Category: Hobbies

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Baseball Hobbies Sim Baseball

Endings and Beginnings

A simulated baseball season played at 3 games per day takes about two months to complete, 54 days for the regular season, plus playoffs. So whether you’re having an outstanding season (as I celebrated in my post on a recent title) or a doomed one (as we are living through with the escapades of Jack Bauer Squared), I have a great deal of perspective on the flow of my various teams.

As of yesterday, the regular season for my six teams in the 2020 WIS Championship concluded, and I have only two of them advancing to the playoffs. Since I won’t be participating in Round 2 (a post mortem on that seems like a subject for a future post), it’s time to get excited about a new group of seasons starting.

A group of five entered in a mini-tournament began play last night, essentially replacing the teams I was managing in the WISC. Counting the two playoff teams remaining, I have 19 active teams for the moment. I check every box score three times a day and adjust lineups as needed. Some teams require constant shuffling, and others basically run themselves, but there is definitely a routine that I manage my day around.

Here’s what that looks like in phone screenshots after a round of games:

I have three more completed rosters waiting for leagues to fill, and all are likely to start within the next week. I’m signed up for a league that’s waiting to fill for its next draft. And inevitably my desire to build new rosters will kick in quickly and I’ll find another intriguing theme or two and enter more. The cycle keeps things endlessly fresh.

I have seven teams entered in Round 2 of a massive five-round tournament put on each year by thejuice6, who runs so many successful themes and tournaments he has his own forum for drafts. His leagues draw a great group of competitive owners and take you on deep dives into baseball history. Last year I made it to the final round and even within one round of the World Series, which is where the good prize money lives. 

I entered seven teams in Round 1 this year and all advanced, and so far I’m on track to have six or seven move on to Round 3. When that round begins drafting, I’ll be able to detail the process behind my drafts and rosters. We are 133 games into Round 2, so that figures to kick in towards the end of the month.

One of my teams in the mini-tournament that just started is entirely made up of players from 1982. If you’ve read my previous post, you’ll appreciate why that was a special draft. I think it deserves a deeper dive soon, in fact, because it connects so many dots. 

The journey here is not a straight line, so enjoy the digressions and tangents as they progress us in a distinctly non-linear fashion. I even have a great story to come about digressions! Maybe two!

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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?

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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.

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Baseball Hobbies Sim Baseball Sim Dynasty

Sim Dynasty: What’s Real Anyway?

Though I initially framed this blog around the start and now flow of a season in a particular game, I am also tracing my history that brought me to today. And a significant chunk of that includes a game I also still play currently.

I first signed up for Sim Dynasty in October 2002 while holding my infant son in one arm and navigating the web with the other. That baby just graduated high school.

Sim Dynasty offers a different experience of building and managing baseball (and football) teams, because owners draft their players, develop them in the minor leagues, then play out their entire major-league careers. Of course, these are not actual MLB historical players we are using, but rather their approximations.

Though there are certainly sim owners who greatly prefer either historical players or fictional ones, I have to observe that at the level of the game engine it simply doesn’t matter. I may refer to the incomparable Sim D pitcher Andy Bomback (more on him to come) or to the performances of Greg Maddux in WIS, but to a simulation all of them are just code bits that contribute information to the decision algorithm that results in an output.

Put them all together and you get games and seasons, and we put names on the statistical achievements and call them Andy Bomback or Greg Maddux. It’s all in fitting with the storylines we create in our imagination. The method of building the teams differs significantly, but what makes these and other great sim games work is that they produce game and season outcomes that mimic reality well enough to keep us coming back.

On one level we certainly must accept that nothing about this hobby is “real,” but the realism exists on a high enough plane that it satisfies the piece of my brain that craves baseball and all its numbers, streaks, championships, and (yes) players. 

Bats or bits, it doesn’t matter. 

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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.