My nineteenth-century baseball league is breezy and fun, without all the meticulous record-keeping that I do for its hockey equivalent. I can play through a nine-inning game in a half hour, and even though I almost never play multiple games in a single day, the season seems to fly by. Coming up on Season 4, I got to thinking about whether I could add a fourth team to the league, as I'm very much enjoying the process of creating an expansion team in my historical hockey league.
To add a new team, of course, I need more players. Currently, I'm using only players who debuted at the major-league level no later than 1899. Given that the Baseball Hall of Fame has inducted a rather limited number of players from professional baseball's earliest era, I have only enough players for three ball clubs (the Haymakers, the Canaries, and the Blue Legs), all of which have eight starting position players, two position players on the bench, and five pitchers. (And to get equal numbers on each team, I kinda had to fudge the career start date for one player.) However, we can get by with one bench player and four pitchers, so if I were to add an expansion team, I could immediately draw three position players and three pitchers from the existing teams without compromising their ability to put a full team on the field.
How do I get more players? Having exhausted the supply of Hall of Famers from the nineteenth century, I could push the timeline forward a bit into the early twentieth. Many scholars of baseball history mark 1903 as the beginning of the modern era (i.e., the National League, the American League, and the World Series played between their respective champions). What if I opened up to players whose careers started between 1900 and 1902? Would that three-season window give me enough players to add another team?
Well, Frank Chance would be able to welcome the remaining two-thirds of Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance, but otherwise it's just pitchers. So many pitchers! Christy Mathewson, Eddie Plank, Addie Joss, Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown, Chief Bender! The problem, of course, is that I don't really need pitchers. I need position players, and they're in rather short supply. If I keep pushing the timeline forward, I'll end up with "modern" players like Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, and such. They're baseball immortals every one, but the point of this league is to create a fantasy of nineteenth-century baseball, and these guys are decidedly twentieth century. So, for now at least, we'll have to put aside the dream of a baseball expansion team. Until then, it's Wagner-to-Ward-to-Chance! (Seriously, with an infield like that, how have the Canaries not won a championship yet?!)
To add a new team, of course, I need more players. Currently, I'm using only players who debuted at the major-league level no later than 1899. Given that the Baseball Hall of Fame has inducted a rather limited number of players from professional baseball's earliest era, I have only enough players for three ball clubs (the Haymakers, the Canaries, and the Blue Legs), all of which have eight starting position players, two position players on the bench, and five pitchers. (And to get equal numbers on each team, I kinda had to fudge the career start date for one player.) However, we can get by with one bench player and four pitchers, so if I were to add an expansion team, I could immediately draw three position players and three pitchers from the existing teams without compromising their ability to put a full team on the field.
How do I get more players? Having exhausted the supply of Hall of Famers from the nineteenth century, I could push the timeline forward a bit into the early twentieth. Many scholars of baseball history mark 1903 as the beginning of the modern era (i.e., the National League, the American League, and the World Series played between their respective champions). What if I opened up to players whose careers started between 1900 and 1902? Would that three-season window give me enough players to add another team?
Well, Frank Chance would be able to welcome the remaining two-thirds of Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance, but otherwise it's just pitchers. So many pitchers! Christy Mathewson, Eddie Plank, Addie Joss, Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown, Chief Bender! The problem, of course, is that I don't really need pitchers. I need position players, and they're in rather short supply. If I keep pushing the timeline forward, I'll end up with "modern" players like Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, and such. They're baseball immortals every one, but the point of this league is to create a fantasy of nineteenth-century baseball, and these guys are decidedly twentieth century. So, for now at least, we'll have to put aside the dream of a baseball expansion team. Until then, it's Wagner-to-Ward-to-Chance! (Seriously, with an infield like that, how have the Canaries not won a championship yet?!)
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