SOM Diary: first five game days

Days 1/2: two game series to get started

AL East: BOS@BAL 3-0, 3-5; NYY@TOR 0-2, 3-0
NL West: SFG@LAD 4-6, 10-4; ATL@CIN 1-0, 8-7

Day 3-5: first three game series

BOS@NYY 3-8, 5-1, 4-1
BAL@TOR 6-1, 4-5, 1-2
SFG@ATL 6-4, 2-7, 5-6
LAD@CIN 5-6, 4-2, 3-10

Standings after five days

AL East

#	Team	W-L	Win %
1.	Boston	3-2	.600
1.	Toronto	3-2	.600
3.	New York	2-3	.400
3.	Baltimore	2-3	.400

NL West

#	Team	W-L	Win %
1.	Atlanta	4-1	.800
2.	Los Angeles	2-3	.400
2.	San Francisco	2-3	.400
2.	Cincinnati	2-3	.400

Batting Leaders so far (AVG/OBP/SLG)

Wade Boggs (BOS) 500/619/812, 2 3B
Willie McGee (SFG) 500/500/682, 1 HR
Eric Karros (LAD) 474/450/632
Terry Pendleton (ATL) 409/409/909, 3 HR
Brady Anderson (BAL) 400/435/600, 1 HR
Will Clark (SFG) 389/476/833, 2 HR
Barry Larkin (CIN) 381/409/714, 2 HR
Dave Anderson (LAD) 375/444/1500, 3 HR
Mitch Webster (LAD) 375/444/750
Joe Oliver (CIN) 364/364/455
Mike Felder (SFG) 357/400/429
Chris Hoiles (BAL) 357/357/857
Jeff Blauser (ATL) 350/391/500, 1 HR


Coming next: another three game series, then the four days of interleague play.

SOM Diary: First observations

Even after playing only 10 or 20 games, I've already learned a lot about Strat-O-Matic in particular and about managing a baseball team in general.

Regarding Strat-O-Matic play,

• Overall it is remarkable how SOM games lead to wild swings in results, close games and not-so-close games, and individual hot and cold streaks for players. All this despite the fact that SOM players do not really change over time - the cards are always the same. It really makes you appreciate how much of actual baseball results are really just due to statistics and randomness, not due to real variations in the players' ability.
  
  On the other hand, this means that all attempts to keep tabs on players day-to-day performance, and adjust line ups and bullpen roles accordingly, are fun to do and make things feel more realistic, but are actually unfounded in reality. In the real game, a manager can and should observe how well players are doing and change team setups based on his observations, but in SOM any such changes are just for fun without a basis in actual player potential on any given day.
   
• I need some notes on how players are doing from game to game. I've started putting post-its on the player cards to track unusually good days for batters, when and how successfully I used pinch hitters (esp. in the NL) and, most of all, for pitchers performance so I get a feel who should be used in which role, especially in the bullpen. Over time I'm discovering more ways to use the iScore player stats to look up such things on the fly, but I think I'll stick to simple post-it notes as well so I can quickly select a potential pinch hitter or reliever from the by just flipping through the stack of cards. 
• Manage lefties / righties matchups: based on the percentage split how often a player faced left handed opponents, I've started to select pinch hitters, sometimes also starting position players. I'm nowhere near doing enough of this, however. I'm starting to mark this on the sticky notes per player...
• I find it hard to reflect things like occasional rest games and injuries. Yes, the player cards have some injuries on them, but so far I've only seen that for position players, and of course at the start of the season everyone is healthy. For the 2013 mini replay I'm thinking of additional injury die rolls for pitchers, and a random assignment of some spring training injuries. I'm sure the 2013 season would have gone very differently for the Yankees without all the regulars on the DL...
• I'm looking forward to playing with cards for the 2013 MLB players - I'll have a much better idea where to use starting and relief pitchers. 

More importantly, regarding real life managing: I notice that so far I've only looked at baseball games from the player's perspective. Playing SOM forces you to think about lineups and player changes in a manager's terms.

• Build a realistic line-up with fast, high OBP guys leading off, high AVG / RBI players cleaning up in position 3-5, the rest towards the end (ok, this is a very basic version, but hard enough to do for multiple teams whose players you don't know)
• The NL is much more interesting and non-trivial to manage, especially regarding pitching changes. You can't just wait for a pitcher to get tired, you also have to make a decision whenever the starting pitcher comes up for the third or fourth time. When starters are doing well, I find it hard to pull them after 6 innings just because they are up to bat again. I'm not watching enough real life NL games to know how real managers tend to handle this.

SOM Diary: Rediscovering Strat-O-Matic

I was reading a very interesting article about the "ancestors" of Magic the Gathering by Richard Garfield. He mentioned Strat-O-Matic with its possibility to mix-and-match player cards or even draft them in a way that resembles real world drafts in the US professional sports (and inspired the limited "draft" play of Magic that I like to lay).

That mention reminded me of the old copy of Strat-O-Matic I had lying around in the basement from I-don't-remember-when-or-where. I dusted it off, found that I don't recognize any but a handful of player names (it's the 1992 edition, long before I started following MLB baseball) but checked it out again.

I clobbered together a few lineups (totally ignoring any historical facts) and tried rolling the dice for a few games. I was immediately hooked to the opportunity to generate games, box scores and statistics with real players.

This year is going well for the Red Sox, and all the teams in the AL East are playing well, so I think I'm going to get the 2013 cards as soon as they cmo out. Until then I'm running a practice round of play in the 1992 season. Here's how I set that up:

Picked 4 AL teams (Red Sox, Yankees, Orioles and Blue Jays) and 4 NL teams (Reds, Dodgers, Braves and Giants), created a small league schedule in which each team plays each own league's team 5 or 7 times (let's see how far I get, I won't finish anyway...) and each team in the other league twice.

Threw together team lineups based on the cards provided per franchise (no drafting, no transfers):
- picked 5 starters to form a five man rotation, sorted them by ERA and W-L record
- picked 8/9 batters as as tarting lineup, again based on ABs and general stats per position
- arbitrarily assigned one reliever with many saves the closer role and normal relievers jobs to all others

I downloaded the iScore app for my Android tablet to do the scoring and statistics, and am very happy how it works so far. The only thing I'm missing is a quick way to aggregate league statistics, league leaders etc. but apart from that it's a very fast way to keep track of what happens (when there are no X-results rolled, a Strat-O-Matic inning can take less than a minute to play).

I'd like to use this blog to keep track of some learnings and developments.