Beyond Pixels and Numbers
Getting to Know Your Players
Making the Players Real
I wrote a few weeks back about using original newspapers to keep your replay fresh.
However, there’s more to it than just that.
Based on my experience, the best way to maintain interest in your project over the long haul is to let the players come to life. You’ve got to figure out a way to turn numerical abstractions like this:
or this:
into an action person:
Now, I’ve got some sad news for you. It’s not enough to look at a baseball card and call it good. That’s a good first step, but you still don’t know the real Vin Campbell.
I’ve got two pieces of general advice that might help you.
Do Your Research
Reading old newspapers is fun. However, it can feel aimless at times, and you can find yourself wasting oodles of time reading articles that are completely unrelated to your project.
Instead of trying to absorb everything possible from the past, I recommend focusing your reading and research on a single player at a time.
Since I’ve already brought him up, let’s take a look at Vin Campbell.
Campbell came to my attention as I was doing a bit of research on the 1908 baseball season. Most fans of baseball history will focus only on the big names and the big events. However, those of us who replay seasons find it important to know certain things about players like Campbell who saw little to no game time. For instance, we want to know if they were on the roster for the entire season, or only for a short time — and how we should manage our use of them in our replays.
Fortunately for us, there is an excellent SABR biography of Campbell:
When I do research on players for this blog, I go to the SABR bio project first. Among all the possible biography sources, SABR usually provides the best information and the most reliable sources,
It’s not entirely clear here whether Campbell was on the Cubs roster right after spring training in 1908. It seems likely, though, since he made his single pinch hitting appearance on June 6th before winding up in Decatur in late June.
Now, if we are really interested in figuring out the Decatur story, we can take a look at a few old newspapers. Reading through every single 1908 Chicago Tribune sports page is going to take a long time, of course. Instead of doing that, we can look for clues in a few key places.
I did a quick search on newspapers.com of all scanned Chicago newspapers in 1908 for the phrase “Vincent Campbell.” And, guess what? I found him right away:
Basically, the Cubs decided to keep Campbell after choosing to send a catcher named Evans to Wichita. They wanted to keep our friend Vince on the roster as a third catcher, just in case.
Well, now we know why Vince didn’t see any game time. He was on the roster as an emergency backup, and apparently really wasn’t impressing anybody with his training performances.
We also have even more information from this one mention. That same page of The Inter Ocean contained the following two graphs that are vital for any serious 1908 replayer:
Not only do we have a formal looking document indicating that Campbell did indeed start the 1908 season on the Cubs roster, but we also now have definitive rosters for all 16 teams in the Major Leagues.
I’m going to be honest with you: I’ve never seen this graph before today, and assumed that something like this simply didn’t exist. After all, The Sporting News and Sporting Life never printed it to my knowledge. This, my friends, is why it pays to do your research.
Back to Campbell. The more we look through old reporting, the better an idea we get of what kind of player he was. Frank Chance apparently had some interest in trading him before he every played him, for example:
We can also figure out when Campbell left the Cubs roster:
That’s from June 13, 1908. An article in the Tribune the day before reported that Campbell had some sort of stomach ailment. There might have been more problems with Vin than his youth alone.
And that’s just the start.
Remember that SABR bio from above? We can learn more about Campbell’s performance against Michigan while at Vanderbilt. There’s this, from the Detroit Free Press, for example:
This is from the glory days of two-way players and limited substitutions, of course. It looks like Vanderbilt didn’t make a single substitution in its 8-0 loss to Michigan.
And that Hugh Fullerton article? I wasn’t able to find it, unfortunately, but I did find Grantland Rice’s writeup of the game. He made several references to “Demon Campbell” throughout. You ought to at least read the opening paragraphs:
We could go on with this. Long story short — one of the best things you can do to make your players come to life is to take the time to learn about them.
Write Your Own Stories
I came across a post on a Diamond Mind Baseball message board the other day written by somebody who put the 1998 season through a hundred automated replays. He reported that the New York Yankees won the American League East nearly every time — but that there was one time when the Tampa Bay Devil Rays somehow wound up on top.
And that’s why I hate automatic replays.
It’s not because of some sort of fluke, or because the computer manager is bad, or anything like that. No — the reason why I hate automated replays is that you don’t get to experience the story of the replay itself.
Without the story, is it really worth playing? Is your project anything more than just boxscore generation?
Let’s look at our friend Vin Campbell again. After switching to the outfield in the minor leagues, Campbell was back up in the majors, this time with the Pirates in 1910.
Now, those 1910 Pirates finished 3rd in the National League, 17 1/2 games behind the Chicago Cubs. Campbell played well that season, amassing a .326/.391/.436 line with 4 home runs (excellent for 1910) and 17 stolen bases — all in only 97 games and 324 plate appearances.
Let’s say you decided to replay the 1910 Pirates season, but wanted to give Campbell some extra playing time. That wouldn’t be too out of the question, right? After all, Vin was clearly on Pittsburgh’s roster the entire season, and the Pirates didn’t exactly have a clearly defined outfield.
Think of the kind of story you could write if Campbell’s extra offense gave the Pirates the boost they needed to compete for the pennant! Think of how interesting it would be if good fortune came upon your dice, allowing him to hit closer to .350 than .300! You’d have a really good story on your hand, one about the star player that the Cubs let slip away — and a story that would be even sweeter if it meant the Cubs losing the pennant in your replay.
You see, that’s the other way to make your replay come alive. Let it tell a story.
That’s what I try to do in my project. I want to tell the story of the replay, and tell it in depth.
Stats and boxscores are nice, but there’s nothing quite like a good, detailed, and deep story. And there’s no better way to examine and rewrite the forgotten stories of the past than a good replay.
By the way — in your research, you might come across some interesting cartoons as well. This is from the old (really old) Chicago Tribune sports section — enjoy!
