Category: Sim Baseball

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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.

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Baseball Sim Baseball

A Deck of Cards

I remember sitting in the otherwise empty conference room of my father’s law office in downtown LA one afternoon. I was perhaps 8 or 9, and the only thing I had to entertain myself for a few hours was a deck of playing cards. 

I knew solitaire games, but at some point I tired of them and decided to turn my deck into a baseball game. I did some math to figure out what percentage of the deck should be outs, walks, and different types of hits. And then I started playing a game.

Knowing myself and the era, it was probably Yankees vs. Dodgers. For one thing, my first two World Series memories are of those teams battling it out in 1977 and 1978, and I definitely would have known both teams’ lineups. I can’t remember how many games I played or who won, but I remember flipping over cards to get the results of at-bats, keeping track of who was on base and how many runs were scored, and finding that the time passed quite quickly.

That may not have been the first time simulated baseball crossed my path, but looking back it clearly established that I saw the game mathematically and had the imagination to recreate a game that way. It was like backyard baseball you’d play with friends, but when you didn’t have any equipment or friends or a backyard handy. That would happen a lot over the rest of my childhood.

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Baseball Sim Baseball

Opening Day Win

Opening Day is in the books, and I can only hope it’s a harbinger of what’s to come. Jack Bauer Squared opened the season with a resounding 17-7 victory over Tulo? More Like Too High. Catcher Gene Tenace led the way with 2 homers and 7 RBI, including one of our two grand slams in the top of the 6th inning. Ryne Sandberg belted the first one to chase Mike Norris from the game after giving up 10 runs. 

We also got 2 hits apiece from outfielders Kal Daniels and Garry Maddox, and even pitcher Mike Cuellar got in on the action with 2 hits himself. Cuellar was less than dominant on the mound, however. I might have given him too much rope, as he faded badly in the 7th inning in allowing 5 runs. 

On the flip side of this thrashing, I feel a bit bad for my friend and opposing manager NebHusker. That’s a rough box score to wake up to in the morning, and I’ve certainly been there, too. You never want to see your ace pitcher get shelled, let alone in the season opener.

Game 1

But it’s only one of 162, and we’ll be facing off again twice more in the opening series. Game 2 will be a matchup of Dodgers pitchers from 10 years apart, my 1975 Burt Hooton facing his 1985 Orel Hershiser. 

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Baseball Covid MLB Sim Baseball

Here Come the Seasons

July 18, 2020

The season will start tonight, shortly after 10 pm where I live. I’m writing the season narrative as it unfolds, so this could turn into a description of a championship season or the struggles of an also-ran team. Starting off with a team I already had success with and then going back and writing about it would have been cheating. 

Does this raise the stakes a bit? Sure. Do I wish I’d decided to do this before I started drafting the team in the first place? Sure. But does life normally come at you with direct plans that work perfectly? As in baseball, the unpredictable happens.

Five days from now, Major League Baseball plans to start an abbreviated 60-game season that will run roughly parallel with this sim season about to unfold. Our simulated season will play three games a day for 54 days to reach a full 162-game season, starting July 19 and finishing on September 10, followed by a few days of playoffs. 

MLB will attempt a Covid-shortened schedule from July 23 to September 27, followed by a month or so of playoffs, if all goes well. A lot has to go well, too. The sports world, like the one at large, looks drastically different in 2020. The only place nothing has changed is here on the computer, where games go on unhindered 365 days a year. 

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Baseball Sim Baseball

Anticipating Opening Day

July 17, 2020

Opening Day will be here in just over 24 hours, and soon we will find out if hard work pays off on the field. The lineups are set. The pitching rotation is in place. The relievers know their roles. 

Sometime after 1 am Eastern on July 19, a server in some unknown building will kick around some code and issue the outcome in the form of one complete box score of a baseball game. One I will care more about than I reasonably should, considering it is completely a work of fiction.

Simulated baseball games include no baseballs. No equipment. No hot dogs and peanuts. No umpires or coaches or trainers. Not even players. This “team” I have created only exists in a shared fiction for myself and 23 other owners in this unimaginatively named 24×24 Draft League, but there is ample imagination involved.

Hard work, too. All 24 owners spent hour after hour preparing for and executing a draft process that lasted 20 exhilarating days. There was nothing fictional about the commitment and passion we put into it. 

More than a hobby, this is equal parts competition, entertainment, relived youth, mental exercise, camaraderie, and creativity. It’s an investment of mind, heart, and soul … and about $12.95, too.