All right, so it's time for the draft and that means another overly complicated metric! Draft order will be determined by three criteria: population, government type, and culture. Population is what it says; however, I am using ordinals rather than direct numbers so that China doesn't get to draft first every single year. Government type is equally important: the stronger the central government, the more attention the country can focus on baseball. That means that dictatorships, kingdoms, and the like will be rated above republics, which are rated above parliamentary democracies (the separation of the Presidency from the legislature giving the leader in question more leeway), which are in turn rated above states in anarchy or going through revolutions. Finally, there's a culture rating which initially is set up more or less arbitrarily but for every cultural event that happens to a country in a year, they will gain or lose a ranking in this criterion.
Why is this meaningful? I've been using the free agent pool as a general pool of talent for teams that, due to injury or whatever, are just plain out of players at a given permission. That ends with the draft, so draftees of smaller-rostered clubs will very likely be playing right away. Additionally, teams get to choose from their own population the first two rounds of the draft and then from everyone else that's available afterwards. Just to make things look right to myself, I then go in and edit player names, countries of origin, and ethnicities to reflect their team.
The long and short of it is... here's the draft order for 1919:
1. New York
2. Tokyo
3. Cincinnati
4. Paris
5. Rome
6. Berlin
7. Vienna
8. Shanghai
9. Chicago
10. Madrid
11. US Army
12. London
13. Mexico City
14. Moscow
15. Amsterdam
16. Royal Canadians
Sorry, Canada! Somebody had to be last.
