The Mike Mathias 1975 Replay
Legendary replay from a legend
The Mike Mathias 1975 Replay
There’s no guarantee that your replay will turn out how you expected.
That’s one of the hardest things to accept about baseball replays. Your 1908 replay might not result in any sort of exciting pennant race. You might go through the 1964 Phillies season with stars in your eyes, only to be disappointed as they finish 8 games out of first. Your 1951 National League pennant race might fizzle out in late August.
Of course, the opposite might happen. You might discover that the 1927 Athletics can suddenly catch up with the 1927 Yankees, for example. Maybe your 1984 replay sees the Tigers in a tough fight with the Toronto Blue Jays.
It’s pretty rare when your replay turns out similar to how it did in real life.
And that’s exactly what happened here.
Mike Mathias
Mike Mathias is my replay hero.
He plays quickly, and he plays broadly. He’s completed no fewer than 21 projects with Replay Baseball — all played by hand with the cards and dice, with no computer manager or autoplay or any tricks, and all documented on his website.
How prolific is he? Mike reports his total number of games played once a year. Here are his most recent stats:
32,000 games in less than 20 years is incredible. And the most incredible part is that Mike writes out descriptions of every single game he plays on Delphi Forums.
I’ve written earlier about why I blog instead of posting my results and thoughts solely on forums. However, I am absolutely in awe at the speed and consistency with which Mike plays and reports. It’s truly remarkable.
The 1975 Replay
While you can read the result of every game here, it might take a little while to get through 850 posts.
We’ll skip to the end. Here are Mike’s final standings:
The thing that stands out most to me here is that the Kansas City Royals managed to win the American League West. I don’t know what it is about the 1975 Royals, who were good but not great in real life. They always seemed to play well for me when I played with the original 1975 APBA cards while growing up, and they also seem to do well in replays I’ve read.
I also find it remarkable that the standings here are so consistent with what happened in real life. Pretty good for a quick tabletop game!
Mike compiles statistical reports for each of his replays in PDF format. The 1975 PDF is here. We’ll go over a few of the more macro stats in this post in the interest of space and time.
I’m impressed by how close these statistics are to their real life counterparts. The famous “rate statistics” — batting average, on base percentage, and slugging percentage — are right on. ERAs are right on, earned runs are right on, runs and hits are just about right on, strikeouts are just about right on — a lot of things are where they are supposed to be. Even complete games, which is a stat that measures the replayer’s accurate use of the bullpen more than anything else, is right where it should be.
There are a few too many triples. I’m not entirely sure why that’s the case, as I don’t know enough about the Replay game engine to comment.
I also noticed that both stolen bases and caught stealing numbers are a bit lower than they were in real life. It doesn’t seem to have had a significant impact on runs scored. Again, I don’t really understand the Replay stealing system as of the writing of this article, which means I can’t say too much.
Sacrifice hits are a bit low, though I think that’s common for most replayers. I know all too well how hard it is to discipline yourself to bunt because the situation calls for it, even though you know the chances are better if you swing away.
Finally, the big mystery for me is sacrifice flies. I’m baffled as to why that would be so far off from real life. Perhaps it’s just due to the rolling of the dice, though I’m not sure about that.
Overall, it was a great replay. Oh — and the Red Sox won the World Series this time around, beating the Reds in 7. The Reds came close, and had the potential tying run on base at the very end, but couldn’t make it happen.