Thank You Contrarian23 for the great idea!
all the following was copied and pasted from contrarian's thread
Historical Replay League
I’ve always been interested in using WIS to complete a long-term historical replay. See
this thread for a discussion I started over a year ago to explore the possibility.
The Cooperstown Historical Replay League is intended to fulfill that ambition. Rules will be explained in more detail in the next post, but first I want to provide some context.
WIS provides us with a database full of players going back to 1885. Every team that has appeared in the major leagues since then is here, including teams and players from three now-defunct leagues: the American Association (in the database from 1885-1891), the Player’s League (from its sole iteration in 1890), and the Federal League (from its two year stint in 1914-1915.)
So I’ve always been surprised that there aren’t more historical replay leagues. In fact, I’ve never seen one at all. I’m not talking about progressives, or twist themes, but a league where the idea is to replay each season in MLB history with the same rosters as the actual teams had that season.
The most important thing to know about this league:
There are a number of challenges with doing this, but foremost among them is probably this: every season there are a handful of teams that are doomed to be lousy and have no chance of competing. I have in mind a couple of ways of dealing with that, but
the first and most important thing to understand about this league is that some teams are not going to have any chance of winning in any given season. And you may end up with one of those teams.
Please read that previous paragraph as often as necessary, and make sure you are OK with this before signing up to join this league. This is a founding premise of this league:
our primary purpose is to create an alternative historical narrative, to explore how things might have been, rather than to ensure that each owner has a decent chance to win in any given season. So we will not be giving lesser teams AAA, or twists, or free agents, or doing anything else to enhance competitive balance, and
whining about this will not be tolerated at all.
Again, please fully understand this before signing up, as this fundamental principle is not subject to change. We will run the league as long as we have enough interested owners, but we will not alter this basic concept.