It's January 23, 1926 in the game. Here's where we stand: The minor leagues have been expanded, in anticipation of an MLB expansion in 1928, and there are now 4 levels (AAA, AA, A, and Short Season A) each with 24 teams. The A and Short A teams are unaffiliated, AAA and AA each have four unaffiliated teams and 20 affiliated teams. Together with the 20 MLB teams that makes 116 teams in Organized Baseball, and the (admittedly drastic) expansion from 62 minor-league teams now means Organized Baseball has teams in all 48 states (plus the District of Columbia and the Territory of "Porto Rico") along with Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and six Canadian provinces. There is also a Cuban Winter League, which I'm treating as a tournament so that Cubans can have meaningful (i.e. not farm-team) baseball with top-tier players (i.e. not washouts looking for a job somewhere). At least right now, I'm trying to have the Cuban tournament involve the players who really played in Cuba back then.
In addition to these leagues in Organized Baseball, there are independent leagues in Japan, the Philippines, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Venezuela, France, the Netherlands, and Australia. All of these leagues are based on, and have team names from, real-life leagues that were active in the mid-1920s, though the players are all fictional. That's another 56 teams. There are a few other possible international independent leagues that I could start including in the 1927-1930 time frame (like Costa Rica, Colombia, a Korean/East Asian League...) but that's another post for another time. The impetus (or maybe excuse) for these independent leagues is to generate players for the "World's Fair of Baseball", about which more below.
As noted in an earlier blog post, 1926 is the sesquicentennial year, and I've got some in-game goals for the year. The expansion of the minors to include every state is part of that, and so is the World's Fair. I'm also planning for a barnstorming tour (perhaps including some of those washouts I mentioned above) to visit the US possessions other than Porto Rico and the USVI (which will be Spring Training visits). If this were a Watsonian post, I'd more or less be saying how preparations are in great shape for everything, even if some locations still need to get a ballpark figured out.
But since it's not a Watsonian post, here's more or less what I think I need to do in more or less priority order:
1. Ballparks for US Possessions
I do a lot of things for the game because I enjoy watching the game and interacting. So, while I could just sim out games, the point of doing a barnstorming tour (especially involving non-major leaguers) is to watch the games in the ballpark I made representing the place where the game is being held. Given the goals of having this sesquicentennial tour is to have games in all parts of the US, building the parks in Guam and American Samoa top the to-do list. Having said that, the games in those parks don't actually take place for a little while yet, so while they top the must-do items, they don't necessarily have to come first...
2. Ballparks for all Organized Baseball teams
This one is less of a pressing need, but I do enjoy watching the playoffs for all the leagues, and so in theory all of the teams in Organized Baseball should have ballparks. Right now, I'm five parks short--Ogden and Spokane in the Pioneer League and three Canadian parks in the Prairie League (Winnipeg, Calgary, and Regina). I've been slowly addressing this (there were eight missing parks a month ago), but my motivation waxes and wanes. Spokane should be straightforward as these things go, the others have somewhat less information but no worse than a lot of other parks I do. On the other hand, since I do have parks for all the states, and I'm not likely to watch any random games, it can happen during the season with no real loss if need be.
3. Ballparks for all Barnstorming games
The sesquicentennial barnstorming tour will start on the East Coast, go through the Panama Canal (and play a couple of games in Balboa), head up to Alaska via a few West Coast ports, then down to Hawaii. From there, it'll be a loop through American Samoa, Australia, the Philippines, and Guam before going back to Hawaii and then the West Coast. There are 3 stops beyond those in #1 that don't have parks at this point--I want the tour to do a Midnight Sun game in Fairbanks, which needs a park, and then Sydney and Brisbane also are missing parks. So the question is basically how much to track down what the parks would be like vs. using stand-ins. The Australian ones in particular are a bit tricky, since I'm having baseball be more popular there than IRL, which would point to fictional parks, but they did use the main cricket fields when barnstormers came through...
4. Ballparks (and Uniforms?) for Independent League teams
This is definitely getting to be very aspirational. It was already the case in Alt-1925 that only a few of these teams had ballparks, and they mostly were stand-ins made to look plausible. The championship series for the Dutch league was in a model of the Amsterdam Olympic stadium that I shoved a diamond into. The French will have the same according to my current plan. The Japanese Big Six teams all play in Meiji Jingu stadium. I may not end up getting to a stadium for the Venezuelans (or Australians?) at all. We'll see how it goes. Uniforms, though, don't seem like such a tall order, and I've made those up from whole cloth (so to speak) already. So, maybe?
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