Category: MLB

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Baseball MLB Sim Baseball

One Game Short

Despite winning our final 7 games of the season, my 1997 New York Mets fell one game short of the playoffs in the Cooperstown Historical Replay season. The Marlins held us off 92-70 to 91-71 to wrap up the wild card, and now they’ll try to duplicate the magic that led to a World Series win that year.

It was a good run and I don’t feel like I could have gotten much more out of this team. I drafted 9th last season, and 7 of the 8 playoff teams were ones drafted ahead of me. The only one that wasn’t: the Marlins, of course, who went one pick after mine. 

We are waiting now for the lottery to determine our draft order for picking 1998 teams. By finishing 3 games above the Mets’ real-life win total, I’ll probably be somewhere around the 9th-10th pick again unless I’m fortunate enough to jump into the top 3. 

The 1998 season has a lot of great storyline options and teams that would be fun to manage. Start with the Cardinals and Cubs for the Mark McGwire–Sammy Sosa record home run race and the 114-win Yankees, but there are certainly a few more that would be worthy to take. I have no idea who I’d take if I got a top-three pick, but I hope to have that problem.

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Baseball MLB Sim Baseball

Another Exciting Finish

I have other Sim League Baseball teams going, of course. Thirteen active seasons going right now, in fact.

One of them is my favorite ongoing league, Cooperstown Historical Replay. This league had a couple seasons going before I joined, but it works very simply and appeals to my old board-game mentality immensely. 

The league replays major-league seasons one after another, with each owner drafting a real team and using only the players from that team. It’s as pure a replay as you can get in this sim, but it also somewhat exposes where it can be a little flawed. The hitters tend to feast on the weaker pitching, and the bad teams tend to do really poorly.

But to keep owners motivated even when stuck with a lousy real team, we have a lottery where your chances are based on how close you came to managing your team to a record as good as real life. If you outshine the team’s actual performance, you’re likely to draft in the top few teams for the following season, regardless of how good or bad you were.

We are in 1997 right now, and for the second straight season I’m managing the New York Mets. Just the way it worked out. We are one game from the end of the season, and I’ve managed the Mets to a 90-71 mark and just one game behind the wild card-leading Florida Marlins.

The actual 1997 Mets went 88-74, so I’m on the good side of the ledger. That should get me a top-10 pick for 1998, but right now I’m fighting for that final playoff spot. We’ve won 6 straight to get a chance at forcing a tiebreaker game 163. We’ll have to beat Houston while the Marlins lose to Pittsburgh in the finale for that to happen, but it’s fun to have a chance.

My history in this league is decent enough. I had a great run in somehow managing the Pirates to a World Series title in 1987 and then taking the 1988 Dodgers to the World Series the following season but losing in seven games. As a Dodgers fan, it was special to try to get that team the trophy, since it remains the last time the team won. 

I’ve gotten one team to a World Series since, but these Mets aren’t really a championship contender. We’d still have to win a one-game tiebreaker just to get to the division series, and the team is already pretty fatigued trying to get there at all. Had to go for it, though. We’ll soon find out if our season continues for one more game.

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Baseball MLB Sim Baseball Tournament

My “Juice” Tournament Teams

I’m taking a look at the teams I drafted for Round 3 of thejuice6’s annual tournament for Sim League Baseball. I had seven teams advance to this round of eight leagues, so I had one pick in seven of the leagues, three in the National League and three in the American. Each league includes 15 seasons of baseball history, so this round covers 120 seasons in all from 1899 to 2019.

These are the years and teams I drafted. I can build my 25-man roster out of anyone from these three teams for that season:

  • League 1: 1906 Chicago White Sox / New York Highlanders / Cleveland Naps
  • League 2: 1920 Cleveland Indians / Chicago White Sox / New York Yankees
  • League 3: No team
  • League 4: 1950 Philadelphia Phillies / Brooklyn Dodgers / New York Giants
  • League 5: 1966 Los Angeles Dodgers / San Francisco Giants / Pittsburgh Pirates
  • League 6: 1985 St. Louis Cardinals / New York Mets / Los Angeles Dodgers
  • League 7: 1993 Toronto Blue Jays / Chicago White Sox / New York Yankees
  • League 8: 2013 Boston Red Sox / Oakland Athletics / Detroit Tigers

I picked 9th out of 12 in League 1’s American League draft (1899-1914) and went with 1906 for a strong combination of starting pitchers in Doc White, Addie Joss, and Ed Walsh along with the best lineup combination among the remaining teams when it came my turn to pick. My hitting star will be 2B Nap Lajoie (as in, they named the team for him in Cleveland back then). Don’t expect many home runs on this team, as no one hit more than 3, and the whole league is deadball-era pitching.

I picked 2nd in League 2’s American League draft (1915-1929) and had a very difficult time selecting. The only team off the board was 1927 (of the famed Murderer’s Row Yankees), and the trick is that the league divides between one division of deadball teams (1915-1919) and two once Babe Ruth showed how to excite crowds with home runs (1920-1924 and 1925-1929).

Though some excellent pitching could be found in those teen years, those offenses really were painfully weak. In 1920, I landed a lineup with four sensational hitters: Ruth, Tris Speaker, Joe Jackson, and Eddie Collins, all of whom hit at least .370 that year. Ruth hit 54 home runs, about as many as the rest of my team combined, and it’s hard to turn down that firepower. There’s a bit of decent pitching to go with them, but offensive numbers will be big for most of this league. 

I picked 4th in League 4’s National League draft (1945-1959) and narrowed it down to a few times pretty quickly. The 1950s were pretty awful for pitching, and some of the 1940s hitting was nothing to get excited about either. In this draft, it seemed the teams with a few decent arms lacked any good bats. 

My 1950 group will have good power throughout the lineup, though it slants too far to right-handed hitting and lacks speed. Fortunately this league uses a DH, because I have two second basemen worth putting atop the lineup in Jackie Robinson and Eddie Stanky.

I had the 5th choice in League 5’s National League draft (1960-1974) and had some very good pitching seasons to choose from in 1966, 1968, and 1969. I went with ‘66 for the twin ace starters in Sandy Koufax and Juan Marichal, which should be as good or better than anyone else can field in the league.

That was not a great era for baseball offenses, and few of the teams will have even one truly elite hitter in their lineups. So for me the ‘66 group will have some depth with sluggers Willie Mays, Willie Stargell, Willie McCovey, and Roberto Clemente. My coworker once told me to name my son Willie because it’s the best way to end up with a baseball star in the family, and maybe he was onto something.

For League 6’s National League draft (1975-1989), I had the top choice. In fact, I initially had the top choice of which of all the 16 drafts I wanted to pick first in, essentially making this the top pick of the entire round. That’s actually a lot of pressure, and I didn’t have time to analyze every draft before I made it. 

I did look through historical ranges of pitching excellence and found that the three teams offered in this 1985 grouping (Cardinals, Mets, Dodgers) allowed me to put together a significantly better pitching rotation than anyone else in the era. With Dwight Gooden, John Tudor, and Orel Hershiser, I have three of the four best starters available in the entire range of years. I’d almost call it unfair, but I still have to find a way to build a team around them and win with the burden of expectations. That said, anything less than a World Series with this team would be disappointing.

I traded leagues with another owner who wanted to be in the AL, so I picked third in the League 7 NL draft (1990-2004). This was a really difficult choice, because the great temptation is to take one of Greg Maddux’s insanely great seasons from 1994 or 1995 even if the rest of the team were weaker. I went with 1993, however, because I still get a solid Maddux season to top the rotation along with several good arms right behind him for depth.

With ‘93 I also get a solid lineup top to bottom that stars Mr. Barry Lamar Bonds in his smaller head phase, when he was “just” an MVP but not yet shattering records. We can back up his power with the likes of Fred McGriff, Matt Williams, and Ron Gant to give the lineup plenty of strength.

For my final team in the League 8 AL (2005-2019), I had the 10th pick out of 12, which meant only six possible groupings left by my turn. I went with 2013 because it had the best single SP available in Max Scherzer and a super closer season with Koji Uehara. I also got the best remaining offensive season with Miguel Cabrera, who was actually a little better in 2013 than in his Triple Crown season the year before.

Overall, though, it’s not a great team. Drafting low means if you wind up being competitive that’s a bonus. My hope is just to steer this team to enough wins to advance to Round 4. The more teams I move on, the more chances I have at getting to the final Round 7 where the prizes are. I managed to get one team there last year and made the LCS, so I’d really like to have two shots at least this year. 

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Baseball Covid MLB

MLB Stat of the Day

After 18 games of the 2020 MLB season, outfielder Charlie Blackmon of the Colorado Rockies has 34 hits. He actually had 34 after 17 games but went 0-for-4 Wednesday to drop his average from .500 to .472.

But the most 2020 stat you can imagine (at least so far) has to be this:

Those 34 hits tie Blackmon with the St. Louis Cardinals. The whole team. For the whole season.

Of course, that’s only possible because the Cardinals have played only 5 games due to Covid-19 suspensions. Thursday’s game is suspended as well. By then six teams will have played 20 games. There is no clear plan for how many games the Cardinals will get to play, but they’ll finish way below the target 60 for all teams.

Still, just wrap your head around one player outhitting an entire team any point past maybe opening day, and it just could never happen except like this. Blackmon is crushing the ball, and the Cardinals are sitting around waiting for clearance.

2020 is just off the charts.

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Baseball MLB

Two Baseball Treasures

Over the years I have managed to pick up a few items at yard sales, swap meets, and the like that became some of my favorite treasures. Two of them feature famous baseball players and sit on my bookshelves.

One is from 1946 and I believe is a page from Life magazine. I found it in one of those bins filled with old magazine pages, and only recently did it take on an added baseball significance. 

The page shows a “BASEBALL SHIFT” in which the Cleveland Indians employed a novel defensive alignment against Ted Williams, with the subhead, “Indians try to stop Ted Williams by placing six men in right field.”

The page describes how Williams tormented the Indians in the opener of a July 14, 1946, doubleheader, so they went to the extreme shift in the second game. Amazingly, thanks to Baseball Reference, we actually have these full box scores online, and they confirm the facts of the magazine.

Fans of today’s MLB will no doubt recall that such defensive shifts were virtually unknown until just a few years ago, but today they are extremely common. Pull hitters like Williams would face them virtually every time up today, but it was not a normal strategy in 1946 in the least.

Take a look at that photo and note that Williams still managed to hit a double to right anyway! 

The second baseball treasure is from The Sporting News and dates to 1933, when an 18-year-old phenom showed up for the old San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League. His name was Joe DiMaggio.

Not that The Sporting News got that right. Their “Minors Worth Watching” feature correctly identified the hitting prowess of the 18-year-old outfielder who set a record for the longest hitting streak in PCL history, 61 games. DiMaggio, of course, would later embark on what remains by far the greatest such streak in major-league history, 56 games in 1941. TSN certainly foreshadowed the skills that would make DiMaggio a Hall of Famer for the Yankees in years to come.

But they didn’t quite get his name right, just a little detail that leaped out at this longtime copy editor. They called him “Joe De Maggio.” 

Some good history in this article from MiLB.com on DiMaggio’s amazing minor-league career. Give it a read.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Baseball Covid MLB

What Can Happen in a 60-Game Season?

Because baseball naturally lends itself to an obsession with numbers (and I cannot say for certain whether the game draws me to the stats, or vice versa), even non-fans tend to know the significance of certain milestones like hitting .400 or 60 home runs. As Major League Baseball begins its shortest scheduled season by far this week, announcers and writers have offered a variety of opinions on whether an individual achievement like hitting .400 would “count” in a 60-game season.

I think we can wait to see if anyone gets halfway through this season with a legitimate chance before devoting too much brainpower to that question, but I do think there is a number very much worth thinking about from the outset: 2.7. That’s the multiplier we get from the ratio between a full 162-game schedule and the 60-game Covid-shortened one, so essentially every game “counts” like 2.7 games normally would. Winning 3 in a row is the equivalent of winning 8 in a row in a full season, relatively.

We can use 2.7 to gauge what an outstanding individual performance might look like across 60 games. For instance, 20 home runs would equate to 54 in a full season. In 2019, when players collectively reached record-breaking totals yet again, the highest individual total was 53 by the Mets’ Pete Alonso. 

At the 60-game mark last season, the Dodgers’ Cody Bellinger had hit 20 and wasn’t close to leading the National League. The Brewers’ Christian Yelich already had 25! That’s a pace for 68 in a full season, but he missed 32 games and fell well short at 44.

So we shouldn’t be the least surprised to see someone get to 25 or even flirt with 30 in this short season, because it’s much less difficult to sustain that level of performance for a shorter time period. Hitting 60 homers in a season remains surprisingly rare and hasn’t been achieved since Barry Bonds hit a record 73 in 2001. 

(The 60-homer mark has only been reached eight times in MLB history, in fact. A particularly fun stat is that Sammy Sosa did it three times, more than anyone else, but he failed to lead his league any of those seasons. He finished behind Bonds in 2001 and Mark McGwire in 1998 and 1999. Should they ever re-open bars, you could probably win a good bet with that piece of trivia.)

While individual numbers will certainly catch our attention in this 60-game season, the standings could offer another place worth watching. Will any team win 40 games? Probably so. That’s a 108-win pace, and in the past two seasons three teams have won between 106 to 108 games. 

Don’t be stunned if a team wins as many as 45, though. In 2013, the Dodgers put together a 42-8 midseason stretch. The 1984 Tigers opened the season 35-5. We don’t have to look far for examples of what’s possible in a chunk of a season, which is what this really is.

A team could be equally bad, too. The 1988 Orioles started the season with a record 21-game losing streak. At the 60-game mark, they were just 15-45. The worst team in 2019, the Tigers, went 47-114, and in June and July they were a combined 10-40. They started a semi-respectable 22-33 and then went 25-81 the rest of the way, which would be a 14-win pace in a 60-game season.

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Baseball MLB Sim Baseball

Bad Neighbor League

As I described in my previous post, I won my 23rd title in Sim League Baseball today. The theme for this league was one of my favorites and worthy of some extra footnotes.

The Bad Neighbor League included only MLB teams from 1922, 1932, 1942, 1952, 1962, 1972, and 1982. Owners have to build their 25-man rosters using players from four teams, using at least six players from each team. The catch is you only get to choose two of your teams, and two of your division mates (bad neighbors) get to stick you with bad ones.

As if that weren’t enough, your third division opponent gets to “dagger” any player on your four teams that you cannot use as well as one of the four ballparks you have available to you. Oh, and the roster restrictions and salary cap are very challenging, too. 

So when you’re building the team, you have to work around using a lot of players you don’t want to and fit them in with the ones you do want. It’s a real puzzle, and everyone ends up only partially happy with their team. 

After one of my division mates “gifted” me the 1972 Texas Rangers, who were managed to a 54-100 season by Hall of Famer Ted Williams, I commented that based on the woeful hitting of that team Williams probably spent the season in the dugout daydreaming about his famous hobby, fishing. So of course I had to name the team, Ted Williams Would Rather Be Fishing.

One of my team’s heroes turned out to be a somewhat unlikely contender, considering he cost only about $1 million out of the $80 million allotted. One of the joys of games like this is expanding my knowledge of baseball history and its players, because no matter how long I keep at this I’ll be encountering players I didn’t know.

Frank Biscan pitched for the St. Louis Browns in 1942, 1946, and 1948, totalling only 148 career innings. He was a relief pitcher in an era when that role went to failed starters, a far cry from the specialized role it plays in today’s MLB. In 1942, the season I used, Biscan appeared 11 times for 27 innings and posted a 2.33 ERA. Since the cutoff for having your season used in the sim is 25 innings, the left-hander barely made it.

I installed Biscan as my closer, and he delivered a near-perfect season. He made 36 appearances for me and earned 35 saves in his first 35 tries. Only in his final game did he blow a save, but the team rallied so he earned the victory. Then in the playoffs, Biscan went 7 for 7 in saves, including 3 games in the World Series. He might well have been my MVP.

Another interesting note about Ted Williams Would Rather Be Fishing while I’m at it. The League Championship Series went a full 7 games, and in the deciding game my leadoff batter Wally Judnich of the 1942 Browns hit a home run to start the bottom of the 1st inning. Our ace pitcher, Johnny Vander Meer (most famous for throwing back-to-back no-hitters in 1938, a feat never duplicated), pitched 8 shutout innings, and Biscan finished it off for a 1-0 series-clinching victory.

Cut to the first game of the World Series. Once again, Judnich led off the bottom of the 1st inning with a home run. And once again that was the only run of a 1-0 victory. The odds against winning back-to-back games in that nearly identical fashion, let alone critical playoff games, must be astronomical. As I posted in the league forum, Holy deja vu, Batman!

One of the discoveries you make after thousands of simulated seasons is that you are actually observing many more games than have ever actually been played in the real MLB, so when something really rare pops up it has a great deal to do with quantity. Play enough games, and some remarkable achievements and unusual performances will surely arrive at some point.