Subscribe now

My latest baseball video was actually supposed to be different:

Initially I was planning on doing a fairly major project. I stuck 32 of the best home run hitters since World War II into 1920 in hopes of getting the “rabbit ball” era to blow up.

What I discovered, however, is that including all of these home run hitters caused everybody’s home run production to fall. And I was actually pretty surprised at what I found when I looked into this.

Buy Me A Coffee

As most of you already know, modern computer baseball sims usually come with some sort of era adjustment tool or factor.

The idea here is pretty simple. You’d figure that Ty Cobb would probably have a hard time hitting .400 if he had to play in the 1980s, for example. You’d also guess that someone like Barry Bonds would struggle to hit for power in the Deadball Era, just like the best power hitters of that time struggled.

There’s a somewhat hidden assumption behind all of this that the general level of baseball ability has more or less stayed constant over time. That may or may not actually be true. In fact, there’s really no satisfactory way to answer that question.

I wrote a four part series on that issue about 3 years ago:

The truth, though, is that I’m still on the fence as to whether the overall level of play has increased or decreased over time.

PayPal Donation

But the problem with OOTP is not that the developers think that the modern game is better or worse than it ever was.

Nope - the problem with OOTP is that offensive production (and, presumably, defensive production as well) is limited by the League Total Modifier (LTM) system.

My understanding of this system is a little bit shaky, and there aren’t a lot of great resources out there to explain things. However, what I understand is that the LTM system is designed to keep league statistics as close as possible to certain numbers in order to make the era you’re playing in “feel” correct.

The problem, of course, is that this means there are only so many home runs that can be hit in 1920. And, if you add in a bunch of good home run hitters, the slice of the home run pie the best home run hitters can get winds up shrinking.

This is explained in this old forum post, in response to somebody who had Oscar Charleston playing in the major leagues in 1920. Babe Ruth couldn’t hit 30 home runs in this particular project, and this is how one of the programmers responded:

A well known moderator added to this:

But, of course, this is completely ridiculous, especially if you’re using OOTP for a cross-era play project.

OOTP is the only game I am aware of that uses this kind of system. To my knowledge, every other game will simply “neutralize” the player’s original statistics, and then use an algorithm to convert them to the new baseball environment.

And, of course, the craziest thing about this is that few people even mention it. To me, this is a major problem, and it practically eliminates a lot of the projects I wanted to take on.

The biggest problem is that you would have to change the LTMs by hand as your project advances from one year to the next. There’s no way to simply tell the game to let your league have an extra 400 home runs every season or whatever.

And, of course, having to make that adjustment by hand takes all the fun out of the project. I wanted to see what impact a sudden influx of great home run hitters would have on 1920. It defeats the purpose if I have to input the total number of home runs beforehand.

Anyway, as I said in the video, there are quite a few reasons to be frustrated with OOTP. This particular reason doesn’t get brought up all that often, however. And it’s something more people should talk about.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Believe it or not, there was a time when baseball sims were actually quite mainstream.

After talking with Mike Cieslinski a few days back as part of the Boxscores from the Basement podcast, I became curious to see if I could find mentions of the game in mainstream newspapers.

Sure enough, they’re there - and they go back to early 1985. Check this out:

Even though it’s a local Wisconsin newspaper, an article like this is pretty impressive for a game that hadn’t even been released yet. And there was more throughout 1985.

Buy Me A Coffee

This scan isn’t quite as crisp and readable, but it’s another interesting article:

Cieslinski’s love of dropping big names was pretty well established as far back as the beginning of his game, as you can see here. And apparently Dennis Martinez has been associated with Cieslinksi’s prodcuts for over 40 years now.

PayPal Donation

Anyway, there are a few other interesting old articles here and there, including a mention in this holiday gift list in a random South Carolina newspaper:

The “Whatever, check it out” sentence isn’t exactly a glowing endorsement. However, it’s always a good sign when you’ve got your product description and your order number in newspapers around the country.

And, finally, I found this mention in a very mainstream newspaper:

Yeah, I think “it’s more exciting than bowling” is a pretty accurate sentiment.

Anyway, this goes to show you that the baseball sim world wasn’t always some bizarre and esoteric pastime. There was a time when this stuff was a bit more mainstream. And I still think we can get there again.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

About 20 years ago, Diamond Mind Baseball was purchased by a young businessman named Dayne Meyers.

If you’ve been around this blog for a long time, you might remember this post:

You also might have seem my very old video on the subject:

After purchasing the company from Tom Tippett, Meyers’ original plan was to discontinue the PC version of the game and try to funnel all players into Diamond Mind Online, an online-only collection of draft leagues that became incredibly controversial in the community.

I’ve honestly never played Diamond Mind Online, and can’t tell you much about what the experience is like. I believe it was originally limited to drafting Diamond Mind’s famous All Time Greatest Players disks, though I presume that the game has since included the ability to draft specific seasons.

Buy Me A Coffee

Now, the reason I bring all of this up again is because the latest trend in these games is actually towards online only play. However, I’m not convinced that this is a vindication of the Dayne Meyers approach.

During a recent Boxscores From The Basement live stream, we had an interesting discussion with Mike Cieslinski, CEO of Design Depot Inc. and the man who created Pursue the Pennant and Dynasty League Baseball. And the discussion we had with him was pretty interesting; in fact, it’s really worth watching the entire stream if you’ve got a few hours:

The Dynasty League Baseball board game still exists, and is actually better than ever, since the famous ballpark diagrams have returned:

However, it’s clear that most of the business is focused on the computer game, which is now strictly online only.

Cieslinski explained in our livestream that the company took the online approach in large part to cater to draft league players. And he’s correct: it’s a lot easier, faster, and more reliable to see the latest standings and statistics if you don’t have to worry about sending backup files back and forth after every single game.

PayPal Donation

Of course, the drawback is that you have to pay for a subscription to either play in a league or to complete a solo computer-based project, something that is more expensive than just buying a computer game.

This is part of a trend that is growing in the community. APBA Go might not necessarily be ready to do away with the now dated APBA Baseball For Windows, but it’s clearly the direction of the future for the company. And, while I haven’t played Strat-O-Matic Baseball Max quite yet, it’s clear that the company’s future development will also be centered on subscription based online play.

Now, there are significant benefits that come from the online only approach that we shouldn’t overlook. You can play these games on any device and under any operating system. In other words, if you’ve got a business trip or vacation coming up, you can use some of your down time to make progress in your replay even if you’re away from your central machine.

And the benefits for draft league play are simply amazing. There’s no need to send files in to the league’s commissioner, and there’s no need to use third party tools to connect to other IP addresses.

I mean, even a game like OOTP, which you’d think would be very well suited to draft leagues given its focus on the GM aspects of baseball, winds up requiring extra tools and a lot of hoops to jump through. This Reddit post is a pretty good explanation of what is involved. And, while it’s clear that at least part of OOTP’s team wants gamers to focus on its freemium Perfect Team game, the reality is that OOTP still has a very strong traditional draft league scene.

But, of course, OOTP’s draft leagues would be a lot easier to play if everything took place on a central server and you no longer had to email files back and forth to your Commissioner.

Anyway, what do you think? Are these online only modes the wave of the future? Does that vindicate Dayne Meyers, who we used to refer to as “He Who Shall Not Be Named” on the forums? Or is the subscription system an unfortunate trend that will do more harm than good?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Check out my latest video here:

This was a relatively quickly played 15 season project with the Colorado Rockies. As I explained in the video, I gave the 1993 Rockies young versions of Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, and Hank Aaron, mostly to see how ridiculous the team could become.

We were able to create quite a bit of ridiculousness. However, even though this wasn’t really a “serious” project, I still learned a few interesting things about baseball in general and OOTP in particular through the process.

For instance, even adding three surefire Hall of Fame players to your roster isn’t going to be enough to get you to the top.

Buy Me A Coffee

One thing that these baseball replay projects have taught me over the years is just how important the so-called “marginal” players really are. This is particularly true in OOTP.

If you’re playing OOTP seriously, the right way to do it is to largely ignore the star ratings and to focus instead on the so-called five tool ratings, which is really the heart of OOTP’s rating system.

If you look around, you’ll discover that some players are underrated by the game’s internal scouting system. In particular, there are some pitchers with Major League stuff, or something close to Major League stuff, that can pitch quite effectively for you if you give them a chance.

This is extremely important to remember in OOTP, since the financial part of the game largely outweighs the on-field performance of your players. Your goal is largely to be as competitive as possible without destroying your budget, which is a lot different from your standard baseball simulation experience.

PayPal Donation

The other key lesson I learned is that free agency can be perilous at times.

Most sports management games are a bit more lenient when it comes to free agent signings. Football Manager, for example, will usually give you a way out if you want to get rid of a 30 or 31 year old player with a heavy contract who isn’t performing well at all.

Part of the issue in OOTP comes from the way that American sporting contracts work, of course. Unlike sports in most of the world, contracts in American sports tend to stick with the player as they go from team to team. And so, if you wind up paying $13 million a year for a declining Roberto Alomar in the early 2000s, you’re going to wind up with a player who you simply cannot get off your books.

I guess it’s the Bobby Bonilla effect. And, even if you know all about it, it’s honestly hard to keep the downside in mind when you feel excited about signing a future Hall of Famer who just so happens to be in his prime.

Anyway, I’d love to know what you guys think about all of this. I’ve got more content coming up in the near future about OOTP - some positive, and some somewhat critical. Stay tuned!

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

I might regret “scooping” myself like this, but I’ll do it anyway.

I’ve been playing a lot of OOTP lately. To be clear, I’ve been playing OOTP 26, mostly because I presume that OOTP 27 is still in its initial buggy stage just like all the previous games.

And, well, I’ve discovered a huge bug.

The bug looks something like this:

Apologies for the hard to see image; OOTP’s awful font size is one of my many complaints.

If you look closely, you’ll notice that the Chicago White Sox have 64 men on their reserve roster in January 1923, in addition to 25 men on their active roster.

This shouldn’t happen - and it’s driving me nuts.

Buy Me A Coffee

I’m currently doing a 1920s project with fully independent minor leagues and no racial restrictions. I’ve also turned on free agency, and am at least hoping to have a vibrant world where teams have to decide between holding on to good young talent and going after experienced veteran players.

However, my save seems to be pretty much broken because of this bug.

I’ve set things up so that each team has a 25 man roster and a 10 man reserve roster. Unfortunately, OOTP doesn’t allow teams to not have a reserve roster. This makes no sense to me, since baseball in the deadball era literally had no reserve roster and no farm system. I’m sure there’s some sort of logic behind this somewhere, though I honestly struggle to understand why things have to work this way.

Anyway, in theory a team could have up to 10 men on the reserve roster, which means 10 promising rookies. It’s not great for creating a vibrant free agent and trading market, but, hey, at least it’s something.

Except for one problem. The game simply doesn’t adhere to the reserve roster limit.

PayPal Donation

Now, most OOTP saves don’t even run into this problem. Modern era saves (i.e. 1946 to the present day) tend to include complete farm systems for every team. This means that teams can’t stockpile 60+ cheap rookies on the reserve roster despite limits that the game is supposed to enforce. Instead, teams stockpile a bunch of worthless looking players in the minor leagues, which is where you can find those occasional diamonds in the rough.

However, if you’re playing OOTP 26 (or OOTP 27, per the replies to this thread) and you want to try your hand at a save from the 1920s or earlier, you’re out of luck. If you include the minor leagues because you want to mess around with Negro League stars, you’ll discover that there are no reserve roster limits regardless of the settings you use. And, well, it means that you’ll have a bad free agent class from year to year, and teams simply won’t ever be willing to give up young talent no matter what kind of players you offer.

OOTP gets a lot of praise from the sports management community, and for good reason. However, this problem is infuriating, and makes me wonder why I spend any time at all messing around with the game.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

I’ve heard a few questions from people recently about what co-op replays are, and why in the world anybody would want to do one.

Now, I should start off by noting that I’ve actually never been part of a co-op replay. I’m familiar with them, however, and I know that there are a number of them going on in various specific gaming communities. It’s a great way to dig deep into a replay without having to play every single game, and can help you finish projects faster than you normally could playing every single game.

I’m not convinced that the co-op replay idea originated in the APBA community. However, the earliest references that I’m aware of seem to come from The APBA Journal in early 1986:

This was written by the immortal Howard Ahlskog, the man who saved The APBA Journal and revolutionized the publication. I’m not sure if the idea was his or not. However, the fact that they could even organize this sort of thing in the age before internet communication is pretty impressive.

Buy Me A Coffee

Now, if you’re used to playing for keeps, you might wonder what in the world the point is.

The problem, of course, is that somebody would wind up managing the awful 1957 Washington Senators. The Senators were 55-99 that season, and the only thing you’d have to play for with that team was trying to avoid that magic 100th loss.

In fact, Ahlskog mentioned that in bold in his article:

Of course, the 1957 replay I really want to see is the one where the Senators somehow manage to win it all.

Anyway, as surprising as this might seem to you, the 1957 co-op replay idea was hugely popular. In fact, it was so popular that they set up two replays that ran at the same time:

PayPal Donation

Anyway, if you’re curious, the first group finished the entire replay in time for the September 1987 issue of The APBA Journal:

The Yankees won the first two games of their World Series, but the Braves then won four straight. I’m not sure if they played the World Series in person or not.

There was a second group that replayed this season, though I haven’t been able to find their report in old issues of The APBA Journal. There’s always a chance that they gave up on the project.

Interestingly enough, a third group completed a project with the same season, which was published in January 1988:

This time around the organizers had every manager play their own World Series replay:

Anyway, the co-op replay concept was popular for a while in the late 1980s. However, the increasing popularity of the computer game, and, in paticular, the advent of StatMaster and MicroManager made the co-op replay generally relevant.

People still play these today, however. It’s a great way to dig into a past season using the cards and dice without bogging yourself down with hundreds upon hundreds of games.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

This old issue of The Sporting News probably doesn’t seem special to you:

If you’re a fan of APBA, however, this issue is actually quite interesting.

For years, J. Richard Seitz had carefully concealed the fact that his APBA game was really just an extension of an earlier game called National Pastime.

There were occasionally hints here and there that APBA was based on some kind of game that Seitz and his friends had played when he was young. Though APBA’s official statements indicated that the company’s name didn’t stand for anything, a few facts about the game’s past started to slowly creep out of Lancaster.

Buy Me A Coffee

I went over a lot of this a long time ago in videos like this one:

There are also a number of posts on this blog about the history of APBA and National Pastime, though they are pretty old and might be a little bit difficult to find.

The rumors of National Pastime swept through the baseball sim community in the early 1970s. They were pretty hot and fierce rumors, and there wasn’t much more that APBA could do than admit that the game was based on an earlier, long forgotten baseball sim.

And the cat finally came out of the bag with this Bill Madden article:

PayPal Donation

I believe Bill Madden’s column was normally focused on baseball card collecting. Of course, back in those days the few baseball card hobbyists that existed knew all about APBA and Strat-O-Matic, and both games were considered collectibles just as much as any of the more traditional baseball cards.

But the key here, of course, is APBA’s claim that National Pastime was “never any secret.”

I’ve got a feeling that most people who grew up with APBA in the 1950s and 1960s would disagree.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

If you’re around my age, you probably played Bases Loaded on the NES at some point in time.

What you likely don’t realize is that the North American version of the game is actually severely stripped down from the Famicom original.

The problem is audio - and, in particular, the fact that Nintendo valued its precious lockout chip more than giving the NES the ability to use external audio chips. And the difference between the two versions is pretty stark when you dig into it:

But video games aren’t the only baseball games where audio really matters.

Buy Me A Coffee

As you probably know, I tend to spend a lot of time these days playing Diamond Mind Baseball.

Diamond Mind Baseball has no sound whatsoever. It’s really a read-it-and-imagine kind of baseball sim. And even though the written play-by-play commentary is simply incredible, it actually pales in comparison to games that feature at least some kind of sound.

Actually, I realized just how important sound is for baseball sims a few weeks ago, when I stuck together this video on the history of APBA Baseball for Windows:

The “Broadcast Blast” feature was unique and a major selling point - and, interestingly enough, I don’t think any competitor has ever come close.

PayPal Donation

Now, most of the bigger games on the market these days have at least some sort of audio option.

Some games, like OOTP, offer the ability to change audio files, though OOTP doesn’t exactly do a great job at explaining just how this can be done. In fact, it’s so confusing that I slapped together my own video on the subject almost 2 1/2 years ago:

But what do you think? Does sound make a huge difference in your baseball sim experience? Should more games try to imitate the Ernie Harwell broadcast of APBA Baseball for Windows? Or is it overrated?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

While doing research on my latest video on the rise and fall of APBA Baseball for Windows, I came across this brief article:

This article is significant for a few reasons.

Buy Me A Coffee

First of all, this is one of the last articles about APBA’s Baseball for Windows to appear in any mainstream media publication.

I’ve been able to find a few newspaper mentions of APBA after 2007. However, most of those newspaper articles are about memories that people had from playing the game decades earlier.

Of course, the second reason this article is significant is because this project never actually took place. To my knowledge, Pete Van Wieren was never actually recorded for a future version of APBA Baseball for Windows. In fact, I believe that the project got caught up in the programming stage when the people working on it realized that the source code was a bit more complex than they thought.

PayPal Donation

However, that’s mostly conjecture on my part, thanks to years upon years of reading posts on the APBA Between the Lines Delphi forum.

Does anybody know anything more about this? I’d love to know.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Growing up in an APBA household was like growing up with a second religion.

I don’t know how to explain it. I spent hours of my childhood reading through old pages of The APBA Journal. I used to look forward to the professionally printed APBA catalogs that started to come sometime around 1993, and I can remember reading through one of the old style mailing lists advertising the 1986 season that my dad had for some reason or other.

And so it’s been kind of hard to go back through the pain and frustration of APBA in the late 1990s.

Buy Me A Coffee

While I was thinking of something interesting to write to accompany this video, I thought at first that I should show at least some of the many sources I cited.

I’ve shown some of them in prior posts, such as this one featuring old reviews of the APBA DOS game:

However, as interesting as the old articles might be, I thought it might be a bit more interesting to share the more personal side of this story.

My first exposure to the world of APBA on the computer came sometime around 1994 or 1995, when my dad bought a discounted copy of version 1.5 of the DOS game at some computer store.

It was on sale, as I remember, and probably didn’t even cost him $10. This was the retail version of the old APBA DOS game, the one that came only with a single disk that included both the game and the 1991 season.

I spent hours playing it, and probably wasted a lot of dot matrix ink and paper printing out boxscores from individual games. I learned how to use the old DRAFT program and would put together my own teams pretty much at random. I wondered about going through the process of actually playing a replay, but realized that it would be really hard to come up with my own schedule, and that it wouldn’t be much fun without a program to keep the statistics as well.

These were the early days of computing, of course. There was no Retrosheet, much less any Baseball Reference. It really wasn’t until sometime in late 1995 that I learned how to use Telnet to access what little of the World Wide Web existed at that time.

PayPal Donation

Anyway, for years I had to make do with the old DOS game. It wasn’t until sometime around 1999 that we had a family computer that was even capable of playing Baseball For Windows. And, by that time, Baseball for Windows felt somewhat antiquated.

I do remember a few things about the old days of the APBA community, however. For example, before APBA released the 1998 season sometime in February 1999, there were numerous fan created versions of the disk that spread online. I think you can still find some of them if you look hard enough.

It was sometime in early 2002 when my dad and I decided to leave APBA behind and give Diamond Mind Baseball a try. This is around the time APBA stopped selling old season sets and disks, and it feels like there was a major communication breakdown between the company and all of the old time fans.

And, frankly, I haven’t really looked back since. Making this video was the first time I’ve touched Baseball For Windows since early 2002.

It’s still a good game, even in the old 32 bit format. But, after thinking about it for a while, I really think the APBA Game Company needs to move on.

The problem with Baseball For Windows isn’t just the fact that there are hundreds (perhaps thousands) of homemade season disks out there that are just as good as anything APBA can create for the program. No - the real problem is that it brings back a lot of bittersweet memories, including a lot of memories about company bankruptcies and the disintegration of a once vibrant fan community.

I didn’t mention this in the video, but the trip we made to Lancaster back in summer 2001 was actually a huge disappointment. We thought it would be like traveling to Mecca. Instead, the staff at the company was rude and dismissive, and we felt like our presence was intrusive or even offensive to the people who worked there. And we couldn’t even buy any old cards.

Anyway, so much for all of that. Perhaps APBA Go will be a better experience. However, I’m quite skeptical that the company will ever figure out how to attract younger players.

The honest truth is that the old APBA games don’t compete well with the newer generation of sports sims - including some of the newer tabletop games.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Normally I’d start an article like this off with some long rant about how nobody cares about baseball anymore, and about how the real problems all lie with the sport itself.

But that’s actually less true now than it’s been in a long time.

If the World Baseball Classic showed us anything, it’s that baseball is increasing in popularity. In fact, the final game of this year’s World Baseball Classic actually outdrew the NBA Finals.

Buy Me A Coffee

Now, you’d think that all of this additional attention paid to the sport would help increase the profile of baseball sims, right? However, I don’t believe we’re seeing much evidence of an increase of attention paid to baseball sims in general.

After putting some thought into it, here are a few issues I’ve seen that seem to be holding back the world of baseball sims:

• Lack of advertising. It’s not the 1980s anymore, sure. It was pretty easy in those days to devote a chunk of the advertising budget to a single ad in Street and Smith’s at the beginning of the season. These days, I get the feeling that the majority of sim companies simply don’t know where to place advertisements, since they don’t quite know where their target fanbase congregates. And so you see certain well known games with essentially no advertising aside from their newsletters and websites.

  

• Lack of visual appeal. This is specific to computer games; board games are a different matter entirely, of course. Most baseball sims rely on text based solutions to deliver game content to the player:

  

  Some games do offer a rudimentary 3D perspective, such as OOTP, though the quality is often questionable:

  

  Compare this to Best Play Pro Yakyuu, a 1988 Famicom game that is a console based baseball sim:

  

  The lack of visual appeal simply kills the games for younger players that might otherwise be interested. While visuals might not matter for you or me, they absolutely do matter to younger gamers.

  PayPal Donation

• Entrenched communities. The vast majority of baseball sim communities are made up of people who have been in the baseball sim world for decades now. As a result, the community has developed its own terminology. It’s fought its own battles and has had its own deep internal discussions for years and years. And so something as innocent as somebody asking whether APBA or Strat-O-Matic is “more realistic” can be enough to set people on edge. While it’s not bad for those of us who have been around the scene for decades, it’s not exactly the most welcoming environment in the world for young people.

• Overexposure. One of the things that made these games interesting and exciting in the past is the fact that it wasn’t all that easy to watch baseball every single day. These days, with the combination of dedicated sports networks and streaming (not to mention the ease of finding and watching pirated streams), baseball fans don’t feel that same longing for more of their favorite sport.

What do you think? Are there any points missing? What can we do to reverse this trend?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Here are a few notes and other tidbits that didn’t make it into my latest video on Famista, the game that we know of as R.B.I. Baseball in North America:

First of all, Famista is actually based on numerical ratings, believe it or not.

When I first played R.B.I. Baseball, my dad would talk about it as if it were a kid’s game and not an actual “simulation.” And it’s true to an extent. Famista and the other games in this series aren’t fully based on real life statistics.

But, then again, none of the baseball sims that we play are actually based on real life statistics. Every single one of them involves some sort of simplification process, through which statistics are converted into a card that looks something like this:

Now, what you might not know about Famista and the other baseball video games is that they also contain rating systems designed to imitate real life. Famista and R.B.I. Baseball have relatively simple systems, sure - but they do exist:

Buy Me A Coffee

The other thing you likely didn’t know about Famista is that it was a pretty advanced video game for its day. You can see this if you look at the inside of the game itself. As I explained in the video above, it uses a “mapper,” which allows the game to hold more programming code and visual material than the Famicom could technically read:

The chip on the bottom left is the PRG ROM; the chip on the bottom right is the CHR ROM. Meanwhile, the “108” chip on the top is the Namcot 108 chip, which serves as what we call a “mapper” in the NES development and emulation community.

This setup was needed because Famista contained more information than the Famicom could natively read. The Famicom could read up to 32 KB of PRG and up to 8 KB of CHR - but Famista more than doubled those limitations:

PayPal Donation

RBI Baseball has the same setup, though the chips were arranged slightly differently because it used a different PCB board:

And the ROM itself is the same size as the Japanese version:

Now, Famista and its derivatives weren’t the first games to make use of this “mapper” trick. However, Famista was absolutely the first game to become popular because of the visual and memory tricks that its mapper made possible.

And that’s how Famista became arguably the most influential basball video game of all time.

Of course, the exciting pennant races in the 1986 Japanese leagues likely helped with its popularity:

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

APBA’s original Major League Players Baseball computer game was one of the first computerized versions of a board baseball sim on the market. And the interesting thing is that this game was covered pretty heavily in the mainstream media, though you probably haven’t seen these articles before.

The earliest preview article I could find comes from Vancouver, Washington:

It’s interesting to see this reviewer talk about “watching the digits change onscreen.” I’m not entirely sure what he is referring to, since the officially released version of the DOS game doesn’t have any digits displayed on the screen that I’m aware of.

Buy Me A Coffee

Newsday in New York City gave it a review a few weeks later:

However, the game itself wasn’t released until early August 1985. Here’s the earliest review I could find after the game was officially released:

PayPal Donation

And, finally, here’s an old advertisement, which started to show up sometime in early October 1985:

This advertisement was in major newspapers all over the United States and Canada. And it’s kind of interesting to see these days, since you just don’t see these kinds of games get this level of advertising anymore.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

If you read old issues of The Strat-O-Matic Review in order, it’s pretty obvious that Strat was going to come out with something big in 1972. There was a big buildup to the idea that Strat could be played with lefty-righty splits. The big announcement came on the front page of the January 1972 issue:

This was a huge deal, obviously - probably a bigger deal at the time than we can even imagine today. Strat wasn’t the first game with a lefty/righty split system, but it was the first clearly established game to adopt an innovation like that.

In fact, the editors of The Strat-O-Matic Review were so excited that they included two “sample cards” that were simply hand drawn mockups:

Buy Me A Coffee

But that’s really not the most interesting thing about this issue. No - the most interesting thing from the January 1972 issue of The Review is the inclusion of letters telling the company that making split cards like that was an awful idea.

Here’s the first:

Now, John comes up with a pretty interesting system here. However, as is the case with so many of these homemade systems, this one is a bit too rigid.

For example, you can’t really say that Bernie Carbo could never start against left handed pitching. He did in 1971. In fact, his only at bats in 1971 came against left handed starting pitchers:

Willie Stargell also had more plate appearances in 1970 than Ladd insinuates:

And I could go on with the other examples he named, but you get the idea.

The problem with Ladd’s approach is that he doesn’t create any sort of actual disincentive to make you not want to start certain batters against left handed pitching. Instead, he simply comes up with an iron clad rule, one that doesn’t really fit in well with what actually happened in real life.

The nice thing about the Strat-O-Matic system is that it creates a natural incentive for the manager to act in a realistic way. This is also true of the Replay Baseball system, and I’m sure it’s true of other games as well.

PayPal Donation

And then there’s this letter in the same issue from Paige Miller of Hicksville, New York:

I think that Paige makes a much better point than John makes. There is a major problem with the small sample sizes that the statistics of platooning brings out. Not only does this “interfere with the smooth-flowing style of SOM baseball,” but it also lends itself naturally to managerial abuses.

In my opinion, the only real way to solve this problem is to think of a way to use a system that actually creates incentives. You want there to be natural gameplay incentives for the replayer to act one way or another.

In other words - you don’t want Bob Gibson in 1970 to start pinch hitting every game.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

I came across this gem while reading through old issues of The Strat-O-Matic Review:

As much fun as playing for 18 hours straight might seem to you, I really don’t recommend doing it. You’re much better off trying to play a certain amount of time on a regular schedule, one that allows you to actually be conscious for the games that you play, rather than trying to push yourself like this.

But it’s always funny when you play a full game, barely know what happened, and realize the second day that someone threw a no-hitter.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Here’s a story you probably don’t remember.

Back in the summer of 1980, the Catholic schools in Philadelphia decided to pull out of all title games for boys’ sports due to the then-current interpretation of Title IX:

Of course, the kids were crushed:

Now, I don’t want to dive deep into the politics of this decision. The fact is that Archbishop Ryan would have played in the baseball City Title game that summer were it not for this legal interpretation.

But then the kids came up with their own interpretation of “title game:”

Buy Me A Coffee

If there was ever a time for Strat-O-Matic to shine, this was it.

Now, the most fascinating question here is how the kids decided which major league player would represent which kid. While they used a five man committee, it’s really not clear how the committee made its decisions.

PayPal Donation

Anyway, there was both controversy and celebration:

And they even made a box score, along with fielding statistics:

And that’s not all. The championship was also featured in an issue of The Sporting News:

And, as you’ve probably guessed, The Strat-O-Matic Review also featured the game:

At any rate, that gives you an idea as to just how popular and well known Strat-O-Matic was back in 1980.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

I’ve seen a few people ask recently about the right way to set up OOTP for a replay project. Here’s a pretty quick guide for OOTP26. This works pretty much the same way with older versions of the game, though some features are missing.

First of all, you should know that OOTP does come with a new game creation wizard that somewhat simplifies the process of creating a new game. However, there are a number of features you might want to turn off depending on the type of project you’re going for.

In other words - even though it looks like you can simply select “New Game” and then “New Historical Game” to set things up, you’ll probably want to go a bit more in-depth than that:

After you select “New Historical Game,” a screen will pop up asking you if you want to play in “Challenge Mode:”

As described on the screen, “Challenge Mode” takes away your ability to act as commissioner and make somewhat radical changes in your save. This mode is really set up for people who want a realistic GM challenge, and likely will only frustrate you if you’re trying to do a traditional replay project with the game. I recommend just choosing “No, continue with New Game” and going on.

Buy Me A Coffee

Then the next screen will pop up:

This is somewhat self-explanatory. You choose your season where it asks you to select the season.

The “Import complete history up to” option will really only impact your record books. If you choose not to import the complete history of baseball up to that point, your record books will be empty. This can be helpful if you want to start in a season like 1901 but don’t want certain impossible to beat records to be part of your league.

And then comes the play mode.

I haven’t tried Drive for the Pennant Mode yet, and can’t really comment on it. I’ll try a project using that mode at some point in the future.

I tend to use Default Mode even for traditional replays. The nice thing is that you can set it up with either real life lineups or real life transactions without being forced to use both.

Replay Mode is designed for traditional replayers, and turns on real life transactions and lineups by default.

Career Mode is the way most people play OOTP. It’s like starting a “New Standard Game” but from a certain year in history. New players will not necessarily go to the teams they played with in real life, and you’ll wind up seeing a lot of deviations from real life as you go along.

Random Debut Mode causes all the players in the game to enter as rookies in completely random years, but with a few exceptions. The players you have to choose from in the initial draft will be at random points in time in their careers. This is because OOTP is designed for you to have a normal balance of rookies, regular players, and veterans on your team. Random Debut is really its own monster with a lot of interesting issues, and is a topic I’ll need to devote an entire post to.

When you click to the next screen, you’ll get these options:

As you can see, even if you choose “Default Mode,” you can still turn on real life transactions and lineups.

The game does not recommend doing so if you import the minor leagues, however. This is because computer managers will not make any transactions outside the historical transaction database with that mode turned on. In other words, a team might have a player in the minor leagues who is playing really well, but will be unable to bring him up if it’s not in the real life transaction database. And, with real life lineups turned on, the team will not be able to put any newly promoted players in the starting lineup.

You should also know that importing the minor leagues will cause your game to go much slower, especially if you play a season with tons of minor leagues like 1949 or 1950.

PayPal Donation

The “Historical Progression” settings are complex and depend largely on the sort of project you want to run. It’s built on the fact that OOTP has a built-in player development engine. Having players be recalculated before every season is basically like buying the new season disk for every new season: players are designed to replicate their real life performances.

The reason this is a choice is because you technically can use OOTP’s player development options even if players are recalculated every year. There are some OOTP players who enjoy doing this, since it creates a bit of variation within each individual season without making things extremely different in the long term.

If you’re doing a traditional replay and are only focusing on a single season, the Rookie Draft won’t matter too much to you. However, if you’re doing a multiple season project, you can choose here to have rookies show up on their real life teams (or franchises, if the minor leagues are turned on) or enable a rookie draft at the beginning of every season.

If you choose “Automatically expand league,” you’ll see expansion teams enter into the leagues just as they did in real life. However, you should note that “Automatically expand league” will also overwrite changes you’ve made to the franchises at the beginning of every new season. For example, if you take the 1919 Philadelphia Phillies and move them to Denver, Colorado, “Automatically expand league” will move them back to Philadelphia at the start of the 1920 season. This is one of those things that unfortunately isn’t explained anywhere except for a few old and obscure forum posts.

“Historical Financials” are turned on by default - even in Replay Mode. This is pretty frustrating, since most traditional replayers don’t care about having the financials turned on. The only option you have here is for the automatic importing of financials. I’ll show you how to turn it off in the settings in a second.

The next screen is all about scouting and player ratings:

Most traditional replayers will probably just want to turn the scouting and player ratings off. If you’re doing a replay with accurate lineups and transactions, the scouting information won’t be of much use to you. You can turn all of this off by changing the settings in the drop down.

I strongly recommend turning the FaceGen settings to include everybody. Additionally, you can download a much better FaceGen pack to have players that look a lot more realistic than they do by default.

If you do a long term project, the cool thing about FaceGen is that the pictures of your players will age naturally. This is a feature that is missing in games like Football Manager.

The game will then give you some final setting choices, and will have you create your manager profile:

If you’re doing a traditional replay, you likely want to make sure that you’re both GM and Manager. And the trading settings won’t make much of a difference, especially if you’re using historical transactions. Those only change things if you’re playing OOTP the default way.

Commissioner Mode allows you to make changes for other teams and the league as a whole. I recommend turning it on for a traditional replay.

Cannot be fired prevents your in-game owner from firing you. I also recommend turning this on unless you’re interested in something like Challenge Mode.

You’ve got to remember that OOTP was originally designed to be a game like Championship Manager (now Football Manager), except for baseball. A lot of these settings are part of the RPG elements of the old Championship Manager series. It’s nice that we can at least turn them off for the sake of creating a traditional replay project.

Now, we’re probably not done. There are a few other things we should look at in the advanced settings. To get to those, click on Advanced Mode on the lower left part of the screen:

You’ll be greeted by this confusing pop up:

This is one of my biggest problems with the OOTP UI. You’d naturally want to just modify a few advanced settings for everything you’ve already set up in the New Game Wizard. I recommend just choosing “yes” at this point.

That will bring you to this screen, which is more like what OOTP’s traditional New Game setup looked like:

You can pretty much change anything you want here, including renaming leagues, renaming teams, promoting entire minor leagues to the majors, and so on. Instead of showing you everything, however, I’m going to focus on a few changes that most traditional replayers are going to want to make.

Note that I’ve got a ton of leagues loaded because I selected to have the minor leagues on. The screen will be a little bit easier if you’re only loading the Major Leagues.

First, go to Rules at the top of the right hand side of the screen:

You’ll see a bunch of options like this:

Now, if you want, you can disable trading from this screen, or disable the Rule 5 draft rule (which allows certain teams to draft players that are not protected on the 40-man roster of other clubs), or allow the game to create fictional free agent players.

If you’ve got lineups and transactions turned on, thing like trading should be turned off. You might want to come over here to make sure.

Next, go to Financials (it’s right next to Rules):

This is where you can turn the financial system completely off. However, the choice to turn it off is hidden in the middle of the screen and isn’t at the top of the screen. This is one of several OOTP design decisions that really drive me nuts:

Turning financials off makes this screen a lot simpler:

The cool thing is that the game will still generate attendance figures for you even without the financial system on.

Next, go to the Historical tab:

This is where you can change the real life transactions and lineups options, as well as make a bunch of changes regarding player development:

Depending on the kind of replay you’re doing, you might want to make it so players can play in seasons they missed in real life, or make it so they don’t retire automatically:

These settings are actually more complex than you think, and will likely require their own post to explore in more detail. For a traditional replay, you should just keep all of these boxes checked.

Now, we’re still not done yet, believe it or not. There are even more settings on the top left part of the screen. And this is where you’ll be able to turn off the stuff you likely don’t want in a traditional replay.

Click on the Settings tab on the top left part of the screen:

This is where you can turn the scouting system off:

This is also where you can turn the coaching system off, which I strongly recommend doing (even in a “normal” OOTP save, the coaching system is poorly designed and implemented):

Owner Goals should also be disabled if you’re doing a traditional replay. That’s mostly fun in replays where you want the owner to give you a certain challenge or ridiculous requirement, like signing an All-Star third baseman when you’ve got no money.

If you don’t have historical transactions on, you can modify the injury settings a bit further down:

And you can turn off the player personality system, which also doesn’t always work as well as intended:

Finally, you can enable or disable the player development system. Notice, though, that the choice to enable or disable it is halfway down the menu:

That’s basically all you need to set up.

It would be nice if OOTP used a more user friendly menu design. In particular, it’s ridiculous that you have to scroll through a huge and complex menu just to turn off the owner goals, player personality system, or coaching system.

The concept behind the program is nice, but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired, in my opinion. And, as others have documented through the years, OOTP’s accuracy as a single season simulator is not as good as its reputation would indicate. The game tends to be more fun as a General Manager simulator.

At any rate, I hope this helps you with your projects! Note that you can also change a bunch of these settings once you’ve started a new game, unless you’re in Challenge Mode. In other words, there’s still hope even if you forgot to do something.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

This will be the last 1980 themed post for the time being. If you’ve somehow missed it, the occasion was the release of this long video I made on the 1980 National League pennant races and NLCS:

And that’s enough tooting my horn for one day.

The real 1980 story in the baseball sim community was Strat-O-Matic’s scandal. And if you haven’t heard of this one, oh boy, do I have a story for you.

The 1980 advanced pitcher cards followed the same pattern, regardless of the pitcher. Here’s how The Strat-O-Matic Review described it:

Buy Me A Coffee

Now, there has been some controversy over the years about whether this was a deliberate decision or a mistake made by the printer. It honestly seems more likely ot me that this was a printing mistake and that Richman was trying to help the game company save face.

Strat-O-Matic had never used patterns as predictable as these in the past. While there were certain patterns that experienced players could pick up on, it was never something as basic or ordinary as “any roll of 4 with the white die is trouble.”

And the outcry was pretty loud:

PayPal Donation

Before The Strat-O-Matic Review could even conduct a survey, however, the game company offered replacement pitcher cards:

Those replacement pitcher cards are rare, by the way.

I’ve got a copy of the original 1980 season cards in really nice condition. I don’t have the replacement pitcher cards, though I do hope to eventually get settled down economically enough to get a copy.

My understanding is that the results are exactly the same. In other words, anybody who actually took up Richman’s offer and just tried the new format would have found that the results were the same.

I think this also shows at least some of what Strat-O-Matic fans consider to be important, though. It’s not just about the cards being accurate. No - a lot of the joy actually comes from the suspense of not knowing what’s going to happen before you find the result. And it’s just not as much fun if you know that a white 4 means something bad for the pitcher.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Back when I was a kid, I loved reading through my dad’s old stacks of APBA Journal issues.

I thought some of the articles were kind of boring, and some were far too technical for my understanding at the time. But then you run into great classics like this one by Rick Judd.

I’ve reformatted this a bit to make it a little easier to read. This is from the April 1984 issue of The APBA Journal, page 1:

If you’re curious, Judd is correct to start Bird for the Cubs. The Cubs got Bird in a trade with the Yankees on June 12 that season:

Buy Me A Coffee

Of course, Bird did not start for the Cubs until August 13, mostly because of this story on the same page:

And so we continue with our “American folklore:”

George Foster, of course, had been with the Mets for a few years by 1984, which explains the sarcasm. Foster showed an alarming propensity to strike out after showing up at Shea.

PayPal Donation

And then the magic started:

And so there you have it - a roll of 11 seven times in a row. Isn’t that incredible?

The ending to this article is even better:

Have you ever experienced anything similar? Or do you think this is just an unusual piece of creative writing?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

If you’ve missed it, I’ve spent the past three days talking about three major problems that APBA encountered in the 1970s.

The first was the discovery of National Pastime around 1973 or 1974:

That caused many people in the tabletop gaming scene to question just how significant J. Richard Seitz was to the world of baseball simulation.

The second was the problems with the original 1949 season:

Releasing 1949 in 1974 was actually a brilliant move on APBA’s part. The season sold quite well, which is one reason why it’s really not worth much money today. However, APBA did a poor job of ensuring that the cards worked well together to create believable results, which caused APBA players to look closer at card making ideas.

And the third was the APBA Master Game:

The Master Game was mostly a reaction to Strat-O-Matic’s Advanced game. While it wasn’t an awful idea, the issues with the Master Game’s accuracy wound up hurting APBA in the long run.

In fact, all three of these factors combined in the worst possible way for the game company. And this is one of the reasons why APBA faces some unusual competition today.

As the years went by, the demand for APBA innovations only grew. I suppose we can put some of the blame on the famous Howard Ahlskog, who made a point of embracing innovations and always talking APBA card theory during his tenure as editor of The APBA Journal.

Now, for the purposes of this article, it’s not necessarily important whether Howard’s suggestions and modifications were technically correct or not. The fact that he was even making suggestions as to how APBA cards and ratings could be modified for increased accuracy was a pretty strong break with the past.

If you go back and read issues of The APBA Journal from the late 1960s and very early 1970s, you won’t see a lot of talk about changing everything around. There was a little bit of innovation talk, sure, but it wasn’t about completely regrading pitchers or any of the other radical solutions that Ahlskog wound up recommending.

Buy Me A Coffee

To illustrate the point, I opened up to a completely random APBA Journal issue and was able to find an example. This comes from the July 1989 issue as part of somebody’s 1984 Chicago Cubs replay:

Ahlskog’s comments are in italics, and, as you can see, he forgot to close his parenthesis - but we can forgive him for that. The interesting thing here to me isn’t specifically what he’s saying about fielding, but, rather, the fact that he’s willing to have a discussion that essentially involves completely changing the fielding system in the APBA Master Game.

Now, this mindset was quite strong, and wound up becoming very contageous. In fact, it got to the point where many APBA players would regrade pitchers out of principal. In other words - those who were serious readers of The APBA Journal became interested ignoring the official grades and ratings that the company created in favor of creating their own.

Nowhere was that more apparent than with the CMBA pitching system, which Ahlskog printed every year for a few years in The APBA Journal. The idea was to completely replace the APBA pitching system in both the Basic and Master games, exchanging the much more subjective APBA system for a more objective one based on batted against average. And so it was common to see things like this in the pages of The APBA Journal:

The CMBA pitching system really is an outgrowth of two of the three points I listed above. It is a reaction to the weakness of the pitching system in the Master Game, and is also a reaction to the problems caused by applying the old APBA formula blindly to tricky seasons like 1949. Personally, I find the system pretty cumbersome, but I can also understand why it was so popular.

But the real key here is that APBA was slowly losing its mystique.

PayPal Donation

And that only got worse after the death of J. Richard Seitz.

The biggest issue that APBA had was that pesky National Pastime issue. It wasn’t until around 1995 that The APBA Journal started talking about National Pastime again. The October/November 1976 issue of the magazine, which was almost entirely devoted to the history of National Pastime, wound up being a one off. The game simply was not mentioned again until long after Seitz was gone.

Now, the problem isn’t that APBA might have violated a copyright. There was no copyright to violate, and the National Pastime patent expired almost a decade before Seitz first started selling APBA.

The problem is that Seitz decided to not acknowledge Clifford Van Beek in any way, despite the obvious fact that Seitz had basically stolen his card and board design. After all, without National Pastime, Seitz would not have had a game to innovate and sell as his own.

When APBA started having significant financial trouble in the 1990s, starting with the acquisition by MMI and going through the bankruptcy in 1999, some of the more enterprising APBA fans started to slip away from the community.

It took a little bit of time to get things set up. However, by 2010 or so, there were a number of games competing directly with APBA that were not only more accurate than the old APBA design, but also tended to be much easier to play.

I’ve talked a bit about Bill Staffa’s NPIII before. NPIII’s name is a reference to National Pastime (think of APBA as “NPII,” and Staffa’s version as the third in the chain). The game uses an innovative error system, additional symbols for strikeouts and walks, a pitching system that incorporates pitcher fatigue in a much more simple and natural way than the Master Game, and has a number of other important innovations.

There’s also National Pastime Next Generation, which is a similar rethinking of the entire National Pastime model. This game includes extensive platoon matchups, a completely rethought balance between batting and pitching, full park factors, and a number of other vastly improved systems. The best part is that NPNG is free - though it unfortunately seems that the files will disappear before too long.

I’m sure that there are others. I know that there are a couple of popular fan boards that serve as replacements for the APBA boards that float around the internet; I’ve got a few, though I haven’t seriously played with them yet.

But the point here is that people are no longer worried about poking the big APBA bear. In fact, the level of innovation in the APBA scene is so strong that I wonder how many people actually play the “vanilla” game.

Part of the problem goes to APBA’s complex relationship with Miller Associates, which really needs to be the topic of another blog post. Miller Associates created the old Wizard application for DOS, which essentially let gamers create their own APBA cards. When the Windows version of Wizard was combined with the old Bill James Encyclopedia, gamers could create entire seasons with the push of a single button - and those seasons wound up being more accurate out of the box than the official sets APBA was selling.

And, when you think about it, the entire mess goes back to the 1970s:

• If nobody knew about National Pastime, there’s a good chance that Seitz would still largely be revered as some kind of God of baseball gaming.

• If APBA had not screwed up the walks in its 1949 season, there’s a good chance that the talk about card creation would never have been a topic of general interest in the community.

• If APBA had gone a different direction with the Master Game (i.e. something more like Replay), there’s a good chance that nobody would have taken the time to make major revisions and changes.

In a sense, APBA wound up unwittingly creating its own competition.

Leave a comment