Tag: championship

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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. 

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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. 

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Baseball Sim Baseball

Title No. 23

Winning a league championship in Sim League Baseball doesn’t get old. The competition is tremendously good, and since most leagues are 24 teams the odds are just never in your favor no matter how well you build your team. Most players will tell you that playoffs are little more than a crapshoot, where the best teams frequently falter and upsets happen all the time.

So today is a celebration day because I won my 23rd title. I have completed 253 seasons in my just under four years on this site, so I’ve emerged on top in exactly 1 out of every 11 seasons. This ratio is definitely not the best on the site, as a search of several top owners showed they’ve averaged close to 1 title every 9 seasons. 

For comparison’s sake, my division mates in this league have these totals: 9 titles in 95 seasons, 14 titles in 283 seasons, and 2 titles in 422 seasons. My opponent in the World Series has 113 titles in 1,413 seasons (one every 12.5 seasons) and is 14th in site history in championships.

People play for a lot of different reasons and try out different kinds of leagues where the degree of difficulty can vary significantly. Some just love baseball history and exploring the possibilities. A bad record is no indictment, nor is a great record proof that you’re a master either.

I have made the playoffs in 126 of my 253 seasons, reached the finals (World Series) in 46, and converted exactly half of those into titles. There are experienced owners who have so much confidence in making the playoffs they can build teams designed to win once they get there. I’m not there yet; I aim to get there and then hope for the best.