Month: July 2020

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Baseball Jack Bauer Squared MLB Music Sim Baseball

What’s In a Name?

Why is this team called Jack Bauer Squared? I shouldn’t assume the references make sense to everyone.

The unique structure of this particular theme league called for owners to draft exactly one player from each of 24 franchises and disperse them across a 24-year span from 1969 to 1992. This meant that you could not have two players from, say, 1988. Nor could you have two players from the Dodgers or Yankees or anyone else. Only the “original” 24 franchises, meaning those in the major leagues as of 1969, were eligible, so it excluded the Colorado Rockies, Arizona Diamondbacks, Miami Marlins, Tampa Bay Rays, Toronto Blue Jays, and Seattle Mariners.

The draft was therefore called 24×24 to represent that each owner had to fill 24 franchise spots and 24 years to complete their roster. The 25th and final player was selected in a supplemental round consisting only of players from the six later franchises and from the years 1993-2019.

For those who were not watching television in the 00s, Jack Bauer was the name of the lead character in the Fox show 24, which followed a counter terrorism agent through a 24-hour cycle of events each season, divided into 24 one-hour episodes designed to appear as if they occurred in real time. 

One other owner took the 24×24 very literally and named his team “576.” My favorite names are “24 Lines About 24 Players,” a very clever song reference, and “A Rod, some Wood and a Big Unit,” playing off the names of three of his draftees whose names and nicknames have something distinctly in common with something totally different. 

Shoutout also must go to “P Niek! At the Disco” for combining a key player (Phil Niekro), music from the era, and a band reference. The owner also placed his team in Chicago’s Comiskey Park, famous for the 1979 promotional disaster Disco Demolition Night, so major bonus points for that.

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Baseball Jack Bauer Squared Sim Baseball

Game 6: Too Much Killebrew

Harmon Killebrew led the American League in home runs six times, including in 1969 when he hit 49. We won’t be the last team he beats up on this season.

Killebrew homered for the third straight game against us and drove in all four runs for Block Chain in a 4-2 victory. We couldn’t score off Frank Tanana until the bottom of the 9th inning, when Bill Freehan delivered a two-run homer to make it a bit closer.

Game 6

Nonetheless, we already had wrapped up our second straight series victory and sit at 4-2. We next head to Chicago’s Wrigley Field for a three-game set against 24 Hours at Wrigley, owned by one of the site’s best. We have our work cut out for us.

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Baseball Covid MLB

Ready or Not, Here Comes MLB

As I launch this blog and get my first set of posts out there, I am watching the Los Angeles Dodgers play a “Summer Camp” game at Dodger Stadium against the Arizona Diamondbacks. The Dodgers have pummeled the Diamondbacks two games in a row and look ready for Thursday’s much-delayed Opening Day.

As much as the game on the field looks like the real thing, everywhere are reminders that what is taking place is as much surreality as reality. Instead of fans in the seats there are cardboard cutout pictures of fans. (I would buy one, but only if I could get my Angels fan coworker on there in a Dodgers hat and a shirt that read “Astros Cheat!” I doubt they’d allow it, and good luck getting him to wear the hat anyway.)

MLB scrapped the original start of the season when Covid-19 started to spread dangerously in March, and teams all suspended their spring training just a couple weeks before the scheduled season openers. That week when one sport after another postponed or canceled games, tournaments, and seasons, all the way up to the Olympic Games, resembled nothing in history. Sports sections shrank to nothing practically overnight.

Much of baseball’s time since was spent with players and owners making news for their inability to agree on the financial terms of playing, and their tone-deaf squabbles cost fans the chance to see more games than we’re scheduled to get now. Massive labor issues remain to be resolved in the long run, but we’ll have time to lament the chasm between the sides after this mini-season wraps up.

A 60-game season represents only 37% of a normal 162-game schedule, so little margin for error remains. Losing 3 games in a row in 2020 would be like losing 8 in a row in any other season. Debate has already started about whether any historically significant statistical performances, like someone batting .400 (which hasn’t been accomplished since 1941), would count in a shorter season.

The much larger question we should all be asking, however, is whether any of this is a good idea. Unlike in the NBA’s “bubble” environment in Orlando, Florida, MLB teams will be traveling from city to city and playing in their home stadiums throughout the 60-game season.  

All this will launch while the United States watches Covid-19 cases mount and mount and hospitals nationwide begin to feel the crunch of being overwhelmed by ill patients requiring critical care. Across the country, cities and states are closing back down to keep as many people home as possible, and just now MLB is attempting to open operations in many of these hotspots. The government of Canada won’t let the Toronto Blue Jays play at home because of mandatory quarantine requirements for anyone entering the country, so a few days before the season starts the Jays have yet to find a temporary home.

We can legitimately ask what might halt this 60-game season (plus the all-important playoffs) before its scheduled finish. A handful of players have already opted out for health reasons, and several more have yet to join their teams because of positive tests. It’s easy to imagine a significant group of players on one team testing positive and having to miss a significant chunk of this short season, with dramatic impact on the standings. How many teams would have to suffer such challenges before many more players drop out or teams find themselves unable to field a healthy roster?

It is all much too surreal. These guys on TV look like they are playing baseball, but it feels like they’re playing a much more dangerous game. 

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Baseball Jack Bauer Squared Sim Baseball

Game 5: Offense Comes Alive

Once again, our pitching came out strong to start the second game of the series, with Burt Hooton holding Block Chain hitless through the first 5 innings. His luck ran out in the top of the 6th, however, as he gave up 5 runs on a pair of home runs and left after recording just one out. 

We still trailed 5-3 in the bottom of the 8th before breaking out for a 6-run inning to turn the tide. The big hit came from Kal Daniels for the second straight game, a grand slam this time. If you’re going to give up a big inning, you might as well return the favor.

Game 5

Jack Bauer Squared improved to 4-1 and for the moment sits alone atop the division. Sure, it’s great to start off well, but there are still 157 to play.

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Baseball Hobbies

Something Transcendent

Baseball entered my life with force in 1977, the year I turned 7. Certainly I had been to a few games before then, but my understanding of the game and knowledge of the players took off that year. I can’t precisely explain which held the most appeal: the actual unfolding of the physical game on the field, or the way the sport could be captured by numbers. 

People fascinated with neither might not be able to appreciate how the two blend. Yet I’m certain there are parallels in the world of bird watching, or stamp collecting, or gardening. You develop a distinct appreciation for the physical element of your hobby, i.e, the coloring of the birds, the art on the stamps, the flowering of your plants. At the same time, your mind also basks in the minutiae unique to that hobby, i.e., the taxonomy and anatomy of the birds, the rarity and values of the stamps, and the secrets of soils and seasons in the garden.

Surely the passions we develop appeal to us best on many levels, challenging our minds, lifting our senses, and soothing our souls. So baseball was, and is, for me, something transcendent and deeply satisfying at my core. And my inability to throw far or accurately or hit a curveball did nothing to diminish its hold on me all these years since.

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Baseball Jack Bauer Squared Sim Baseball

Game 4: Homer Heroics

Our home opener continued the pitching-first trend of the previous two games, as it remained scoreless through 6 innings. Block Chain’s Jose Deleon matched up with my Bert Blyleven to allow a combined 5 hits to that point. After Blyleven shut down the middle of the Block Chain lineup in the top of the 7th, the singing of Take Me Out to the Ballgame must have inspired my offense.

Pinch hitter Alex Cole hit for Blyleven with the bases loaded and one out and hit into a run-scoring force play but used his speed to avoid the double play. That kept the inning alive for leadoff man Kal Daniels, who drove Deleon’s 108th pitch over the wall in center field for a 4-0 lead.

Rod Beck pitched an easy 8th inning and should have emerged unscathed from the 9th as well. Rafael Ramirez booted a ground ball for his third error of the season to give Block Chain extra opportunities. Slugger Harmon Killebrew didn’t miss it, homering to bring the lead down to 4-2. 

Closer Bob Woodward came in to get the final out and wrapped up his second save. We moved to 3-1 on the season and into a 3-way tie atop the National League West. 

Game 4

So far my emphasis on pitching in the draft has paid off with the league’s best ERA (2.21), but it’s very, very early. Team stats, and even individual ones, don’t start taking on significance until 20-30 games because of the skewing effects of outlier performances. 

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Baseball Covid Jack Bauer Squared MLB Sim Baseball

Selecting a Stadium

Sim baseball schedules rarely fit the travel-based logic of professional teams, so you don’t generally play extended road trips or homestands unless the game was specifically programmed to create that added verisimilitude. My teams in WIS do, however, each play in a specific real-life ballpark with effects on games based on the dimensions and actual historical performance in those parks.

There are well over 100 stadium choices in the game. They range from historical fields from the early days of baseball with only guesses at some of the details lost to time, to every stadium in current use. You’ll find the most offense-friendly parks in history, Denver’s Mile High Stadium and Coors Field, to the pitchers’ favorites, the Houston Astrodome and San Diego’s Petco Park.

For this 24×24 league, no owners can have the same ballpark, and we were restricted to those actually called someone’s home from 1969 to 1992. Part of our draft included selecting our unique ballpark in any round we chose. I waited until near the end to try to find the best fit for the team I’d built.

Sometimes the strengths of a team lend themselves to a particular park, especially if you are trying to hit a lot of home runs — or, more importantly, prevent them. Some owners put less stock in the importance of a park and select more neutral choices frequently, and when a team doesn’t have an obvious strength you want to exploit, that’s a sensible way to go.

I wound up in Montreal’s Olympic Stadium for this league for a handful of reasons, which may or may not prove wise as the season progresses. I’ll get into the sim reasons once I’ve explained park effects better, but the best non-sim reason for the choice is that earlier in 2020 (just before everything started shutting down due to coronavirus) I made my first visit to Montreal. The stadium is still there, but the baseball team is long gone. 

The Expos relocated to become the Washington Nationals in 2005, and in 2019 they won the franchise’s first World Series in its 51st season. From 1969 to 2004, the Expos only made the playoffs one time, in 1981. They had the league’s best record going in 1994 when a strike ended the season prematurely, so we’ll never know what they might have accomplished were it not for the first season to end without a World Series since 1904. 

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Jack Bauer Squared Sim Baseball

Game 3: Dominant Pitching

The third game of the opening series continues with the resurgence of dominant pitching. My 1st-round pick, left-hander Teddy Higuera, didn’t allow a hit until the 5th inning and then escaped a bases-loaded, no-out jam in the 7th to leave with a 2-1 lead. Rod Beck and Bob Woodward each pitched a perfect inning to close out the 3-1 victory.

Shortstop Rafael Ramirez atoned for two fielding errors by going 3-for-4, doubling in the 9th and scoring an insurance run on a pinch single by Bob Bailey. 

Game 3

All told, it’s a promising first series. If you win 2 out of 3 in baseball, you’re doing extremely well. We’re only in 3rd place in our 4-team division, however, as two teams swept their first series. Next up we face Block Chain, one of the teams that remains winless, but you can’t put any stock in that. All these teams are good enough to beat you any time, and his 0-3 could be 3-3 just like that.

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Baseball MLB Sim Baseball

All-Star Baseball

Fresh from my garage, my original All-Star Baseball game is still ready to play.

Among the many sports simulation board games still housed in my garage is the original and best-selling All-Star Baseball. Designed by a former major league player and coach, Ethan Allen, and first released in 1941, All-Star Baseball reigned as the ultimate baseball sim for decades.

I can’t trace my first encounter with ASB precisely, but I know I played solitaire and head-to-head games with friends often. The game’s simplicity was critical to its success, even if it overlooked tremendously important aspects of baseball. Everything was reduced to the batter, and the cards realistically simulated the percentage of times a real player did certain things like hit a home run, strike out, or walk. 

ASB cards were discs with numbers around the edges that represented different outcomes in proper proportions. Results were revealed by a spinner that would stop and point to the play’s result. New card sets would come out after each season, and there were also all-time greats available. I remember learning the names of some baseball legends from playing the game.

The version in my garage probably dates to about 1979 or 1980, based on the player cards in there. It was last played close to 20 years ago, as I can tell from one of the simple scorecards included in the set, when I challenged my stepson to a couple games when trying to teach him more about baseball. He beat me, 10-9, so you can tell I wasn’t cheating!

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Baseball Jack Bauer Squared Sim Baseball

Game 2: Back to Earth

After the offensive fireworks of Game 1, the second game of our season turned into a pitchers’ duel fitting with a pair of Dodgers opposing each other. My 1975 Burt Hooton and his 1985 Orel Hershiser each gave up one early run and that was it. Hooton lasted 6 innings and allowed 4 hits, while Hershiser went 7 and gave up only 3 hits. 

Both teams threatened in the 9th, but we left the bases loaded and Tulo left two on. The bullpens battled into the 10th inning, until Tony Phillips hit a walkoff homer off Joe Sambito to leave the Veterans Stadium crowd jubilant with a 2-1 victory.

Game 2

It’s important to note that I developed a text-message friendship with NebHusker, my opening opponent, over the past couple years playing this game, and we really ramped up the conversation during this draft. Because I’d already taken a second baseman, Ryne Sandberg, in the 3rd round, I asked Husker if he’d been considering Phillips for his open 2B spot as the draft progressed. He hadn’t, then immediately took a liking to him and drafted him. And now, fittingly, Phillips delivers the winning hit in Game 2.