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Getting Started

There are several things to be considered, decisions to be made, and a large amount of prep work to be completed before starting a replay. I wanted to write down the decisions and steps taken to put all this into motion.

Game Play Platform

The most obvious question from an APBA perspective is cards/dice or computer? I really prefer the dice/cards version of the game. I just feel that rolling the dice and keeping my handwritten box scores puts me in the middle of the action. But that is just the gameplay portion of it - the whole records keeping aspect can be quite daunting.

If I was to go this route I would go with the Basic Game (BG), not the Master Game (MG). I already have the BG board modifications I want, plus I just don’t want the extra level of complexity and dice rolls that the MG would require.

Regardless, I have decided to go with the computer game (BBW 5.75). Besides the getting the inherent but automated complexity of the MG, most importantly is that it will do all the stat collection and report production for me. I can set-up the schedule ahead of time, I can still modify pitching graders to my taste, and instead of having cards and papers scattered all over my desk it will all reside in a single container - my computer.

The drawback here is that I might have actually only "played" one or two full games in BBW 5.75. For the past ~15 years I have used micromanagers exclusively to do all this for me in my draft league. I am sure it will take a few weeks of gameplay for me to get the full hang of it - sacrificing, stealing, when to run and when to hold, and so on, that the micromanager currently does for me. (Babe Ruth)

Resources

There has been a tremendous amount of baseball research over the past 25 years and all of this is reflected in Baseball-Reference.com. For every season, not just 1930, there is a treasure trove of information available:

Statistics: https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/MLB/1930.shtml (including batting, pitching, fielding, and more)

For easy research, I have dumped all of these tables into a single spreadsheet. Once that was completed I did the following:
  • Rearranged the first name and last name fields into a single last, first name field
  • Added a column to denote carded designation (CD, XB, XC)
  • I added a number designation to traded players last-name to help track their appearances among the different teams (i.e., Smith1, John)
Most importantly, there is a day-by-day recap of every game, complete with box scores:


This includes the actual starting lineups and pitching rotations for every day, for every game, which will be used as part of this replay.
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