Tag: sim baseball

Categories
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. 

Categories
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. 

Categories
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.

Categories
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.