As I mentioned in my
Depression Era Baseball blog, I have always hoped to find an engaging project that would allow me to explore the Negro Leagues. With Strat-O-Matic's brilliant new card set of all time great Negro League players, designed for use with its existing Hall of Fame set, we're finally going to get to do what could never be done before - integrate baseball from the beginning, using the best players of each era regardless of skin color.
We'll need to take a lot of liberties of course. My proposal is to create two leagues with six teams apiece in cities that historically had teams, expanding to a few cities down South as well. This will mirror the traditional structure of the major leagues prior to expansion. The leagues will not engage in inter league play. The winners of each will then play a seven game World Series.
Each team will automatically draft players from an integrated pool of players, so each will feature a mix of Hall of Fame baseball players along with Negro League greats. The computer will draft and set starting lineups and rotations, and make the decisions. I plan to report, comment and add additional "color" to the writeups.
Here's some
more on Strat-O-Matic's new Negro League set by way of background. Here's more about
Strat-O-Matic baseball.
One note: The Strat-O-Matic Hall of Fame set was complete through 2001 and does not include subsequent inductees. It also includes two players not actually in the Hall - Pete Rose, Carl Mays and Joe Jackson.
