Author: Jason Winston

Jason Winston is a lifelong baseball fan and player of various simulation games. He has worked as (among other things) a professional educator, journalist, marketing writer, and compliance analyst. He has managed tens of thousands more games than Connie Mack did, and with a better winning percentage, too!

Categories
Baseball College Hobbies Sim Baseball

Replaying a Season

Replaying an entire major league season requires several tools, not least of which are time and patience. I started with just the National League for 1982, in part because I was not certain from the outset what would happen. The initial plan was to play a month for each league, alternating back and forth.

Using Statis Pro Baseball, with all the cards provided plus a few I made myself for the limited-use players needed to fill out all the rosters, I followed the league’s actual schedule that I had found in a book I still had from the 1982 season preview the year before. That little paperback The Complete Handbook of Baseball, proved invaluable. The 1983 preview edition had all of the individual statistics from 1982 that I could use. 

I collected the books year after year because finding everything you needed in one place was much harder before we’d even dreamed of the internet. The Baseball Encyclopedia was a revelation, of course, putting all of baseball’s historical data into one volume. I bought the updates every few years, because you had to be current. (I still have all of these books. Because of course I do. I have a few posts coming just on baseball books, you can be certain.)

Life in 1983 consisted of more than just simulating baseball games, however. I was in 7th grade at a college preparatory school with hours of homework each night. I had a bar mitzvah in June to prepare for, and I was fortunate to take a trip with my grandparents to Israel and Italy that summer. Plus, you know, pesky things like doing anything else.

This is to say that I did not spend every free moment replaying the 1982 season, but I made progress steadily enough that I became hooked. At that time the National League had 12 teams, each playing 162 games. So that meant 972 games had to be played in all, and each one took over an hour to set up, play, and complete the scoresheet.

After every two weeks’ worth of games, I would compile all the updated season statistics. Though it may seem incomprehensible in our modern computing era while I play online games that do all of it instantly, I had to do all the work by hand initially. I designed special team stat pages and filled them in manually, going through each of my box scores (using the game’s specially designed scoresheets that I could probably recreate from memory right now), adding everything up, and doing all the math.

Once I had my stat updates complete, I would write long letters (on actual paper!) to my sim penpal Caleb and share all the details of my season in progress. He would send me tomes of his own recapping his 1981 adventures. Life got busier for him, too, eventually. He actually could play baseball well and played through high school.

An amazing invention arrived somewhere in the middle of all this: the home computer. I couldn’t afford one until I was about 16 and the mass market developed, but soon I discovered the wonders of a spreadsheet. The program, Lotus 1-2-3, revolutionized my statistical work, though in those days of floppy disks and minimal memory, it could take hours to enter all the data. Saving would take actual minutes, and if anything failed you had to type everything in again.

On average, I could complete about a month’s worth of games in a year. I played all the time in the summer, when I was essentially home alone all day. I’d bring the game with me for visits to grandparents. (I even remember bringing it to a nudist colony my mother belonged to. Yes, there was a nice indoor clubhouse on whose floor I could spread out my game while people outside did whatever it was they did.)

As the years progressed and I stuck with my challenge, the biggest temptation was to move on to a newer season. By the time I reached high school, I was still barely into June of my replay season, and the pace certainly slowed. I attended a very competitive private school, and studying took up nearly all my time. Eventually there were jobs and even a semblance of a social life. Sim baseball basically sat on the shelf outside of vacations in those days.

By the time all the hard work in high school paid off and I headed to Philadelphia to attend the University of Pennsylvania in the fall of 1988, I still was only in early September of my replay season. The game stayed in Los Angeles. 

I reached the end of my season in 1990, some seven years after beginning and 10 years after first discovering Statis Pro Baseball. Forget about the American League; this was just to get the NL season done.

Today with an online simulation, you could do it essentially instantly. But where would be the fun in that?

Categories
Baseball Jack Bauer Squared MLB Sim Baseball

Games 36-39: Here We Go Again

Dear Reader, I beg your forgiveness. The results in this 24×24 league have been so disheartening, I practically wanted to scrap this project. Or at least stop narrating this seemingly doomed season and focus on any other one. Literally any of my other ones would be better, as this is the worst team I have going out of 18. Aren’t you lucky, Dear Reader?

But let’s soldier on, as we aren’t even a quarter of the way there and a run of luck could still even the tables for us.

We have two home-and-home interleague sets to catch up on, and the highlights have been few. We started off with the animals of The Hawk, the Bird, Simba and a Moose, and they mauled poor Teddy Higuera with a pair of three-run homers in the early going to take a huge lead.

We did flex some of our own power with a three-run homer by Carlos Delgado and a two-run shot by Bobby Bonilla, but there wasn’t enough to come back as we lost 8-5.

Game 36

The second game marked our lone trip to Oriole Park at Camden Yards (fitting home for a team of that name, too). This time it was our turn to take a big early lead, as we chased Mark “The Bird” Fidrych after 4 innings. 

Mike Cuellar pitched well enough to earn his 2nd win, giving up “only” 4 runs in 7 innings, and Bob Woodward kept his ERA at 0.00 by earning his 10th save in the 6-4 victory. This marked the 4th straight time we followed a loss with a win, so our recent history looked like this: L-W-L-W-L-W-L-W. 

Game 37

Our second interleague series of this set against 24 Lines About 24 Players (still in awe of the genius of the team name, I must confess) went a lot like much of the early season. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but we lost twice by one run. We fell to 4-11 in such games, and it’s taking a lot of wind out my sails and variety out of my prose. There are only so many ways to say that your team fell just short, again.

Rickey Henderson led off the opener with a home run, something he did far more than anyone else in MLB history, 81 times. This is seemingly true of Rickey’s records, where he put huge gaps ahead of second place in the books. He hit 50% more leadoff homers than the next closest (Alfonso Soriano with 54). Rickey stole 1406 bases, and second place still belongs to Lou Brock with 938.

I digress, but since this is our only series facing Rickey I might as well indulge in some appreciation. After all, he helped beat us the way he famously did. He stole two bases, scored three runs, and 24 Lines beat us 3-2. 

Game 38

Our L-W streak ended in the second game, as our trip to Sicks’ Stadium ended in a 10-9 defeat. Bobby Bonilla hit a grand slam, but the Jack Bauer Squared pitching gave up runs in six different innings. We had the tying and go-ahead runs on in the 9th with one out, but a pair of strikeouts ended the threat. 

Game 39

So it’s a 15-24 mark we carry limping back home in hopes of turning the tide soon. But hope is not a word well associated with this team much any more.

Categories
Baseball Jack Bauer Squared Sim Baseball

Games 33-35: Something To Build On

What’s that, Dear Reader? You had us totally written off going into that three-game series with the league’s best team? Truth be told, ownership was pretty pessimistic too.

It’s useful to remember that code bits don’t know anything about what came before. So the ones representing Jack Bauer Squared had no knowledge of their poor start or Hitmen 24×24 and their strong one. It’s just head to head and let the algorithm play it out.

Mike Cuellar retired the first nine batters he faced, and we gave him a 4-0 lead to work with. But for whatever reason his code bits are misfiring repeatedly this season, and he’s not performing as expected. Cuellar gave the lead back and then some with a 6-run 4th inning, but run-scoring doubles from Ryne Sandberg and Bobby Bonilla put us back on top in the bottom of the inning.

Bonilla wound up driving in 6 runs with a 4-for-5 day, and the bullpen allowed just 1 run over 5 innings as we held on to win, 11-7. Bonilla is now starting at 3B every day for me, as his switch-hitting bat and slightly better defense have left Bob Bailey on the bench for now.

Game 33

The offense didn’t save much for the second game of the series, however. The teams battled to a 1-1 tie going into the 9th inning, but Hitmen broke through for 3 runs to claim a 4-1 win.

Game 34

That took us to the rubber game, which continued to feature the dominant pitching from the previous game. Bert Blyleven may have been drafted as our 4th starter, but he’s getting results like an ace. Blyleven (5-3, 3.11 ERA) took a shutout into the 9th inning, and Bob Woodward got the final two outs for his 9th save to seal the 2-1 win.

Kal Daniels hit his 6th homer to take the team lead. Our leadoff guy against right-handed starters, Daniels is slashing a team-best .333/.450/.600 and definitely justifying his place on the roster. 

Game 35

Stats start to become a bit meaningful now that we’re 35 games into the season and the sample size is developing. Our team OPS of .731 is just above the league average of .718. And our team ERA of 4.31 is just above the league average of 4.36. So even though our record of 14-21 reflects a .400 winning percentage, there’s reason to think we have at least a slightly better than average team. And underperforming could give hope that playoffs are a possibility if we can get the record to better reflect the team.

Next up: two more interleague series as we get our one glimpse of two other teams from the distant lands.

Categories
Baseball Hobbies Sim Baseball

The Game That Hooked Me

The store could have been a Toys R Us. Maybe even Gemco. Somewhere that sold a wide range of games, at least, because I wasn’t looking at Monopoly or Sorry. I would have been about 9 ½  and almost certainly shopping with my grandparents, who bought me more than a fair share of my necessities as well as frivolities.

I can’t say precisely from a distance of 40 years what made me want to buy the game in the box that looked more like a dictionary than a game. A bookcase game, it was called. It was something more serious, clearly.

Statis Pro Baseball, produced by the Avalon Hill Game Company, included cards for every player from the 1979 season in that first set I took home. I remember the excitement of separating all the cards on their perforated sheets, studying the rules, sorting all the players into their teams, and figuring out how to play games. 

I played for fun at that stage as my knowledge of baseball was still growing. Replaying the playoffs. Playing All-Star games. Whatever my imagination could dream up, I could do now. I had a statistical replay game with realistic outcomes and all the elements of baseball. I had the 1979 season and almost every player, save a few with too few at-bats or innings. 

Mostly I played the game solitaire, which worked just fine. I managed both teams as best I could, and since you didn’t get quite as granular as selecting pitches or anything that you couldn’t reveal to the other side, it presented no problems. I had learned how to keep score of baseball games over the previous couple years, so I had the tools I needed.

Fortunately, I also found someone to play against. My grandparents had a large network of friends, and that included a couple whose two grandsons would come to visit each summer from their home in rural British Columbia. My grandmother had the idea to get us together during one of my visits, and there began a friendship unlike any other I’ve had.

The older of the two boys was close to my age and, as it happened, a baseball fan. I introduced Caleb to my Statis Pro Baseball game, and he took a liking to it immediately as well. After the 1981 season concluded, he purchased his own version and set about replaying the entire full (not strike-shortened) 1981 season on his own.

After the 1982 season, I got the newer version of the game to get the most recent player card set. When you’re 12, a set from 3 years earlier feels really distant. And I was ready to undertake my own season replay, starting from the most recent season.

Over the next few years, Caleb and I progressed through our respective seasons. Each summer when he came to visit, I would become like a third grandson for his grandparents and spend a few days with them. Sure, we would swim and shoot hoops here and there, but we spent hours stretched out on living room floors with our game sets playing sim baseball.

In between those infrequent visits, we became penpals. In the early 80s, that was the way to stay in touch with your distant friends. You wrote letters. And we wrote long letters. Admittedly,  most of them were packed with baseball statistics, standings, and highlights of our seasons. Neither of us really knew anyone else who particularly took the same interest, but we were fortunate to have a correspondence that gave us a way to share our joy with each other.

Statis Pro Baseball became a faithful companion throughout those years, and I have many more stories about it. Thinking now, decades later, what captures me the most is how sharing the hobby helped me make a good friend. People inevitably drift out of our lives, as he did when his visits ended and we finished high school and went off to college. I wonder if he still has his game in his garage, too. I’d bet on it. Bonds like these don’t break.

Categories
Baseball Covid MLB

MLB Suspends Wrong Guys

Major League Baseball hasn’t had a banner week, despite managing to open its shortened season three-plus months into a worldwide pandemic. The strategy of trying to play games while covid-19 cases and deaths continue to mount in the United States remains to be fully tested, but a major outbreak among the Miami Marlins forced games to be postponed and schedule shuffled.

The worst case scenario didn’t unfold, yet. There hasn’t been a player or coach to suffer severe illness from covid, and if other teams aren’t affected by the virus spreading, the protocols might even hold.

So while MLB waits for the tests to show if the damage has been contained, they found a way to remind us how much potential they still have to mess things up somehow. Today’s suspensions of Dodgers pitcher Joe Kelly for eight games and manager Dave Roberts for one game took a bad decision and compounded it with a worse one.

To recap, the league found that the Houston Astros cheated throughout their 2017 championship season, which culminated in a World Series victory over the Dodgers. MLB issued harsh punishments to the Astros’ front office and manager, one-year suspensions that essentially could end careers. 

But they promised all the players immunity in exchange for revealing the details of the cheating program. So no player received any kind of punishment, and the team kept its title. The Dodgers, among other teams, were decidedly less than thrilled with that outcome.

Cut to the much-delayed 2020 season, in which the Dodgers and Astros were not scheduled to face each other originally but had to under the new regionalized schedule that reduced travel. In Tuesday’s 6th inning, relief pitcher Kelly appeared to struggle with his control and threw several pitches that missed their targets. He threw a few pitches that came close to hitting Astros but didn’t, and he also threw a few that didn’t come close to anything.

 

Let’s note this is the same Joe Kelly whose April video on Twitter showed him breaking windows in his house because his backyard pitching was so inaccurate. Do we know if he was just wild or if he intended to put a scare into the Astros? No. Did he hit anyone? No. Did he come really close to ending anyone’s career? No again.

So of course MLB slapped him with a suspension for 13% of the season, something totally out of proportion with the alleged crime. A few years ago Kelly was suspended for hitting a player with a pitch and then hitting him again in the ensuing brawl … and for that he received a six-game suspension. Hmmm.

Maybe you’ll recall in 1965 when the Giants’ Juan Marichal hit the Dodgers’ John Roseboro over the head with a bat? Marichal got 10 games for that.

Also, let’s remember once again that no Astro received as much as a single-game suspension for participating in a cheating scandal for at least a season. Does any of this feel appropriate?

Had Kelly actually hit anyone with a pitch or a fist or a piece of equipment, he would have earned a suspension. Maybe even a longer one. Kelly will appeal, the suspension will probably get cut down a few games, but no one will forget that MLB whiffed on this pitch and hit itself in the head in the process.

Categories
Baseball Jack Bauer Squared Sim Baseball

Games 31-32: Ending Slide, Trading Wins

When you can’t buy a win, you don’t care how you get one. Or who you beat. And after splitting two games with 24 Pack of 24 Distinct Ales, I’m fairly sure both sides feel the same way. 

Jack Bauer Squared came into the interleague series on a 7-game losing streak, and 24 Pack had dropped 9 of 10. So trading wins is a good enough outcome for both of us at this point.

In our game at Olympic Stadium, we rode a 3-run homer by Kal Daniels and 8 innings of 1-run pitching by Bert Blyleven to a 4-1 victory that ended our ugly slide. Bob Woodward made up for his awful extra-inning performance the previous time out with a scoreless 9th for his 8th save.

Game 31

Our visit to Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium to try for a sweep didn’t go quite as well. After taking a 2-0 lead, Teddy Higuera got roughed up for 4 runs in the 2nd inning and we could never regain the lead. 

The 5-4 loss ran our record in 1-run games to 3-9, so our 13-19 record should really be closer to 16-17 at this point. That’s hardly championship material, but it would be less to overcome to get into competition.

Game 32

Next up is a mighty challenge, too. We have to face the league’s best team, Hitmen 24×24, which at 24-8 is ahead of everyone else by 5 wins. Just have to hope we can put together a good series and maybe take two of three and gain some confidence.

Categories
Baseball Jack Bauer Squared Sim Baseball

Breaking News: Streak Ends!

Jack Bauer Squared snapped its 7-game losing streak! Details to come!

Categories
Baseball Jack Bauer Squared Sim Baseball

Games 29-30: The Skid Hits 7

What’s this, Dear Reader? You’ve returned for more suffering? Let’s cut right to the chase. We lost another two to run our losing streak to seven games. Did it matter that we were facing an equally struggling team? Why of course not? 

We opened this two-game interleague series against 69-92 25 different teams at home, and each team put up 4 runs in the 3rd inning. Again Mike Cuellar was useless, but the headline will be if he ever has a good game at this point.

It was 5-5 going to the 8th, and on came Rod Beck to try to keep it that way. News alert: He didn’t. Shooter got the wrong end of the gun for the second straight game, giving up 5 runs while recording only two outs. His ERA ballooned to 6.75 after being 2.20 just two games earlier. Guess who else has a 6.75 ERA? Cuellar!

A couple runs in the bottom of the 9th weren’t near enough, and we dropped our sixth straight, 10-7.

Game 29

To try to turn the tide, we had to turn to a spot starter, Dave Goltz. Pitchers in WIS can work about 10% more than their real-life innings, so you have to pace them to stay fairly close to accurate usage. My starters have gotten just a bit of fatigue, so Goltz was on hand to fill in a few times through the season just like this.

Bulletin: He wasn’t up to the task. The manager left Goltz in a bit too long, as he gave up 6 runs and 11 hits in 6 innings. Our offense couldn’t do much to help, and a 6-3 loss ran the losing streak to seven.

Game 30

Next up: two games with the team with the league’s worst record (though we are quickly providing competition for that crown). 24 Pack of 24 Distinct Ales has lost 4 in a row and 9 out of 10. Something’s gotta give, and at this point I’d bet on them.

Categories
Baseball Jack Bauer Squared Sim Baseball

Games 25-28: Where Is This Train Headed?

The time has arrived, Dear Reader, to ask which of us likes suffering more. Is it me, for continuing to write my way through a season that is developing into a train wreck? Or is it you, for actually coming back to read about it?

It is quickly becoming time to recognize that this might be a disaster. We might be off the rails and careening through a long, painful process of trying to figure out what went wrong. I’ve committed to the telling of the tale, so hold onto your handrails.

We began a four-game series at $24 and Some Change in Metropolitan Stadium with an 11-13 record and a chance to establish ourselves in the division. Four games later, we left Minneapolis with our tails between our legs, whimpering.

The series opener was decidedly inauspicious. Mike Cuellar once again pitched poorly, and we trailed 9-3 going into the 9th inning. This time he gave up 6 runs and 9 hits in 7 innings, so basically that’s no really good starts and six bad ones in seven tries.

If you play enough sim games, enough unlikely events will occur, however, and somehow we scored 6 runs in the top of the 9th to tie the game. Carlos Delgado struck the big blow, the tying three-run homer. 

And then the game turned into a lengthy slog, staying 9-9 until the 14th inning. After a leadoff walk, closer Bob Woodward (who had been perfect on the season) came in and proceeded to walk the next three batters, forcing in the winning run. Just like that, the comeback was for naught, and we lost 10-9.

Game 25

Seven strong innings from the man leading our pitching staff, Teddy Higuera, put us in good position in the second game of the series. But the bullpen, so recently a strength, couldn’t hold the lead. Joe Sambito gave up two runs in the bottom of the 9th, and we lost our second straight on a walkoff and again a one-run loss, this time 3-2.

Why did I pick this team to chronicle again? Sigh.

Game 26

Forget about the bullpen being a strength anymore. Even when the offense picks up, the pen is finding ways to let us down. Desperate for a win and clinging to a 3-2 edge, Rod Beck took the hill for the third straight game but finally faltered. 

Beck allowed 4 runs in the 7th to put us behind 6-3, yet we had another comeback in us with a 4-run rally in the 8th to go back in front. But with our best relievers tired, we turned to a couple of long men to hold the lead and they couldn’t do it. $24 put up 3 more in the 8th and held on to win 9-7. 

Game 27

Desperate to avoid the sweep, we instead fell flat. Burt Hooton got roughed up for 8 runs and yielded three homers, and our losing streak stretched to five with a 9-3 loss. 

Game 28

Nothing’s going right, and we’ve fallen into last place. Is it time to delete this blog and start over with a better team?

Back to interleague play for the next four games, matchups with a pair of fellow last-place teams: 69-92 25 different teams and 24 Pack of 24 Distinct Ales. At this point, we need anything to get back on track before this train wreck of a season goes down the drain. Even the metaphors aren’t working well, alas.

Categories
Baseball Covid MLB

MLB in Trouble Already

Well, that didn’t take long. After a weekend spent joyfully celebrating the return of baseball, Monday hit with a ton of reality bricks. 

The Miami Marlins have reportedly at least 12 players testing positive for Covid-19, plus some coaches. MLB stepped in and postponed the Marlins’ scheduled game in Miami against the Baltimore Orioles. And, since the Marlins’ positive tests occurred in Philadelphia (where they’d been playing the Phillies), MLB also postponed the New York Yankees’ game in Philadelphia.

The next 24-48 hours will give an indication of whether this is a hiccup or a collapsing season. If testing shows the impact has been contained, the Marlins can dip into their pool of 60 available players and resume playing once permitted. That’s why each team has a larger-than-usual 30-man active roster and 30 more available on short notice.

But it’s easy to see the whole house of cards falling down. Postponing more than a couple of games can create scheduling nightmares in a season with few off days already. Much worse, we could see an expanding outbreak that renders teams unable to play or facilities deemed unsafe. And that’s to say nothing of what might happen if someone were to become seriously ill.

This quote in The Athletic today speaks volumes about the situation:

“Major League Baseball needs to be thinking about the Phillies,” Dr. Zachary Binney, an epidemiologist at Emory University’s Oxford College, said Monday on The Athletic’s Starkville podcast. “They have conducted perhaps an inadvertent experiment, but an experiment nonetheless, on whether the virus can be transferred in a game from one team to their opponent. And we are awaiting the results of that experiment. We’ll see that in Philly, I think, over the next three to five days or so. But I think if you want to be cautious, you should probably be quarantining the Phillies as well for the next five days. And that’s extra rough for them because really, they didn’t do anything wrong. But again, it’s the virus that sets the agenda here, and you have to build your agenda around what it’s doing.”

Any sense that continuing to play cannot be achieved safely could start a ripple effect of players and other personnel opting out, and in a very short time the experiment could be over. How many players scheduled to take the field today might already be having second thoughts? “An inadvertent experiment” can’t be the words players want to read today.

Like many others, I got caught up in enjoying the games again the past few days. I started to believe this might just work, being an outdoor game with lots of space between players and precautions being taken. 

If this can’t work in today’s America, though, I can’t imagine how the NFL can pull it off this fall. And colleges? I doubt they ever take the field. Too many people in much too close quarters, way more so than baseball requires.

The NBA’s Orlando bubble experiment gets under way within the week, and though they seem to be taking strong measures to protect the players’ health, that could unravel just as quickly if anything goes wrong. 

Maybe sports is a luxury the U.S. just couldn’t manage because of how poorly we’ve handled containing the virus in comparison to the rest of the world. These restarts didn’t take place during a time when the cases were under control, but rather the opposite, during a spike. Maybe things can still work out, but we won’t have to look far for reasons why if they don’t.