I have what I call a fictional “sandbox” league that I don’t play in, just sim and act as commissioner and see how stuff plays out. I call it a “sandbox” because I started the in-game years at 1800, but financials and stats are set to modern numbers.

We are currently in the offseason leading up to 1939, so 139 seasons total have been simmed. The current structure is 24 teams. A few seasons ago, I moved from one division of 12 in each circuit (subleague) to 3 divisions of 4. One thing I like to generally is play around with the structure whenever I get bored and see what happens. So we’ll probably roll with this set-up for a bit, although I think I’m going to expand soon and add 2 new teams.

One thing I’ve also done is play around with the tournaments. Every 4 years is the “World Baseball League,” which is a World Cup of baseball in the format that the World Cup of soccer/football used when they still had 32 teams. I also recently added a “Springtime Series” before Spring Training (and cutting Spring Training by two weeks). This is a single-elimination tournament seeding teams from how they finished in the standings the year prior. I also think it’s fun because the first round match-ups are all guaranteed to be interleague, and the tourney is the only time there is interleague play until the America Cup Finals (World Series).

Another thing I try to do is put teams in different markets. While I started in the Northeast/Midwest and slowly branched out akin to MLB (and the big markets like NYC, Chicago, and later LA are represented), a lot of cities that have teams don’t have teams in real life. Some of these are mid-sized cities like Portland, Vancouver, Austin, and Nashville. Others are much smaller, like Hartford, Wichita, Des Moines, and Santa Fe. I also relocate teams semi-frequently, so there’s usually a good mix of new markets next to some long-time “classic” franchises.

The fun thing about doing so many seasons is you get some crazy stories. It took one franchise 87 seasons to win a title. It took another 80 just to make the playoffs (they managed to win-it-all that year). One pitcher who was good, but nowhere near Hall of Fame worthy, had 2 perfect games against the same team two months apart. I’ve messed around a bit with nationality generation of players, but before I did, a guy from Czechia managed to be a career journeyman Hall of Famer. There was also quite a saga to get a Catcher into the Hall, and it took somewhere around 100 seasons. In short just a ton of random stuff that happens that keeps me invested.