question now. I'm thinking I might just start another league, swap some teams with it, and just refuse to acquire players from any team in it.

In case anyone is curious, this is the # of MLB teams throughout its history:

1998-? (25+) = 30
1993-97 (5) = 28
1977-92 (16) = 26
1969-76 (8) = 24
1962-68 (7) = 20
1961 = 18
1901-60 (60) = 16
1900 = 8
1892-1899 (8) = 12
1891 = 17
1890 = 25
1885-9 (5) = 16
1884 = 33
1883 = 16
1882 = 14
1879-81 = 8
1877-8 = 6
1876 = 8
1875 = 13
1874 = 8
1873 = 9
1872 = 11
1871 = 9

Yeah, pre-1892 was pretty wild due to a lot of teams not being able to make ends meet, competing with rival leagues, etc, and dropping out or even being kicked out. It was the merger of the NL & AA in 1892 that finally settled things down for awhile. EDIT: It may look like there's a stretch of consistency from 1885 to 1889, but there was just an equal # of teams that kept coming and going during those 5 years.

[Doc_Giggle]

Originally Posted by kq76

24, 6 teams a division.

And I agree completely that the more teams the easier it is to take advantage of the AI. I'm struggling with this question now. I'm thinking I might just start another league, swap some teams with it, and just refuse to acquire players from any team in it.[/URL].

It’s getting to the point where every free agent class is pretty much stacked at each position, so I don’t really need to worry or plan ahead with my roster construction cuz there’s always going to be a new stud available at that position. And I thought more teams would mean more of a challenge because there’s more teams to get through but there’s certain orgs that are basically totally non viable who basically just function as MLB level feeders for the rest of the league.

[kq76]

What you might want to do is look at your league's finances. For example, with my current league there are often players on the trading block or available via shopping my players that I would trade for, but I can't because either I can't take on more salary or the AI can't. I purposefully took a team with a "tiny" market though (EDIT: and the worst fan interest!) so, while we're one of the best teams in the league, we also have the lowest budget and payroll.

What you could do is make a copy of your league, sim to the offseason, re-import your fin'l settings (or tweak selected settings manually), and then test sim from there to see if that helps. And if does, make those changes to your current league.

Or, you could just nerf your own team's fin'ls.

[David Watts]

Originally Posted by DreamTeams

12 teams has proven the sweet spot for me. I've found that in just a couple of season I get to know the whole league and form an attachment real quick. Not everyone's cup of tea, of course, but I love it.

Do you use 2 sub leagues or just 1?

[Eugene Church]

The Golden Age of Baseball was the 1950s... there were 16 teams... 8 in the National League and 8 in the American League.

Only the pennant winners went to the playoffs... the World Series.

There no free agency... players pretty much played for the same teams year-after-year... as a teenager I knew the lineup and pitching rotation of all 16 teams... you could really get immersed in the teams... you knew all the players... not so today.

In my fictional league that I enjoyed the most there were 16 teams, 8 teams in each league.

[Tiger Fan]

Originally Posted by Eugene Church

The Golden Age of Baseball was the 1950s... there were 16 teams... 8 in the National League and 8 in the American League.

Only the pennant winners went to the playoffs... the World Series.

In my fictional league that I enjoyed the most there were 16 teams, 8 teams in each league.

That is the exacr same format I enjoy the most.

[Syd Thrift]

Yeah, on the other hand it was 16 teams in 10 cities at the start of that decade and as fun as it is to replay that - I agree, in fictional sims you can really get to know all of the teams involved much easier than even expansion era 24 team leagues - it was getting really, really unwieldy by that time. Two teams in freaking St. Louis. St. Louis, a city that currently doesn't even have a football or basketball team (which, sure, it's not a small city and really should have an NBA franchise at the very least, but still). Also, Boston just plain could not support two clubs and while I think a case could be made that Philadelphia could have, the A's were even in the best of times a feast-or-famine club and the Phillies also had problems drawing. Even the Dodgers, as wistful as New Yorkers sometimes get about them, had real problems drawing fans when they weren't winning games.

As late as the 20s I think you could still make a case that with train travel being the way that it was, St. Louis was about as far west as they could get - even then, as I'm sure you're aware, they had to plan out the schedules so that AL teams played the Tigers, White Sox, Indians, and Browns all in the same road trips and NL teams went against the Cardinals, Cubs, and Reds (maybe the Pirates too since Pittsburgh is pretty far inland. But, like, even by the 1930s the Browns had 3 seasons in which they failed to reach 100,000 fans.

By the time teams were able to cross the country via airplane instead of train, baseball pretty much had to go to the bigger urban centers - the Browns move to Baltimore, for instance, only really succeeded in displacing Washington, and Milwaukee was just about the last city in the US they could have expanded to without branching out further - and with that, 16 teams was suddenly not even close to a large enough organization to both keep teams in places like Cincinnati and Pittsburgh but also represent San Francisco and Los Angeles and Dallas and Atlanta and all those other cities who were equally if not more able to support a team like KC and Seattle and San Diego and Phoenix and Miami and Denver (those last 3 didn't get teams, somehow, until the 90s). I keenly remember as a Mariners fan that the only way you were going to keep half the teams in the league from moving every few years was to expand into the obvious choices (the M's almost moved several times, most notably to the Tampa Bay area; I think Phoenix was also in that mix at points).

I wanted to also add that we all tend to have a yearning for the game the way it was played when we grew up. To me, 26 teams with 7-team divisions in the AL and the asymmetry of the DH was always the way baseball "was supposed to be", and I really like the offensive/defensive mix of the 70s and 80s. I can understand being into the way the 50s worked for similar reasons. I'm sure it won't be long before people pine for the days of LOOGYs and steroids...

ETA: I had to choose "other" because 26 wasn't an option.

[DreamTeams]

Originally Posted by David Watts

Do you use 2 sub leagues or just 1?

I use just 1 sub league with 2 circuits (divisions) of six teams. Made a custom schedule to eliminate interdivision play. This proved the only way to facilitate each division playing as a separate circuit, but still having single league awards.

[Pelican]

One change I would make to the historical list is for 1914 and 1915 the total number would be 24 teams. The Federal League signed enough MLB players to be considered a third major league, and if you track the stats of their players, the level of competition was reasonably close, particularly considering MLB teams were weaker due to the defecting players. Probably 24 teams spread the talent too thin back then, unless the early Negro League players could have been integrated. I’ve done that in a sim, and I think it shows an alternative path that would have been better - more fun to watch.

[BBGiovanni]

Originally Posted by kq76

24, 6 teams a division.

I think this is the right answer for a US league. It lets you have teams in enough cities/regions to be believable, gives you a variety of opponents in your division, and keeps the league so that you can really get to know the players and prospects.

[kq76]

I thought 24 would be the runaway leader when I added the poll, but I'm actually a little surprised by the spread. I've often gone with 24 as I find it's a good balance of enough teams to keep it interesting and not so many that you can't get deep enough into it. But thinking about it, I can see reasons for the appeal of the 8-16 group and for the 32-48 group. I remember I once ran a 8 or 12 team Canadian league that I really got into and enjoyed. And I'm currently contemplating running 2 24 team leagues in the same world.

The more intriguing thing I think I'm seeing out of the results are what must be the # of teams in people's divisions. I'm a huge proponent of 6 team divisions, as I know a lot of people here are (it's not too few that you'll get .500 division winners nor too large that too many teams will be too far out), but looking at a number of people's choices in this poll, you can't really make 6 team divisions with those (it appears many must choose either 4 or 8). I should make an accompanying poll about teams in divisions.

[Rosco Peabody]

I love the symmetry of a 32 team league with 8 divisions of 4 teams each

[Westheim]

One more for 24. (In two leagues, four divisions)

It's enough variety to not play the same stupid team all the time, and yet not so many teams that you can't keep up with who's where anymore.

[BBGiovanni]

Originally Posted by kq76

I thought 24 would be the runaway leader when I added the poll, but I'm actually a little surprised by the spread.

Even though I voted for 24 I almost never play a league that small

[darkcloud4579]

Originally Posted by Doc_Giggle

Is it 24? My current universe is gigantic (1203 teams), with the league I operate having 36 teams, and I feel the more teams you have, the less scarcity of talent you have, and it's a lot easier for you to just scoop it all up at the AI's expense. Once this gigantic universe inevitably crashes, my next idea of a universe was doing a stats only Canadian league (Maple Leaf Baseball... keeping it MLB), and I was debating the number of teams I should do. 30 for keeping with modern MLB, sure, but if I'm doing all my own scouting, I feel like 24 might be more realistic to get an easier grasp on the league, as well as making it so there's a scarcity of talent that'll be harder for me to hoard.

What has been your experience?

If you're playing out games then keeping a smaller footprint under 26 is good, because otherwise some teams will likely never win ever and it can be boring to look at. Vast universes of teams can be fun from a player diversity perspective but unless you're playing super slow it can be a lot to navigate, the database gets very large and you'll likely have 1000s of players who you'll never know about or care anything about.

But it truly depends on how you play and how long you play your league. My current save went along with MLB history but eventually diverged, expanded earlier and now 150 years into the sim, I'm at 40 teams because that felt like the right thing. It's a lot, but I like having pockets of leagues that feel truly global and maximize the way the game can work

[PSUColonel]

For me, it’s what the real MLB SHOULD (but won’t) do. 32 teams, 4 four team divisions in each league. 8 playoff teams….win your division and you are in. Easy peazy, Japaneesy

[Syd Thrift]

I'd prefer a 36 team league TBH. 6 divisions, 6 teams per division. I don't like the smaller NFL style divisions, especially with the long baseball season.

So maybe they expand to...

Montreal
Riverside, CA (or Las Vegas if the A's move to Riverside) (honestly unsure that Vegas can support a baseball team though)
Austin
Brooklyn (yes, a third team in NYC)
Charlotte
Orlando or San Antonio

I feel like we're not particularly close to another round of expansion though, not with the league hemorrhaging fans the way they are.