Roger's 1930 APBA Replay

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...

After an exciting 1929 season where the Philadelphia Athletics won the World Series over the Chicago Cubs, both teams are looking to be back in the pennant hunt in 1930. But there are other teams that want to get in on that World Series money, so let's do a pre-season preview of the 1930 season. American League Boston Red Sox (Manager: Heinie Wagner ) 1929: 58-96 8th Place The 1920's were a rough decade for the Red Sox and it doesn't look like 1930 is going to be much better. The 1929 pitching staff did feature Red Ruffing , Milt Gaston , and Danny MacFayden at the top, but it faded pretty quickly from there. The offense didn't pack much punch either, and there doesn't appear to be much immediate hope in the pipeline. The Red Sox are hoping to make some trades to bolster their roster and to see what minor leaguers might help as well in 1930 Chicago White Sox (Manager: Donie Bush )  1929: 59-93 7th Place Similar to the Red Sox, the 1920's we...

L ou 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 C...

After all, 1930 isn't 2018, so what differences in gameplay and strategy do I need to remain cognizant of? Sacrifice Hits In "old-time baseball" the sacrifice hit was used much more than in today's game. While I may not be a fan of this strategy, it was definitely a part of the 1930 baseball season. A quick glance at the final 1930 team stats shows that every team averaged between .94 to 1.25 successful sacrifice hits per game. One successful SH per game per team will have to be the general guideline during the replay. Stolen Bases A quick look at stolen bases attempt (SB) in 1930 shows that each team attempted a steal attempt in about three of every four games. The overall stolen base success percentage was right around 60%. Analytics has shown us that 66% is about the breakeven point required to consider this a successful strategy. It will just have to be something I will have to monitor and account for, including SB attempts that really don't h...

Charles Conlon was a photographer that worked ballparks in New York for much of the first 40 years of the 20th century. Obviously, he took a lot of pictures of New York-based ballplayers, but all baseball teams made trips to New York several times a year, so he was able to get pictures of many visiting ballplayers during these four decades as well. The story of what happened to the negatives of all these pictures is an interesting one worth reading ( Link ). Regardless, The Sporting News ended up with them and in the early 1990's published two 330 card sets and a 110 card set consisting of pictures from Charles Conlon. I purchased those sets at the time, but the promised five-set release never came to fruition, so that's all there is. If you follow the links above you can see there is plenty of legal turmoil around these cards still today - too bad . ( Jack Russell ) I am using snapshots of these cards as artwork to spice up the blog entries. So far my photography skil...

Given that APBA BBW 5.75 is a game it is necessary to note what settings will need to be set and what other gameplay limitations need to be acknowledged. Beyond just settings, it is a matter managerial discretion and limitation to ensure these are used but not abused. Stadiums and Rain-Outs I have installed period appropriate stadiums for all the teams and they have all been set to Domed to ensure we don’t have rain-outs. Actual 1930 rain-outs are already worked into the schedule as is. The stadium's files I have collected are in a semi-compacted format and need to be uncompressed before they can be used: Copy the <name>.DI_ and <name>.IN_ files to a temporary directory Open a DOS window (i.e, a CMD window) CD to your temp directory Use the expand command, as such: Expand <name>.DI_ <name>.DIB Expand <name>.IN_ <name>.INI Copy the newly expanded DIB and INI files to the Ballparks folder where the game is installed Assign...

It is common practice for APBA players do institute some sort of pitching regrades as part of their replay. There are many different systems out there for doing this, but they all require a bit of legwork, a spreadsheet (hopefully), and a way to manually update the pitcher's grade in the player's database. The August 1990 APBA Journal included an article named " New Way to Make Weighted Average Pitching Grades for Master/Computer Game ." This process is broken down into a step-by-step process below. The best and easiest way to get the basic pitching stats into a spreadsheet is to go to http://baseball-reference.com , search for the season you are looking for, and dump the pitching stats into a spreadsheet. This would be the time to perform any maintenance on the data (Hint: convert thirds of innings from .1's and .2's to .33's and .67's - it will make the math later much better) You will most likely want to grade the NL and AL pitchers by the leagu...

The intent is to keep players as close as possible to their actual usage as during the 1930 season (plate appearances, game played, innings pitched, complete games). Trades will occur as they did during the season, as will debuts and final appearances. Although injuries are reflected in the actual lineups, I try to document what I find out along the way. Actually, replicating the actual lineups used solves most of the player usage issues, especially for multi-positional players. Players I recently purchased a new copy of the 1930 Season Disk. It happens to match identically the 1930 Season Disk I purchased ~25 years ago, so that was a bit of a waste. They both come with 400 "carded" players, which means there are 93 un-carded players. Once installed the usual activities are required - set-up a season, get the players on the right team for the beginning of the year, put players on the farm as appropriate, and begin play. Actually, there are several other steps tha...

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 w...

I am going to do a replay of the 1930 baseball season using APBA Baseball for Windows . If you are reading this I am assuming you are familiar with the APBA baseball game, the concept of doing a full season replay, and baseball in general. If not, suffice it to say that, yes, I am going to replay an entire baseball season from 85+ years ago. APBA Logo I know that Google , like Facebook , has kind of queered itself in the marketplace with its misplaced privacy policies and its decisions to become involved in the filth of politics in general. However, I have used Blogger previously, am familiar with its quirks and foibles, and at free I can't beat the price, so I am going to stick here for now. There will likely be tweaks made to the blog layout, especially at the beginning, and as I figure what I think works best. The initial intent is to walk through and document my set-up procedures (what I call Week 0 ), if for nothing than my own benefit. From there I...