The Original 13

[darkcloud4579]

This is a spinoff of this dynasty featuring now 300 years of history and counting... and of this dynasty where the HOF lives.


The American Baseball Association (formerly D2D) is my main major league in a universe I've been managing since 2008 or so in real time. We're now at entering our 319th season. There are other major leagues but they're not really central to this specific story which centers around the 13 teams in the ABA that still exist and were founded before 1900.

In recent years, it's been all about the darlings of the modern era. I wanted to take things back a bit and focus on those older franchises and their success (or lack thereof) and see if we couldn't help one of them turn things around.

The teams that are from the 1800s that still exist are:

Victoria Cougars (11 titles founded in 1800)
Philadelphia Quakers (7 titles founded in 1800)
Carolina Wrens (17 titles founded in 1800)
San Francisco Peanuts (12 titles founded in 1800)
Toronto Blue Collars (8 titles founded in 1800)
Colorado Gold Sox (9 titles founded in 1812)
Brooklyn Originals (7 titles founded in 1812)
Eau Claire Paws (9 titles founded in 1812)
New York Gothams (14 titles founded in 1840)
Washington Maroons (14 titles founded in 1840)
Los Angeles Seraphs (7 titles founded in 1867)
Boston Yanks (8 titles founded in 1870)
Salt Lake City Elders (3 titles founded in 1891)


So the idea here is to get reacquainted with some of the history, pick a club to run and see if we can't return them to glory.

This season will start with a free agent draft of everyone from all of the leagues, intentionally so that the best 25 rounds of players are in the ABA.

Once I pick a team, I'm debating whether I'm going to do the drafting or whether I want the computer to do the draft for all of them and then I go through, look at the Original 13 and figure out the best team to run to lead to a title.

[darkcloud4579]

The draft appeals to me, but it's almost overwhelming to think about ALL of the talent in the league to try to figure out who to take. Maybe that's the trick? I dunno.

[darkcloud4579]

I let the AI run the draft because I just didn't feel like dealing with it. I'd rather run the team through the year. I turned injuries back on (low) for those who are new to the league, it's a fast-sim setup so I never used to run with injuries for most of the history of the league but have decided to mix stuff up a bit to keep it more interesting for managing teams.

[darkcloud4579]

So we ran that draft and then I went ahead and simmed the season since after the FA draft everyone gets a one-year contract. So free agency this year is still bedlam and you have players all over the place.

Also I went to 38-teams, the most this league has ever had. New York City Invaders and Minnesota Chiefs join the league to make for 38 teams in the ABA.

I'm still debating what I want to do, but...I still think the story I want to pursue right now is to take over some older franchises and prep them for title runs to end longstanding title droughts.

Brooklyn (71 seasons)
Baltimore (41 seasons)
Washington (78 seasons)
Philadelphia (70 seasons)
Carolina (51 seasons)

So these five are in my crosshairs. I think in Parcells fashion, we're gonna spend some time trying to get them all good. But I haven't figured out how I want to do it yet. Just spending a bunch of money, making deals and rolling the dice in the postseason doesn't sound fun.

I do want to put together a team of some of the best talent in the game right now. That I do want to do...because I haven't really done that before, with so many teams, we've always had teams that have been full of randoms except in the cases where it was all home grown talent or whatever.

So I do want to do something like that...but again, I kind of want there to be a method to the madness a bit. I've been pondering this a while though and I need to just start playing again.

[darkcloud4579]

With Baltimore, Washington and Philadelphia in the same division, there's the beauty of a rivalry that we can reignite if all three of them decide to pony up at the same time. Brooklyn, meanwhile, is now in the same division at Great Plains who are a relatively newbie team joining in the 2030s and have won 10 championships in less than 100 years and it'd be interesting to see those two teams duke it out in their division.

If it's one thing this league has lacked since the 1800s or so and maybe for a period in the 1980s it's rivalries and so, having real rivalries could be good and the best way to do that is to get invested in a few teams and see if there's a real battle that can brew.

Also I cut the playoffs down from 16 teams back down to 10. I want to see what that's like for a while and also to make it better to win. 10 out of 38 is crazy but baseball season is so long...I'd prefer teams that make the postseason be teams that performed so good over a long time.

To "compensate" those teams that don't make it a bit, I've removed the ABA champs from the Champions League and instead, now the representatives will be the 3rd and 4th teams wild card teams from each league who go to the Champions League. Gives those teams something to play for and it makes sure ABA teams don't get anyone injured after a long grind of a season since ultimately, they didn't care about the champions league title anyway.

[darkcloud4579]

I think I have my storyline. Despite the year saying 2118, I've been basically operating in perpetual 2005 mode in this dynasty for all 300 years, so we're not really "in the future" we're just basically doing groundhog day with new players.

The New York City Invaders owner is a rich dot com guy who wants to buy a title. This spurs the Baltimore/Philadelphia/Washington cabal to join in, all joined by rich owners who want their big city teams to dominate the league.

Meanwhile in the AL, Brooklyn seeks to regain its once proud spot as one of the signature clubs in the game and tries to take on Great Plains.

So that's five teams all doing big spending. Carolina, meanwhile, will take on a different plan of trying to rebuild their club and grow organically.

Can't do all of those at once. So we're gonna stick to the making the NL East the best division in the game first...we'll see how that goes and then try to set out to do the other things.

[darkcloud4579]

While I've tried before to build up one club and see if they could be successful, I've never built up several rivals at the same time, going after similar players and seeing where the dust settled. So trying that challenge on for size would be an interesting model for me, where the goal is essentially a tide to lift all boats in some kind of conglomerate fashion where these 3 or 4 or 5 clubs gang up on the rest of the league and each other.

[darkcloud4579]

I've got the story. We're gonna have three brothers who buy franchises and we'll do a storyline around sibling rivalry and figuring out who wins a title first. I'll control all three of them.

[darkcloud4579]

So here’s the idea. Three brothers own baseball franchises in the same division. I control all three teams and you build them in an effort to see who wins a title first. The idea is for it to be cutthroat. Normally when I do dynasties where I build super teams, it’s just me taking over one team at a time or having two teams in two different leagues and so it matters less.

But having them compete against each other means that they’ll have to compete for resources and talent and all of that. Which should be interesting to see how it works out and whether it drives up prices, whether they’ll strike or what my philosophical idea is with all three of them since you can’t build all of the teams the same way.

The other thing is, since I’ve just run a free agent draft a year ago, there are a lot of guys on the FA market than normal so there’s a lot of talent and it’s a good time to try to build a title team if you’re out there trying to make moves or whatever.

Here are the four brothers for our franchises in-game. The idea is to see who can put together a title team first. They will spend their inheritance split equally in an effort to achieve that task before the other.

[darkcloud4579]

TEAM STRATEGIES
MAROONS: Long-term deals to a core group of players.
INVADERS: ‘96 MARLINS. Established veterans surrounded by young players. Go for it all. Sell off if they win it and go prospect heavy after if YEAR 1 strat fails.
ATLANTICS: Best defensive players money can buy, coupled with the best rotation in the bigs if possible.
QUAKERS: ‘98-‘01 Yankees. Time to win is now. Sign anyone and everyone you can get towards that cause no matter what it costs. City needs a winner

[darkcloud4579]

AVALON, Cal.. -- Whew. What an offseason. Give us a second while we catch our breath and try to digest what just happened.

[darkcloud4579]

So here's the thing. I was driving tonight and we've gone ahead and did the brother's storyline. This offseason, Washington, Philadelphia, NYC and Baltimore were among the top 5 teams in terms of off-season acquisitions. Minnesota also had a huge offseason.

The brothers influence on the game has been noticed already, but that doesn't mean a whole lot without a title.

I went back to a 16 team postseason setup because honestly, I wanted to keep the fluke possibilities there. Just seeing a team buy a title in the regular season didn't appeal to me as much...but rather than have a bunch of wild cards be able to knock out good teams, I've setup the postseason where each division plays a division championship series and the two wild cards do the same. Essentially knocking out one from each to get down to 4 teams and then those teams duel it out for a shot at the LCS.

It's unorthodox and I might scrap it after this season, but I'm curious to see how it works.

Anyway, the brothers influence is fine and all but I don't care enough about their teams or the storyline right this second to spend all of this time talking about them. I tried and couldn't get very far. One idea I did cook up that I'm going to go ahead and pursue though is the idea of a fantasy baseball setup.

I'm not a day by day play guy. Not really my story at all. I'd prefer to sim a whole season, but as an exercise in storytelling and chronicling stuff and just enjoying stuff more...I'm deliberately trying to get myself to play OOTP slower but didn't find a model that worked for me.

But I think the daily fantasy baseball model sounds like one that might work.

Using the Draft Kings scoring system, this idea would have me facing off against myself which sounds weird, but...it's a good way to show someone around a league by playing day to day fantasy with some constraints like budgets.

To keep it easier to manage, it'll be me against another owner head to head for 162 games of the regular season where we earn money in daily prizes, monthly bonuses for winning the head to head challenge and then an end of the season prize for winning the league.

The money figures are based on other people playing and sponsors, but for the purposes of our story there are just two guys competing daily against each other. It'll be weird to compete against myself and to write about it, but the idea here is you can employ two different strategies and see how they work and also, I'm going to constrain myself and make it easier for the 2nd team by essentially giving that team a blank check re: salary cap and for me, to have to adhere to a more stringent one.

To make it easier, salaries for players will be calculated based on 1% of their big league contract. Otherwise, it'd take me too long to calculate based on stats. The good slash bad thing about this is...a lot of guys are undervalued and so, it means there are chances to hedge your bets if you feel like mining through certain guys and finding the hidden gems.

The other thing is...because my major league universe as two other major league status leagues, I had to decide whether I'd count them or not since they're a wrinkle the real big leagues don't have.

I've decided those players are all eligible, except UPB stats are worth 80% of the stats of ABA players and NABL worth 70%. So...that's a fairly heavy disincentive not to choose those players unless there's a compelling reason for it.

For the purposes of this story, I won't be involved in any GM moves or anything. I've fired all of my human GMs and the idea here is to sim the games and be part of it as a fan watching and checking on my fantasy team, rather than controlling the other stuff.

Injuries are still turned on, so that remains a factor too.

I have a spreadsheet

[darkcloud4579]

I'll probably come back to this story, because the storyline is a solid one about the brothers. We're still executing the story about the longstanding members of the Original 13 who can't seem to win a title, but...doing so using my fantasy baseball storyline instead.

[darkcloud4579]

Just to revisit, the 78-year drought by Washington ended this past season, they beat Minnesota to claim their first title in a generation. All four of the brother's franchises made the post-season, too.