Pacific Coast League 2020: Pants and Cobb

[BBGiovanni]

For all the things I dislike about #manfredball, the goofy regional schedules this year gave me an idea for a variant MLB setup. I happened to be re-reading Neil Sullivan's "The Minors", specifically the chapter about the PCL's efforts to withdraw from MLB's player draft and be an "open" league on the way to becoming a third major league.

So, if Walter O'Malley didn't get free land from Los Angeles, and Bob Cobb (yes, the inventor of the Cobb Salad) and PCL president Pants Rowland got their way, the PCL could have developed on its own and most of America would have been saved 5-10 years of rooting for crummy expansion teams.

For a quickie way to set this up, you can use the AL/NL in a single league (2 subleagues, 2 divisions of 5 teams each) and the 10 expansion teams that came along in the aftermath of O'Malley's invasion of Chavez Ravine, shifted to the PCL in two divisions of 5 teams each. I'll post my setup with rough instructions first. I haven't actually started playing yet but I've enjoyed digging up logos and even putting some together, and I thought they might be useful to folks.

I am almost all cut and paste and copy, occasionally a re-coloring guy, so in general I do not take credit for ANY of the artwork itself. Some is re-purposed from the sportslogos.net archives. Some of the pieces come from the most excellent SFGiants58's projects on the forum there; you've probably seen multiple posts here converting his (?) brilliant work to OOTP logo/uniform/cap files. I've used some of those in my setup; I'll point them out but I won't (mostly) re-post them here. I also cribbed some graphics that showed up in google searches from the sportslogos forum, and a couple of pieces from sets I found here. I'll try to point them out as I post but if I miss a credit or most importantly someone is mad at my use, send me a PM and I'll edit for credit or take it down immediately.

I've loved all the graphics I've found here over the years, and if some of these unis are useful and save people time in hunting for graphics and/or turning them into game files, I'd be happy knowing I've paid some back.

[BBGiovanni]

NL East: Change the Mets to the Montreal Expos. O'Malley never abandons Brooklyn, so Bill Shea, Joan Payson, and Branch Rickey never need to bring the NL back to NY. SFGiants58 made an interesting "modern" Brooklyn Dodgers logo set, I'll post my conversions of those. The rest of the division keeps their unis.

NL West: Change the Braves to the Milwaukee Brewers. You can pretend Perini sold the Braves instead of moving them to ATL or that he decided to re-brand with the insanely-popular minor league team when they got to the Cream City. SFGiants58 did a fauxback Brewers set, I'll post them. Horace Stoneham had been planning an Escape from New York since O'Malley was a shifty bankruptcy lawyer for the firm handing the Dodgers' bailout, so the Minneapolis Giants are also in the western half of the NL. Golem64 converted SFGiants58's MIN set and I'm using those. At some point in the 60s baseball expanded to Texas, so the Astros are here too.

AL East: Mostly the same as the current division, except the Washington Senators never moved to Minnesota because Stoneham beat them there with his carpetbag; rename the Twins. Golem64 made up unis from SFGiants58s modern Senators designs which I'm using in my season.

AL West: Most of the current Central Division will fill this out. One of the 5,000,000 cities jerked around by Charlie Finley was Dallas: normally I leave the Athletics in KC but this time I decided to move the A's to Big D. SFGiants58 did a modern Dallas A's set; he also had a couple of fauxbacks so I tinkered with those to come up with a kelly green Dallas A's set because I love those colors so much.

Pacific Coast League: I'll go into more detail as to what I did and why as I post those, hopefully over the next week, but for now I'll list which teams I adapted for what.A few are pretty obvious: the LA Angels stay the LA Angels, the San Diego Padres stay as they are, and the Seattle Mariners get reskinned as the Rainiers and the Rockies become the Denver Bears. The other teams aren't too scientific, but I'm listing what I did so you don't have to work through the existing teams to fill out the PCL slots.

Portland Beavers: ex-Diamondbacks
Salt Lake Bees: ex-Marlins
Vancouver Salmon Kings: ex-Rays (note the Oakland Oaks moved to Vancouver in 1955 even before the Giants hit town)

San Francisco Seals: ex-Nationals (I just played a Mets season, so I left them as the Expos)
Hollywood Stars: ex-Brewers
Sacramento Solons: ex-Rangers

Final structure notes: You'll see no teams in the Deep South; if the PCL had been elevated to a major league in the 1950s, most of the cities in the south (particularly the ballparks) would have still been segregated. The Brewers had no reason to leave Milwaukee; the above teams should have been stable enough to not need Atlanta. Florida didn't get their teams until the 1990s, and the less said about those stories the better. Ditto for Phoenix... all these cities have AAA teams in my setup. I left the Texas League as an affiliate of the PCL even though they have no teams there. I have an idea for an alternate setup but it would involve a whole new league probably in CA. Maybe someday!

[BBGiovanni]

I've gotta shut down for the night, but I'll post the Brewers and Dodgers sets, both based on graphics by SFGiants58 on the sportslogos.net forum. They're buried in his "Project 32" or "Defunct Saga" threads, but I can't find the exact links at the moment.

Milwaukee:




Brooklyn:

[BBGiovanni]

Milwaukee:



Brooklyn:

[OmahaReynolds]

Awesome man! I love this concept. Very happy to see Denver Bears instead of the Rockies

[BBGiovanni]

Oh what the hell, sleep is overrated. These unis assume Charlie O. brought the kelly green to Dallas and it stayed, and their modern unis evolved back to a technicolor-era design.

[BBGiovanni]

Originally Posted by OmahaReynolds

Awesome man! I love this concept. Very happy to see Denver Bears instead of the Rockies

Well then I'll start with them! SFGiants58 had an interesting Rockies concept using the CO state flag that I messed with before going back to what I've always used, based on the Yakima Bears' last look.

Also, Denver was only in the PCL for a few years, but they drew 45,000 plus in Mile High Stadium (then called Bears Stadium) and their owner Bob Howsam tried hard to get DEN a franchise in the Continental League. So, if the PCL moved up I'm sure Denver would have been in there, especially with a team in Salt Lake (which would have been a logical expansion to 10 teams, right about the time Hollywood left for Utah when O'Malley drove them out of town IRL).

[BBGiovanni]

SFGiants58 designed some excellent ones, with a nice rich chocolate brown and California gold, and rjl518 already rendered them into OOTP uniforms. I'm using these. This is the awesome main logo just to whet your appetite:




Ditto for the Seattle Rainiers... in prior playthroughs I've modified Tacoma Rainiers jerseys, mashing up pieces from the Mariners, but this green and red set is fabulous and makes a nice contrast from the other teams in my PCL. You can find them in Golem64's thread, and again here's a little appetizer:

[BBGiovanni]

The real team was the Mounties, and the current team is the Canadians, but I love all the graphics from this minor league hockey team too much, and I think they work well for an OOTP set. Apologies to any in BC that find this heretical!

[BBGiovanni]

You can of course use the current PCL gear if you want, but I wanted a gold-dominant set for contrast with the other teams. I always liked the Bad News Bears scheme, and this is a tribute to that really, as well as the "South Carolina Buzz" from Major League Back to the Minors (who in turn used the Bees' predecessors unis).

[lotr13]

Great stuff. Would you care to post the PCL logo you're using? It looks very nice.

It's unfortunate that the game doesn't support three sub-leagues in one league. I've always wanted to pick up a historical sim in the late 40s or early 50s with the PCL joining MLB and going from there.

[BBGiovanni]

Originally Posted by lotr13

Great stuff. Would you care to post the PCL logo you're using? It looks very nice.

It's unfortunate that the game doesn't support three sub-leagues in one league. I've always wanted to pick up a historical sim in the late 40s or early 50s with the PCL joining MLB and going from there.

Well, I'm glad you liked it, it's just something I found on an abandoned blog. And I couldn't even find it on my hard drive to upload! So, I found it again and dressed it up a bit. It's not as clear as I'd like in the game but it's better than it was.

[BBGiovanni]

There's a nice set of the powder blue unis the Beavers used in their last years before PGE Park got torn down; they're floating around the boards somewhere. But I went with the black/red scheme because (1) I wanted Portland to be tougher-looking, (2) it matches the Blazers' scheme, and (3) the Rose City team should have some red in it.

The road jersey script is from a txranger design.

[BBGiovanni]

[BBGiovanni]

The linchpin of the old PCL, once the Giants came to bump them off the league had no chance at all. Seals Stadium is a grocery store now, but whenever I have tourist-guests in town I try to get them over to the Double Play Bar and Grill, still slingin' across the street after all these years. Not fancy, but still a lot of fun.



In the PCL South, the Seals take the field with these unis, with logo and wordmark by SFGiants58 on the sportslogos boards. I changed the colors to match those from an old set I did for Sammy Sosa High Heat Baseball, and the real and classic Seals cap logo (I'm not sure why he changed it, it's still seen around town all the time, Seals gear is quite popular).

[BBGiovanni]

I remember the Solons as a Brewers farm team, something like this. But I just sold some old Duane Decker "Blue Sox" books, and looking around for graphics I saw Ruwisc's recent Solons with Columbia blue, so those things made me want a more traditional look with dominant light blue which would set the Solons apart from the other PCL teams. I figure they sort of updated their look in the 70s with the baby blue, then sort of shoehorned it back into their classic unis, all while keeping their unique heart logo. I found the scripts, yet again, in the sportslogos.net forum, this time from someone called BayBallFan. He drew the main logo from a shoulder patch on an old Solons uni and I recolored it to the columbia/navy scheme and played around with their original cap logo.

[BBGiovanni]

Since I went with a navy scheme for the Angels, I wanted a bright red scheme for their enemies the Hollywood Stars. A lot of the uniforms floating around are either too old-timey or too modern softball uni. I found an awesome set by txranger on his photobucket, but they're navy-dominant so too much like the Angels and and as I say not a good fit for my league. But the logos/scripts have a kind of 50's drive-through hamburger stand vibe, so I think they'd have gotten paired with a zingier contemporary cap logo for my PCL... A little clipping and re-coloring, recycling the old Huntsville Stars' cap, and they're good enough to be rivals to the Angels and popular among the glitterati...

[BBGiovanni]

I had worked up a set from SFGiants58's logos, but so did rjl518, and other than blue sleeves mine didn't look different. I wanted a blue-dominant set, and I wanted it to be pretty conservative/classic, sort of the Yankees of the PCL. So I used the early 60s script and pieces from other eras, and ditched the Moreno-era symbols.

[BBGiovanni]

[BBGiovanni]

With the PCL as a major league, obviously there's a need for a new top level minor league. I thought about raising the Cal League but it made more sense to reorganize into a new western league.

Most of these teams are existing or recently-departed PCL teams. The links are to posts where someone posted designs based on SFGiants58's concepts, and the boldface are designs I'll post.

Colorado Springs Sky Sox: Vancouver Salmon Kings
Oakland Oaks: Salt Lake Bees
Tacoma Rainiers: Seattle Rainiers
San Jose Churros: San Francisco Seals
Reno Aces: Portland Beavers

Oklahoma City 89ers: Sacramento Solons
San Antonio Missions: Hollywood Stars
Phoenix Crotalos: San Diego Padres
Las Vegas Lizards: Los Angeles Angels
Albuquerque Isotopes: Denver Bears

(I know the Texan big league teams are in the MLB, but it was easier to keep the Texas League as the PCL AA affiliate so keeping SA in the SW league was a logical shortcut.)