Expansion Discussion Thread

[claphamsa]

Who wants to live in Virginia anyway? 

the West part is pretty nice

[mstreeter06]

We have found our 4th future expansion owner, Marek Singeling. Marek is joining us from the Netherlands which adds another location throughout the world that the AFBL represents. We have members in the USA, Canada, Australia, Spain, UK, and now the Netherlands. This is one of the great things about online leagues in OOTP.

As the Commish, I'm excited to begin to take the next steps in the expansion process. Please vote for which year we will expand and voice your opinion about any of the details if you have any thoughts.

Thanks guys!

[mikezone13]

We have found our 4th future expansion owner, Marek Singeling. Marek is joining us from the Netherlands which adds another location throughout the world that the AFBL represents. We have members in the USA, Canada, Australia, Spain, UK, and now the Netherlands. This is one of the great things about online leagues in OOTP.

As the Commish, I'm excited to begin to take the next steps in the expansion process. Please vote for which year we will expand and voice your opinion about any of the details if you have any thoughts.

Thanks guys!

Who's our UK rep matt?

[mstreeter06]

We have found our 4th future expansion owner, Marek Singeling. Marek is joining us from the Netherlands which adds another location throughout the world that the AFBL represents. We have members in the USA, Canada, Australia, Spain, UK, and now the Netherlands. This is one of the great things about online leagues in OOTP.

As the Commish, I'm excited to begin to take the next steps in the expansion process. Please vote for which year we will expand and voice your opinion about any of the details if you have any thoughts.

Thanks guys!

Who's our UK rep matt?

Expansion owner Paul (NDK-Paul)

[mikezone13]

Nice - are all expansion owners able to vote for the end of season awards? I hope they can so that they can get to know some the guys in the league.

[mstreeter06]

Nice - are all expansion owners able to vote for the end of season awards? I hope they can so that they can get to know some the guys in the league.

Absolutely! I strongly encourage participation from our future expansion owners in addition to our current owners. I consider our 4 expansion owners as members of the league so only makes sense for them to vote as they see fit!

[mstreeter06]

With voting in Statslab, I need to figure out how to create our expansion guys without a team in the game. I plan to test in my test league tonight. I'm thinking that I can create them as new human managers in the game then not assign a team to them?

UPDATE: I created our 4 future owners in the game before the FCS and then ran Statslab with them in the SQL dump. I don't see any of them as login options in Statslab. Any thoughts anyone?

[mstreeter06]

The Illinois owner (Lawrence, LT on the forum) has approached me about taking one of the expansion teams when we expand in either 2017 or 2018. So he will have 1 of the 4 expansion franchises with 1 of the future owners taking over the Illinois franchise when we expand. I'll go down the order in who joined first about who wants to stay as an expansion team or take over the Illinois franchise with Marek being the fallback to take over if the other 3 don't want to take the IL franchise.

That being said, if there are any other current owners that are interested in taking over an expansion team then hand over the team when we expand to one of the expansion owners please let me know or post here as soon as possible.

The order of 1st choice to decide to take over IL when we expand is Paul, Frank, Matthew, Marek.

Whomever takes control of the Illinois franchise will be given the opportunity to relocate the team to a different state without the 1 year penalty. The same goes for any other teams abandoned by their current owners.

Thanks guys!

[24Rocks]

This is all turning out to be very interesting process

[BaseballAddict32]

How good is the Illinois franchise? Just curious even though I am definitely loving the direction of the Nevada franchise and where I can take it. Will be a process but its cool to be building something from scratch. And we are working on partnerships with businesses to sell luxury boxes for their biggest clients to come enjoy games as well. Whales I believe they call them 

[mstreeter06]

How good is the Illinois franchise? Just curious even though I am definitely loving the direction of the Nevada franchise and where I can take it. Will be a process but its cool to be building something from scratch. And we are working on partnerships with businesses to sell luxury boxes for their biggest clients to come enjoy games as well. Whales I believe they call them 

Whoever does take over the Illinois franchise (stay in IL or relocation) will be taking over an upcoming, exciting roster. A legitimate 1-2 punch with Wallace and Zhu and powerful youngster OF Thomas.

[LT]

How good is the Illinois franchise? Just curious even though I am definitely loving the direction of the Nevada franchise and where I can take it. Will be a process but its cool to be building something from scratch. And we are working on partnerships with businesses to sell luxury boxes for their biggest clients to come enjoy games as well. Whales I believe they call them 

I think it is a good squad. We did struggle with injuries in 2015 and that really hurt us early in the year. 

The 1-2 pitching punch of Wallace and Zhu, Neal had a strong rookie year and there are several pitching prospects close. We have an excellent closer in Jacobs, and two top closer prospects on the horizon.

As for hitting, we have a ton of power, Gonzalez (38 HR), Thomas (42),  Sackett (33). OF Hammond had 24 jacks and missed a lot of time. The shortstop, Jackson, hit close to .300 and is 24 years old. The catcher is solid, if unspectacular.

The farm system is rated #2 at this time and I have 2 extra picks so far in this draft, so will add 9 new guys (at least) to the system.

I just want to start from scratch and see what I can do.

[BaseballAddict32]

How good is the Illinois franchise? Just curious even though I am definitely loving the direction of the Nevada franchise and where I can take it. Will be a process but its cool to be building something from scratch. And we are working on partnerships with businesses to sell luxury boxes for their biggest clients to come enjoy games as well. Whales I believe they call them 

I think it is a good squad. We did struggle with injuries in 2015 and that really hurt us early in the year. 

The 1-2 pitching punch of Wallace and Zhu, Neal had a strong rookie year and there are several pitching prospects close. We have an excellent closer in Jacobs, and two top closer prospects on the horizon.

As for hitting, we have a ton of power, Gonzalez (38 HR), Thomas (42),  Sackett (33). OF Hammond had 24 jacks and missed a lot of time. The shortstop, Jackson, hit close to .300 and is 24 years old. The catcher is solid, if unspectacular.

The farm system is rated #2 at this time and I have 2 extra picks so far in this draft, so will add 9 new guys (at least) to the system.

I just want to start from scratch and see what I can do.

Wow that is tempting to want that team especially if they were allowed to be move to Nevada. Will see what the guys ahead of me say.

[stevee]

I've voted for the 2017 expansion, along the same lines of thinking that an extra season for the new owners to wait could be a little painful for them.

Since I live in Baltimore, I've been thinking of a possible relocation for the club over to Maryland. That would probably necessitate a switch of sub-league as well to the PL if we're keeping the regional lines. If the club moved to coincide with expansion, though, the FL would be getting an odd number of expansion teams to fill the vacancy our departure would cause (unless there's an existing PL club moving to the FL). I could also just stay in the FL with the rebranded team until a good time comes to move us to the PL. 

[mstreeter06]

I've voted for the 2017 expansion, along the same lines of thinking that an extra season for the new owners to wait could be a little painful for them.

Since I live in Baltimore, I've been thinking of a possible relocation for the club over to Maryland. That would probably necessitate a switch of sub-league as well to the PL if we're keeping the regional lines. If the club moved to coincide with expansion, though, the FL would be getting an odd number of expansion teams to fill the vacancy our departure would cause (unless there's an existing PL club moving to the FL). I could also just stay in the FL with the rebranded team until a good time comes to move us to the PL.

I'm leaning toward this reasoning for 2017 as well. I'm all for getting everyone involved as soon as possible without compromising the league as it currently is. I believe that the AFBL will be alright with expanding in 2017 but I'm going to leave the voting open for a little longer.

Like we discussed in PM, I'm alright with California relocating to Maryland. If we need to realign when we expand, we will. This is my reasoning to have time relocate when we expand so we can avoid more realignment down the road. If the CA franchise does want to relocate to MD then send me another PM confirming this and then you can announce the team's intentions in a Team Press Release to open play in MD in 2017. Thanks!