Tag: stadiums and ballparks

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Baseball Jack Bauer Squared Sim Baseball

Games 21-22: A Glimpse of the Other League

Sim League Baseball’s standard schedule uses 24 teams divided into two leagues and six divisions, with four teams per division. You play each team in your division 14 times (42 total), and each of the other eight teams in your league 12 times (96 total). The other 24 games are brief two-game series with each team in the other league (one home, one away). You only get a taste of interleague play.

My interleague schedule began with P Niek! at the Disco (praised in an earlier post for that name), and we will get to see six of these teams over the next 19 games. And that will be it, unless we are fortunate enough to get to the World Series.

Mike Cuellar made his sixth start of the season and though it was actually one of his better ones, that’s not saying much. Cuellar gave up 4 runs in 8 innings, but his ERA actually dropped to 6.64. Only one of his starts has met the criteria for a quality start (3 runs or fewer in 6 innings or more), and only barely met those minimums that time. For a second-round pick, he sure isn’t doing what I need.

Meanwhile, our opponent’s namesake Phil Niekro had his famed knuckleball working and pitched into the 9th inning en route to a 5-2 win. 

Game 21

Our one trip to Comiskey Park followed, and Teddy Higuera put up another excellent performance with 6 shutout innings to improve to 4-2. Ryne Sandberg continued a hot stretch with 3 hits, including a pair of run-scoring triples, as we returned the favor with a 3-1 victory. 

Game 22

This put us at 10-12, one game back in the division. Still pretty early to know if this team is just going to be average or has a chance to make a good run, though. Our next short matchup in interleague play is against Three Rivers Blues, who sit at 11-11. They’ve given up the most runs in the league and also have one of the top offenses. 

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Baseball Jack Bauer Squared MLB Music Sim Baseball

What’s In a Name?

Why is this team called Jack Bauer Squared? I shouldn’t assume the references make sense to everyone.

The unique structure of this particular theme league called for owners to draft exactly one player from each of 24 franchises and disperse them across a 24-year span from 1969 to 1992. This meant that you could not have two players from, say, 1988. Nor could you have two players from the Dodgers or Yankees or anyone else. Only the “original” 24 franchises, meaning those in the major leagues as of 1969, were eligible, so it excluded the Colorado Rockies, Arizona Diamondbacks, Miami Marlins, Tampa Bay Rays, Toronto Blue Jays, and Seattle Mariners.

The draft was therefore called 24×24 to represent that each owner had to fill 24 franchise spots and 24 years to complete their roster. The 25th and final player was selected in a supplemental round consisting only of players from the six later franchises and from the years 1993-2019.

For those who were not watching television in the 00s, Jack Bauer was the name of the lead character in the Fox show 24, which followed a counter terrorism agent through a 24-hour cycle of events each season, divided into 24 one-hour episodes designed to appear as if they occurred in real time. 

One other owner took the 24×24 very literally and named his team “576.” My favorite names are “24 Lines About 24 Players,” a very clever song reference, and “A Rod, some Wood and a Big Unit,” playing off the names of three of his draftees whose names and nicknames have something distinctly in common with something totally different. 

Shoutout also must go to “P Niek! At the Disco” for combining a key player (Phil Niekro), music from the era, and a band reference. The owner also placed his team in Chicago’s Comiskey Park, famous for the 1979 promotional disaster Disco Demolition Night, so major bonus points for that.

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Baseball Jack Bauer Squared Sim Baseball

Game 6: Too Much Killebrew

Harmon Killebrew led the American League in home runs six times, including in 1969 when he hit 49. We won’t be the last team he beats up on this season.

Killebrew homered for the third straight game against us and drove in all four runs for Block Chain in a 4-2 victory. We couldn’t score off Frank Tanana until the bottom of the 9th inning, when Bill Freehan delivered a two-run homer to make it a bit closer.

Game 6

Nonetheless, we already had wrapped up our second straight series victory and sit at 4-2. We next head to Chicago’s Wrigley Field for a three-game set against 24 Hours at Wrigley, owned by one of the site’s best. We have our work cut out for us.

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Baseball Covid MLB

Ready or Not, Here Comes MLB

As I launch this blog and get my first set of posts out there, I am watching the Los Angeles Dodgers play a “Summer Camp” game at Dodger Stadium against the Arizona Diamondbacks. The Dodgers have pummeled the Diamondbacks two games in a row and look ready for Thursday’s much-delayed Opening Day.

As much as the game on the field looks like the real thing, everywhere are reminders that what is taking place is as much surreality as reality. Instead of fans in the seats there are cardboard cutout pictures of fans. (I would buy one, but only if I could get my Angels fan coworker on there in a Dodgers hat and a shirt that read “Astros Cheat!” I doubt they’d allow it, and good luck getting him to wear the hat anyway.)

MLB scrapped the original start of the season when Covid-19 started to spread dangerously in March, and teams all suspended their spring training just a couple weeks before the scheduled season openers. That week when one sport after another postponed or canceled games, tournaments, and seasons, all the way up to the Olympic Games, resembled nothing in history. Sports sections shrank to nothing practically overnight.

Much of baseball’s time since was spent with players and owners making news for their inability to agree on the financial terms of playing, and their tone-deaf squabbles cost fans the chance to see more games than we’re scheduled to get now. Massive labor issues remain to be resolved in the long run, but we’ll have time to lament the chasm between the sides after this mini-season wraps up.

A 60-game season represents only 37% of a normal 162-game schedule, so little margin for error remains. Losing 3 games in a row in 2020 would be like losing 8 in a row in any other season. Debate has already started about whether any historically significant statistical performances, like someone batting .400 (which hasn’t been accomplished since 1941), would count in a shorter season.

The much larger question we should all be asking, however, is whether any of this is a good idea. Unlike in the NBA’s “bubble” environment in Orlando, Florida, MLB teams will be traveling from city to city and playing in their home stadiums throughout the 60-game season.  

All this will launch while the United States watches Covid-19 cases mount and mount and hospitals nationwide begin to feel the crunch of being overwhelmed by ill patients requiring critical care. Across the country, cities and states are closing back down to keep as many people home as possible, and just now MLB is attempting to open operations in many of these hotspots. The government of Canada won’t let the Toronto Blue Jays play at home because of mandatory quarantine requirements for anyone entering the country, so a few days before the season starts the Jays have yet to find a temporary home.

We can legitimately ask what might halt this 60-game season (plus the all-important playoffs) before its scheduled finish. A handful of players have already opted out for health reasons, and several more have yet to join their teams because of positive tests. It’s easy to imagine a significant group of players on one team testing positive and having to miss a significant chunk of this short season, with dramatic impact on the standings. How many teams would have to suffer such challenges before many more players drop out or teams find themselves unable to field a healthy roster?

It is all much too surreal. These guys on TV look like they are playing baseball, but it feels like they’re playing a much more dangerous game. 

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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.