SOM Diary: AL Central opening series KC@MIN

The Kansas City @ Minnesota series continued with a game where batters started to make more contact than in the first game, at least for the visiting KC team.

KC@MIN game 2: 6-2
In game 2, Ervin Santana quickly recovered after giving up two runs in the first, while Kevin Correia labored through 6 innings giving up four runs. Josh Willongham showed his range limitations by conceding two triples to hits to left that younger, faster leftfielders might have had a clean play on. The Twins bullpen gave up another two runs while the Royals relief corps held up well and brought the game to tie the series safely home. Final score Royals 6, Twins 2. Santana takes the win, Correia the loss, the Royals batters contribute a HR and three (!) Triples, while the Twins manage only 5 hits out of 32 at bats and only Joe Mauer continues his work as anon base machine with two hits and a walk.

KC@MIN game 3: 8-1
Game 3 was a pretty lopsided affair. The Royals hit ten hits off Mike Pelfrey and scored seven runs off the starter who lasted only 4+ innings, while the Twins' bats remained mostly silent (the team is batting below .200 as a whole in the three first games of the season). Jeremy Guthrie cruised to an easy win, pitching seven innings and giving up one run on three hits, a walk and seven strikeouts. Billy Butler went 3-for-5 with a two run homerun to get the Kansas City scoring started in the first inning.
They paid a high price for it, though, losing both starting catcher Perez and infielder Getz to injuries. However, the Twins didn't fare any better, losing Joe Mauer in the first inning after he fouled two balls off his foot.

SOM diary: Season Opener - KC@MIN

To get the season started, and to learn how to prepare lineups and rosters in a somewhat historical way, I decided to start with teams I don't know at all (which are actually most teams outside of the AL East ;), and randomly picked KC @ MIN as the series I would play first.

BTW, as mentioned earlier, I had decided to up the Twins' chances by giving them RA Dickey as a starter. This is basically the only unhistorical player assignment I will intentionally make to my 2013 replay rosters for now (given my general penchant for knuckleballers it felt such a shame not to have Dickey play despite running only four teams per division...).

Anyway, both opening day starters went deep into the game after shaky starts: James Shields pitched seven innings, coneding runs in the first and fourth inning, and R A Dickey nearly played a complete (nine inning) game, giving up a two run homer to Billy Butler in the top of the first, adding five 1-2-3 innings and leaving only after giving up two hits in the ninth.

The game went deep into extra innings and ended on a not-so-dramatic note when Royals reliever Chen gave up back to back walks in the bottom of the 12th. Aaron Crow took the loss, Casey Fien got the win with two hitless, scoreless innings of relief.

Josh Thole (brought to Minnesota to catch R A Dickey) actually went 1 for 3. He was replaced by Joe Mauer who went 0 for 1 with a walk in extra innings.

Let's see how the season opening series continues for these two teams...

SOM Diary: Lineups and Rosters for 2013 Replay

After some experimentation I have arrived at the following format to get an overview of each team's roster and some reminders of historical use of the players (how many games played, which position, typical position in the line up). I create these via sheet.zoho.org and intend to use printouts to record the games played and some simple indicators (smilies) for performance (click on the thumbnail to see a larger version):

Initially I wanted to start building these with the SOM cards in hand, but I found that inventing my ownlineups led to very unrealistic results so I ended up using baseball-reference.com to build these sheets and only refer to the actual SOM cards to figure out which players were available at all.

I used the following data available there:

• Team Roster for number of games started per player and position
• Defensive lineups for default starting positions and position players
• Batting orders for a default batting lineup (that's the order in which position players appear on the roster above, and how I sort their SOM cards after each game)
• Lineups linked above, and pitching gamelogs to understand why some players only played few games or had few at bats - were they players brought on the team (or leaving the team) at some point during the season or were they bench players who only got to play once or twice a week all season long?

I will try to use players in their historical roles, rather than inventing my own usage patterns and trades. That's why the roster contains the inetnded number of games each player should get in each position (scaled down from the real 162 game seson to my 33 game season by a factor of 5).

Die ersten Füsilierbataillone komplett

So, die ersten zwei Füsilierregimenter aus dem schönen Repertoire von Grünewald sind geschafft. Es ist ja auch erst knapp vier Monate her, dass die aus der Schachtel herausmarschiert sind :)

Vorne erstes Bataillon vom Füsilierregiment Salmuth (als erstes Bat. mit weißer Leibfahne) und hinten das zweite Bataillon vom Füsilierregiment Hoffmann mit normalen Kompaniefahnen

Die Trommler müsste man aus größerer Nähe anschauen (oder wenigstens aufs Bild klicken um sie größer zu sehen).

SOM Diary: 2013 replay - team selection

I've started thinking more specifically about the 2013 replay with the cards I ordered today (yay!). I've also started to write up some depth charts and charts where I can track each players games played to track performance and make sure I roughly hit the correct numbers of games per player.

Team selection

After some more thinking and reading, and also simply looking at the sheer number of games to be played, I have decided to go for the AL only option 2 in my earlier list. So there will be three four team divisions, dropping the fifth placed team in each:

AL East: BOS, TB, BAL, NYY
AL Central: DET, CLE, KC, MIN
AL West: OAK, TEX, LAA, SEA

Individual "player trades"

In general I will do the 2013 replays without and changes to the player rosters provided by SOM card selections. I will reflect major trades like Peavy or Soriano.

However, when I read the AL 2013 summaries in the Hardball Times Annual 2014, the idea occurred to me to make a few individual "trades".

In addition to trades that occurred in reality (e.g. the Iglesias/Peavy trade for the RedSox mid season) I could help out the worse teams and at least get a look at some of the key players from the fifth placed teams by moving one or two people from the fifth placed teams to a fourth place team with an obvious need.

For example, the Twins (? to be verified) seem to have struggled with below average starting pitching, and on the other hand with the Blue Jays placed fifth I was sad not to be able to run R A Dickey. So why not move Dickey to the Twins, give the Twins a reliable starter with good ERA and many innings pitched and get a chance to see some knuckle balls fly past batters and catchers? I guess he'll have to take Thole with him as a personal catcher - if only to get the passed ball stats roughly right...

I might also look into giving the Yankees some support in the injury plagued infield, e.g. by looking for some good infielders from the Astros or White Sox.

Ankersteine: Getreidespeicher (GK-NS 14)

I think I have now built most of the original models from the Anker sets up to GK-NF 14, so I've started to dabble in other stuff. One thing I wanted to look into was the Neue Serie models released by the company later, today available via the CVA archive at ankerstein.ch.

I started with the grain storage (Getreidespeicher) from the booklet for GK-NS 14. I like these more modern buildings, with different proportions and style than the classical Richter buildings.

However, I quickly stumbled across the many differences between the NF and NS stone sets, started to improvise and towards the end of building had to add a few stones from a surplus set normally used by my son. I think I will continue my dabbling in the NS models with the buildings for set 12 and come back to the models for 14 when I actually have the stones from GK-NF 14A available to compensate for missing or different stones.

Building the model was a lot of fun, though, and it has many characteristics that set it apart from other Anker buildings I've tried earlier.

• the bridge between the small administrative building and the actual storage building (and I always thought that the one in my company's headquarters was a very innovative idea ;)
• the space for a railroad between the buildings, with loading areas on both sides
• the neat little stairs at the end of the unloading platforms
• the strong vertical design with the high walls structured by niches and windows (leading to a rather shaky construction as the window frames and the walls to their sides don't interlace at all)
• the long flat roof over the unloading platform, and generally the nice mix of roof angles to use up nearly all blue roof stones

Overall a very nice project, highly recommended and also nice to show to people who don't know much about Anker buildings to avoid the impression that they are only good for classical castles and churches...

The main walls with the different protruding columns and niches are starting to take shape

First layer of the roof on the main storage building, with the ventilation holes already in place

Side view of the face of the building with the same vertical niche design as the main building front, and the pedestrian bridge over the railway line.

Backside of the building, same facade and roof layout as the front but not interrupted by bridges or other building parts.

My podcast directory

More for my own use as a favorite list, but maybe someone else might also be interested: here's the list or podcasts I listen to more or less frequently.

1. Magic the Gathering

• Limited Resources (high octane limited advice and analysis)
• Judgecast (Judges talking rules and more)
• Drive to Work (the Magic designer Marc Rosewater talks game design)
• Constructed Resources (fledgling constructed derivative from LR)

2. Games in general

• The 2 Halfsquads (the one and only ASL podcast)
• Three Donkeys (Garfield and others talk board games, unfortunately inactive since mid 2012)

3. Sports

• Grand Sumo
• Rasenfunk
• Glubb Podcast

Baseball aktuell

• Just Baseball
• FanGraphs audio content 
• Effectively Wild
• Baseball Rabbi
• WEEI.com RedSox Audio

Baseball outdated

• Rotographs fantasy podcast
• Over the Monster (RedSox fan podcast, apparently season only)
• ESPN Baseball podcast
• Strat-O-Matic (THE baseball strategy boardgame, see my blog diary for more) - very infrequent updates
• Stealing Home (Hardball Times)

4. Tech

• HCP podcast

5. History

• History Extra
• D-Radio politisches Buch
• Newly discovered podcasts to try out: one - two - three
• German language new finds: Geschichten aus der Geschichte - JMU - Tell Me a history