1941 Southern Association & Texas League schedue file
16 teams, 8 teams per league, 1 division per league
154 game balanced schedule (22 games against each of the 7 other teams in the league)
No interleague games.
Settings for 1941:
Year starts on: Wednesday
Season starts: April 10 (Thursday)
All-Star Game: none (no game played between the leagues; the TL did play an internal All-Star Game on July 16).
The schedule file contains the exact original schedules for the Southern Association and Texas League for the 1941 season. There are a few interesting features in these schedules, which is why I thought I'd make them available.
First, as was the case with all minor league schedules, they are quite time compressed. The SA opens on Apr. 10 and closes on Sept. 7, a 151 day season. The TL opens on Apr. 13 and closes on Sept. 7, a 148 day season.
Second, the TL teams play almost constantly throughout the season with no days off, with the clubs getting just 1-4 off days for the entire campaign. The SA, on the other hand, has plenty of off days, but these are the result of playing many doubleheaders. Team average some 25 twin bills each in the SA, and play one almost every Sunday; their counterparts in the TL only average 8 doubleheaders each for the whole season.
Third, there are a fair number of Saturday off days in the SA. I'm not entirely sure why that is, but I do recall reading an article on the majors from the early 1940's which mentioned that attendance at Saturday games had decreased markedly in recent years. It was almost to the point that some teams were drawing better for a weeknight game than they were for a Saturday afternoon contest. Perhaps this same problem was afflicting some of the minor leagues and thus some teams preferred to schedule an weeknight game or twin bill over a Saturday day game.
The schedules for the minor leagues rarely indicate whether games are day or night contests, so I had to extrapolate this somewhat when designating the start times. Starting with the second full week of the season, I used the following rule-of-thumb which approximates reasonably well the tendancies of the era in the minors:
- Monday through Friday games were set as night games.
- Saturday, Sunday, and holiday games were set as day games.
The times specifically were 2 p.m. local time for day games and 8 p.m. local for night games, which were then corrected for the time zones to generate proper Eastern times. Day doubleheaders had their times set at 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. local, while twi-night twin bills were set as 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. local time. The times were then adjusted for the time zone of the host city.
Both the SA and TL used the Shaughnessey playoff system, which saw the top four teams in each league entering into a postseason playoff. The first round was a best-of-5 while the championship was a best-of-7. The two league champions then met in the best-of-7 Dixie Series. OOTP will only let you take the top 2 teams from a division into a postseason playoff round, but that is at least half of the way to what was really done. Alternatively, you could split each league into two 4 team divisions while retaining the actual schedule. This would allow you to get 4 teams into the postseason, though of course you have divisions which didn't really exist. But by using the actual schedule and ignoring those divisions when it comes to your standings and such, it comes reasonably close to the real playoffs (though you may not truly have the top 4 out of 8 teams).
In any event the choice is yours.
Enjoy!