APBA Transaction Manager

Lou Gehrig might have been the original Ironman of Baseball, but even he had games where he got to sit for a few innings. There were a few players that play every day in 1930, but even they were given breaks now and then. Baseball was still a rough and tumble sport, and while players may have always been in fear of losing their job due to injury, day off's were not an unusual occurrence, whether it just be for a day of rest or a minor injury. Even the players who put in 80-100 game players would play 2-3 times a week throughout the season as a part-time starter, a replacement, or as a pinch-hitter.

I already knew that Rogers Hornsby had broken his ankle at some point in late May and missed considerable time. In BBR each player has a Game Log, and by looking at Hornsby's I could see exactly he stopped and then restarted playing again.

This got me curious, so I started going through game logs for every player. For example, Pepper Martin played in six games for the Cardinals. Early in the year? Late in the season? It wasn't his ML Debut, nor was it is ML Finale, so it wasn't specifically noted elsewhere. I was able to identify all of the early season drops, mid-season call-ups or drops, and then late-season call-ups, in cases where it wasn't an ML Debut or ML Finale.

As far as injuries, I didn't want to account for every day off, but I decided that all absences of ten game or more would be noted. I started a list and labeled them as "Injuries," although I really don’t know the real reason they were out. An injury is a reasonable assumption (they didn’t have paternity leave in those days), but I suppose it is possible players could have been shipped out to the minors and brought back. In some cases you could look in the player bio on their BBR page and it might provide a reason as to why playing time was missed (Jack Rothrock broke a leg, Travis Jackson had the mumps, etc.). From a gameplay perspective, since I will be using actual lineups anyway, injuries to starters are more-or-less accounted for anyway, as well as ensuring the subs get their time in at specific positions.

(George Watkins) But I still need to account for the everyday lineups, trades, other known transactions, and now a plethora of injuries. This is a lot of work to do manually throughout the replay.

The APBA Transaction Manager (ATMgr) is a handy utility to use when doing a full season replay. APBA provides a season schedule file in a CSV format, which saves considerable effort in that you won't have to manually enter the basic season schedule. ATMgr takes this to the next level by providing a list of transactions that occurred during the season as well as the actual starting lineups as used during each game and automatically maintains rosters and lineups throughout the entire season:

• The actual starting lineups, including starting pitcher, can be found in BBR
• Transactions include activating or deactivating players from a roster, whether a call-up or a release, a period of injury, or in the case of a trade, dropping players from one roster and adding them on another

Each transaction is date-based so in the aforementioned case of Rogers Hornsby, he broke his ankle on May 30 so he will need to be on the active roster on May 30, but on May 31 he will be moved to the Farm Team. His next game appearance was on August 19 so he will need to be activated on August 19 to be available. As it happened Hornsby broke his ankle in game one of a double-header, so this means he will be one the active roster during game two of the doubleheader, which is the limitation of using a date-based system.

Limitation or not, given the need to initially populate the rosters, account for all the player movement and injuries during the season, and including the additional periods of injuries that I documented, there are 1343 entries in the final transaction file for 1930, and ATMgr will handle all of these for me automatically.

There is a Yahoo Group (ATMgrforBBW) where the ATMgr executables and the lineups and transactions files are maintained. There is also plenty of documentation on using the tool and getting everything set-up. It can be a little tricky to get started, and a bit finicky at times as well, but it really does a good job of double checking names and dates to ensure everything lines up from the begining:

• If a player is already on an active roster and an attempt is made to active him an error will be flagged
• If a player is in the starting lineup on a date but is not on the active roster an error will be flagged
• It will also want to verify name differences - are Charlie Gehringer and Charley Gehringer the same person?
• It will also verify that if a player is listed in the lineup at a position that the player actually does have that fielding position assigned to him
• I am sure there are more checks, but these are the ones that popped up for me. I had added a bunch of injuries to the transaction list and several additional tweaks were required to clear this up

Next step? I suppose I am ready to actually start, but I am going to play a few "spring training games" to ensure I am using ATMgr right, ensure the APBA setting are correct, and just to make sure I haven't overlooked anything.