Spring Training

Given that I hadn't really manually played any BBW 5.75 games with the exception of one or two practice games many, many years ago, I wanted to get in a week of "Spring Training" games before I kicked off the replay. This would allow me to re-familiarize myself with the computer game itself, as well as with the ATMgr usage with regards to rosters, lineups, and transactions.

It has all gone very well. ATMgr does an outstanding job of doing what I need it to do. All of the Opening Day rosters were set correctly, the lineups are pulling in and loading correctly, and the daily transactions are adjusting the rosters as expected. It took a little effort to get this set-up the way I wanted initially, but the benefits of that effort are extremely obvious already.

As far as gameplay goes, just clicking on pitch/swing buttons is relatively sterile as compared to rolling the dice and looking up the results on the game boards. The game also includes options and shortcuts for looking up player data when making decisions about actions to take, and I suspect there is still more to learn.

Besides having APBA BBW 5.75 open in front of me when I play I also have:

• The actual game box score from Baseball-Reference.com. I don’t rely on this religiously, but it does allow me to see what non-starters were used (i.e., pinch-hitters, pinch-runners, and relievers) so I am using as a "guide" for gameplay decisions
• Microsoft OneNote, so that I can jot down game notes and observations and what-not
• A spreadsheet that contains a ton of player data pulled from Baseball-Reference.com

In fact, I am so satisfied I have decided to not delete all of the "Spring Training" games and start fresh but to just count them as regular season games and proceed from there. I have played several full days at this point, and every game is a unique event in and of itself, just like a real-life baseball game. I will be providing regular replay updates in the blog, but haven’t made a final decision on how often or to what extent. I am not planning to provide a game-by-game account or even a daily report but perhaps limit my updates here to an end-of-week review (or maybe something somewhere in between).

I am pretty satisfied with the overall look of the blog as well. I might make a couple of tweaks here and there yet, but I like it. I had originally intended to include a link to a players Baseball-Reference.com page when a player name was mentioned and I have done some of that already, but in my previous post, I must have had 90-100 names listed. That's a lot of work to include that many links. I am still considering my options here, but I really do feel like including the links is the way to go. I may just have to do a handful every day until I get this caught up.

The thing I am not satisfied with is my ability to snap decent shots of the Conlon Cards that I am including as artwork in the blog posts. I actually seem to be getting worse at this, if that is even possible. I like the idea of including these pictures though and am going to keep at it, but I may have to resort to perusing the web to find the pictures I want online. The picture included here was found online. (Val Picinich)