For some us, baseball is a year round obsession.\u00c2\u00a0 Even though the Major League Baseball season ends, we find ways to fill the off-season with talk of the “Hot Stove League” and the occasional Winter League tidbit as we patiently wait for pitchers and catchers to report.<\/p>\n
Here at Seamheads, we don’t want the season to end but inevitably it has to.\u00c2\u00a0 Or does it?<\/p>\n
Enter the Seamheads Historic\u00c2\u00a0League (SHL) — name is a work in progress.\u00c2\u00a0 Starting soon after the World Series ends, the SHL begins.\u00c2\u00a0 But what, you ask, is the SHL?<\/p>\n
The SHL is a concept formed about two months ago after I had a discussion with Matt Sisson about another possible project to fill the idle time of the offseason.\u00c2\u00a0 That project, unfortunately, fell through — for now — but a side project of a continuation of the excitement of the baseball season in the off months and bringing it to the Seamheads began to blossom.<\/p>\n
The first step was to contact Mike Lynch and see what he thought of the idea.\u00c2\u00a0 Basically, the idea was to form historical All-Time rosters of every Major League franchise and simulate a league using “Out of the Park Baseball” (OOTP 9)<\/a>, a computer simulation program.\u00c2\u00a0 Mike thought the idea was definitely one to push forward with so the groundwork for the SHL began.<\/p>\n In concept, the idea was imperfect though.\u00c2\u00a0 Under the current configuration, it didn’t make sense for the Toronto Blue Jays to compete with the New York Yankees straight up and how historically relevant were the four most recent franchises?\u00c2\u00a0 But then again, this was a historic league and baseball had a number of division and league configurations in its time.\u00c2\u00a0 To balance the league for competitveness, seven four-team divisions were formed:<\/p>\n National Originals – Teams Who Began In The National League National Association – Teams Who Began In American Association But Moved to National League American Atlantic – American League Teams Along the East Coast (Originally) American Midwest – American League Teams in Midwest (Originally) Expansion A – Teams Added in ’61 & ’62 Expansion B – Teams Added in ’69 Expansion C – Teams Added in ’70s & ’90s All franchises are allowed to select players when the current team played in a different location.\u00c2\u00a0 For example, the Nationals have access to the Montreal Expos.\u00c2\u00a0 And the schedule is set for teams to play more games in division than out and for the two National divisions to play a few more games against each other, the two American divisions to play a few additional games against each other and the three expansion divisions to play a few games against each other.<\/p>\n Once the divisions and schedules were set, the next step was to set up rosters.\u00c2\u00a0 At first, the concept was simple.\u00c2\u00a0 Share the idea with the Seamheads team and come up with rosters.\u00c2\u00a0 However, then the idea took a new direction.\u00c2\u00a0 Instead of the Seamheads writers being the “General Managers” of these All-Time franchises, why not seek out some of the best baseball minds and baseball fans out there?\u00c2\u00a0 So, we did.\u00c2\u00a0 I turned to Mike and Joe Hamrahi from Baseball Digest Daily<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0for help and the three of us — mostly Mike and Joe — landed some big names in the baseball world to help give the project an addition that makes it more interesting.\u00c2\u00a0 Plus, it gives our writers a chance to help weave a story about the season without any personal interest in one particular team.<\/p>\n As far as who the “GMs” are… well, that will continue to be a loosely guarded secret — if you are familiar with Facebook and join the Seamheads group there, you’ll find a few names there and some of the “GMs” have asked for help on their blogs and such.\u00c2\u00a0 The names will be revealed here on the blog soon\u00c2\u00a0but it doesn’t take a bloody sock to figure out some of them.<\/p>\n Anyway, hope this is enough of a taste of what’s to come.\u00c2\u00a0 Personally, I’m working on the daunting tasks of entering all of the All-Time franchises into the simulation and some other details.\u00c2\u00a0 And more information will be revealed next Saturday… but hopefully this is enough to get you checking back for more and while you are, check out all the great writers on Seamheads and leave comments on what you think of the idea especially constructive ones since there’s still time to make minor tweaks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For some us, baseball is a year round obsession.\u00c2\u00a0 Even though the Major League Baseball season ends, we find ways to fill the off-season with talk of the “Hot Stove League” and the occasional Winter League tidbit as we patiently wait for pitchers and catchers to report. Here at Seamheads, we don’t want the season […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/48"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=765"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/765\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/strong>Braves
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