Cool!
Well with all the teams in place I can get going on generating rosters, which I plan to do tonight and tomorrow. You guys can start planning out your schedules, in case you haven't already started. In the interest of this not being a massive masochism-fest,
the season will now span 140 games. That's 20 games, 10 home and 10 away, against each team in your league. The season starts on the second Tuesday of April, and concludes the last day of September. You are responsible for scheduling your own games. Any games you fail to play (barring weather concerns) will result in a fine.
If you guys want to create some fun traditions for your league (for example the Cincinnati Reds
always open at home with a day game), that's entirely up to you and your league.
Some recommendations for scheduling.
Baseball-reference is your friend. I would recommend looking at historical schedules from 1903-1911 for inspiration. From the looks of it teams on the peripheries typically scheduled 2 to 3 lengthy (15-28 games) road trips in which they visited 5-7 cities (sometimes the same city twice, at either end of the road trip), and a couple smaller road trips to more local teams (for example the Washington Senators usually visited the Philadelphia Athletics for one-off road trips due to close proximity). For visualizing, I would recommend either doing a mark-up yourself on excel or google spreadsheets. Doing it like how bbref draws theirs up helps for visualizing the road/away splits, and you can easily use the COUNTIF function to keep track of games scheduled against each team. One last word of advice - remember blue laws (in many of the cities teams are actually not allowed to play baseball on Sundays, although there are ways around this), and remember that doubleheaders (two games played on the same day against the same team, back-to-back) are your friend - doubleheaders were very common.
So good luck, feel free to ask me for advice if you need any help. For you non-regulars, don't be a stranger: #nes is a helpful place, and I'm almost always online over there. Expect to see a main thread up with individual team-roster profiles forthcoming.
Oh, this would probably be useful. List of teams:
Federal Association
Boston Minutemen
New York Americans
Providence Blues
Chicago Railers
Philadelphia Warriors
Washington Smokes
Richmond Rebels
Pittsburgh Kings
National Association
New York Mohawks
Albany Half-Moons
Baltimore Barnstormers
Detroit Wheelers
Chicago Foxes
Omaha Barons
Minneapolis-St.Paul Loons
St. Louis Royals
For ease of use, spoil'd is a map of the teams: