What If There Was No Monopoly?

How baseball might have developed

What If There Was No Monopoly?

As you should know by now, Major League Baseball exists on the back of a monopolistic economic system. It’s a system that comes from the Gilded Age, and I mean that as literally as I possibly can. The National League system started in 1875, and was a system of ensuring territorial monopolies and restricting player salaries and movement.

I wrote a little bit about this a year ago, actually:

But I’ve always wondered what baseball would be like if it had a truly organic system. What would promotion and relegation look like if there was no monopolistic league on top of everything else? What would happen if local leagues were to form organically and local regions were to come up with their own championship structure, instead of everything being dictated by commissioners in a smoke filled boardroom?

I haven’t seen a baseball setup yet that I’ve found convincing. However, over on the Football Manager forums, I found a project the other day that looks like what I’m looking for.

You can check out the North American Football Association here.

Now, the cool thing about the way this is designed is that the United States and Canada have been divided up into separate regional league structures, something like this:

I’m not sure that the regions correspond exactly with what “should” happen in this kind of scenario. I’d imagine that it would be easy for somebody to create an entire league for texas, for example, and the Rocky Mountain states don’t really have anything in common with the Great Plains. But it’s a start.

Now, the cool thing about this setup is that each of these 8 regions winds up having champions through their own league structures. And the creator then made a sort of Champions League for the Americas to allow them to play against each other.

And the other interesting thing is that there are no territorial rights to speak of. This team in Manhattan, for example, has numerous rival teams around the other boroughs of New York City:

The creator kindly provided a semi-complete Google Earth map of all the teams. In my neck of the woods there are over a dozen:

And that’s the thing that really makes this kind of setup fun. You wind up with a lot of regional rivalries and real regional flavors to your game.

I’ve always wanted to use OOTP to set up this kind of league. I’ve never really had the time to grind it out, however. It takes a lot of research and quite a bit of creativity to come up with different team names and league structures.

Maybe I’ll figure it out one of these days.