Category: Sim Dynasty

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Baseball Jack Bauer Squared Sim Baseball Sim Dynasty

Quick Updates

Dear Reader, I apologize for a few days’ hiatus in posts as my work schedule and other responsibilities took me away. Here are a few highlights and I’ll try to get us caught up soon.

As of this writing, my Jack Bauer Squared team that I’d basically left for dead early in the second half has somehow managed to crawl within 2 games of first place with 31 games to go. Our division leader is under .500, so that certainly helps!

Another Sim Dynasty season recently wrapped up. We had a furious wild-card race in the National League, and I held off Montreal by just 1 game to make the playoffs. 

But a return to the World Series was not in the cards, as the Chicago Street Hounds showed why they were the better regular-season team and survived a 7-game series to beat us and then went on to win the World Series. We’ve made a big offseason trade to try to make up some ground and get revenge on the Hounds next season, though.

And today is the MLB trade deadline. The Padres are making huge moves to give the Dodgers reason to worry in the NL West. Could we have an all-SoCal championship series played in Texas? Oh, we have to talk about that!

More to come soon!

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Baseball Sim Baseball Sim Dynasty

About that SimD World Series

Dear Reader, I left you hanging with my preview post about my World Series matchup on Sim Dynasty earlier in the week. Alas, it was not yet Brooklyn’s time to rise to the top.

We were matched up against the three-time defending champion Cleveland Badgers, who won 124 games in the regular season to our 106. While we had to battle through a five-team race to get into the playoffs, the Badgers cruised and clinched in August.

In Game 1, Cleveland sent ace Gary Weaver to the mound and he didn’t disappoint. The Badgers cruised to a 6-3 opening victory.

Game 2 was scoreless through 7 innings, giving hope we might pull off the road split if we could just squeeze across a run somehow. Cleveland struck first with a run in the 8th and sent closer Kid Edmondson to the mound to seal it. The Bats rallied to tie, however, and sent it to extra innings. 

In the top of the 10th, we stranded runners on 2nd and 3rd, our best chance to pull off the win. In the bottom of the 11th, the Badgers got a walkoff homer from Pete Ripple to win 3-1.

That sent the series to Brooklyn’s E-Bats Field for Game 3, where Ripple immediately did damage with a first-inning, three-run homer in a 5-run inning. The Bats rallied with a pair of homers in the 2nd and got 4 runs back. But no one scored again until Cleveland tacked on one in the 8th and held on to win, 6-4.

Disheartened, Brooklyn couldn’t summon any attempt to come back in the series. The Badgers put us out of our misery with a 6-0 win in Game 4 and a sweep.

That gave the Badgers four straight titles, and now they’ll try to become the first team to win five in a row. We will try to get back to the Series and thwart that effort if we can.

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Baseball Sim Baseball Sim Dynasty

A Sim Dynasty World Series

Meanwhile over on Sim Dynasty, we have something exciting going on. To recap, Sim Dynasty owners guide their teams through drafts and trades and follow players’ careers season by season, trying to build a great team. The players aren’t real, but they perform statistically quite realistically.

I’ve been in the Tony Conigliaro League since it was founded, starting in the 1950 season. We have reached the 2196 World Series, to be played Wednesday. My team, the Brooklyn Blind Bats, is making its first trip to one since 2184. We lost that one attempting our first four-peat, but we reached five WS in six years. 

It’s a long road back in a rebuild sometimes, and this one has not gone quickly for me. I haven’t paid as much attention to my SimD teams lately as I used to. They more or less go on autopilot all season except when injuries occur and for drafts and such. But I don’t trade as much as I used to or follow the storylines like I once did, in part because I do spend much more time micromanaging my WIS teams. 

My Bats have won 33 titles in 62 WS appearances, the most of any owner. There are actually about 6 or 7 of us who have been around since the outset, which is about 15 real-life years by now. The TCL plays nine games per day, so we cycle through about 15-16 seasons in a calendar year, hence our league date being far in the future by now.

My opponent tomorrow is also an original owner, though he took a brief break at one point before rejoining, so the career stats are split in half. The Cleveland Badgers have 27 titles in 228 seasons, and they are three-time defending champions right now. Twice the Badgers have pulled off a four-peat, and no team has managed to win five straight in our 246 years.

It will all be over in one day, a best-of-seven series. Either it’s my turn to climb back to the pinnacle, or Cleveland makes history again with a title. 

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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.