While I'd been thinking I'd start the Alt-1925 season right after that blog post, I instead decided to get a laptop repair before starting the season. So it'll probably be another week before that gets underway. That gives me a chance to write a bit about the various worldbuilding things that I've been mulling in spare moments here and there. Unless I wanted to treat this as a strictly mathematical exercise in simulation, in which specific parameter choices were going to be critical, the worldbuilding would flesh out the storytelling.
There's been a positive feedback loop for me in the game for quite some time, where making new ballparks makes me want to actually use them in-game, which then (at least sometimes) drives a need for more ballparks. And then some of the rationales for using these parks drive their own logic as far as worldbuilding. For instance, deciding to use a few ballparks for Spring Training led to also setting up the Caribbean developmental league, which in turn led to my needing a few more parks so that I could have a reasonable number of teams in it. Realizing I'd made parks for many (but not all) of the biggest North American cities and U. S. states made me want to finish the sets, which then led me to have barnstorming tours, which then led me to consider a Far Eastern barnstorming tour, which then led to needing period-appropriate parks in Japan, Manila, etc. That in turn led to setting up the non-US independent leagues, etc.
The other worldbuilding driver, as I've mentioned in other posts, is the integrated nature of baseball. So, something had to happen to change one of the most openly racist periods in modern American history into one that's accepting of Black ballplayers as some of the biggest (inter)national stars. At a minimum, that seems like it would require a more complete and successful Reconstruction Era, and presumably Lincoln surviving it. The game plowed right on through the 1917 and 1918 seasons with unchanged rosters and schedules (as I expected), which means that canonically the US involvement in World War 1 was very different, if it happened at all. So, if I'm willing to accept changes to two gigantic influences on 1920s America, what else is in bounds? Is anything out of bounds?
And of course, the answer is yes--there are things I'm grounding the worldbuilding in. I only want actual historically documented baseball players to end up in MLB, though I grudgingly accept that some players who are poorly documented will be among them. This is true even though a timeline where Black Americans were uncontroversially accepted as equals in the 1920s is one where Oscar Charleston and Bullet Rogen (or Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth for that matter) might have chosen to go into business or do something other than be baseball players. I've also decided (as I'm pretty sure I wrote in some 2020-era blogpost) that technology is basically what we had in our timeline, which means no continent-spanning leagues until the 40s at the earliest, and no night games until the 30s. Some other related things I really don't care about, or am not checking in any case--schedules that have a team in Kansas City one day and Boston the next, or Mobile one day and Santo Domingo the next for that matter, aren't things I'm sweating.
I'm trying to keep team names correct for the period, save for those in Cleveland, Boston, and some minor leagues that are considered racist. I'm trying to keep period uniforms as well, again with the same caveat. I'm trying to have the right cities in the right leagues, more or less, but also not sweating that (especially since I've decided to try to have teams in all 48 states plus whichever provinces and other countries). I've also decided that I'm going to keep the cities at their historical populations, and so keep the relative sizes and rankings of cities the same. Despite all of that slack I'm giving myself, I am trying to keep the ballparks pretty close to what really were present in those cities at those times, even though there's no particular reason to be a stickler for that. In this case, I think it comes down to a combination of my wanting/needing something to work from rather than having no constraints at all, plus wanting to post things to the forum that really are historical.
Bringing it back to the worldbuilding, all of this seems to point in some very rough, broad directions. The US is less racist, and so perhaps it's also less interventionist? I do want baseball to still be popular in Nicaragua, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, etc., and perhaps in a universe where the US is less interventionist but baseball is still popular in all of those places, it'd also be popular in Haiti? That's definitely a retrofit from wanting a Caribbean League team in Port-au-Prince, though. But the logic seems to hold. Would the US still have the Philippines as a colony? I'm saying no, so having the Philippines as an independent republic that's close allies to the US. But what about Hawaii? Or Puerto Rico? Or other territories that were US possessions c. 1925 in OTL? Would the Spanish-American War have happened? I suppose at the moment I'm letting some of those wave functions stay uncollapsed, but I've certainly been thinking of all of the OTL possessions (other than the Philippines) as being under US control. Maybe Puerto Rico becomes a state when Alaska and Hawaii do? Or becomes independent? I think Canada still exists, though in some scenarios the lack of a US Civil War would remove the proximate cause of its existence (and potentially remove the example for uniting the Australian colonies later on?). However, I think the logic of a single Dominion of Canada still carries the day.
In Asia, I suppose I'm imagining China as a stable republic, with Korea and Taiwan independent of them and Japan. Hong Kong is still British, though, and I suppose I'm imagining the British Empire as more or less intact (other than Africa which I'll hit on below). I suppose I'm also imagining some of the foreign concessions in China still existing, which gives spots for teams in a Chinese baseball league. Australia and New Zealand are as OTL, with Australia providing another baseball spot. I don't see any real changes to Latin America or the Lesser Antilles, I suppose.
As far as Africa, in keeping with the spirit mentioned above I'm imagining less colonial influences and no real Scramble for Africa. So, rather than the continent split up among European colonies, I'm imagining trading posts with European sovereignty in limited areas. Maybe something like the Antarctic Treaty, though obviously the existence of tens or hundreds of millions of human beings would make that a very limited basis of comparison. I think South Africa is going to be more or less as it was OTL, and I think having one UK-associated country (with no apartheid) would probably be a happier outcome for the indigenous population than having the Boer Republics still in place. With a more liberal/progressive Germany, which wasn't defeated in WWI, they would still presumably have trading posts in Kenya and Namibia among other areas. So I think, and admittedly this involves some working backward, Liberia would be more important here--it would have US influence, and a less-racist US would be more willing to work constructively with them. While in OTL baseball isn't a thing in Liberia, I think in TTL it would be. Or, at least, I'm deciding it is. :)
That finally brings us to Europe. I think the way to get where I want to be, again with the proviso that I may retcon all sorts of things, is to have a short war confined to Russia, Austria-Hungary, and (I guess) the Balkan countries, with an aftermath of a dissolution of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires and soft landings for all the constituent countries. Maybe Germany, France, and the UK not only stay out of the war but also broker the post-war...situation. Ideally the Ottoman Empire also breaks up at this point, again with minimal European colonization, though that may be too much to reasonably expect.
All of this only would matter at the margins in terms of random extra leagues that are running, plus things like World Cups. So, I'm going to try not to think about it any more than it's fun to think about. But I guess those nations that are playing some form of baseball worth noticing in this scenario, based on reality and how this worldbuilding is looking c. 1925 are:
Top level: USA, Cuba
Second level: Japan, Canada, Dominican Republic, Philippines?, Mexico?
Third level: Netherlands (and Netherlands Antilles), Korea, Taiwan, Nicaragua, Panama, Venezuela, UK?
Working on it: Haiti, Colombia, Australia, China, South Africa, Ireland?, Belgium?, Finland?, other Central America, Bahamas?, West Indies?
Dabbling: Liberia, France, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, India?, Dutch East Indies? Morocco? Malaysia? French West Indies?
And so presumably the Baseball World Cup, when it happens, would have a 12-team field (the first soccer World Cup had 13) of something like: USA, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, Netherlands, Venezuela?
OK, this has been long, so I should just post it!
