Disabled List

It might be a while before there's a new post. Not only is it the Labor Day weekend, but we have some friends staying over at the house for DragonCon, which is a science-fiction convention in Atlanta.

Therefore, my guests come first. New posts will come, but I have to see some verrrrrrrry weird people on Saturday....

The General Manager Project

Not much going on in the dynasty front today.

I'll give you some idea of a project of mine. My project is to propose a system for Baseball Mogul gameplay that would regulate the firing of general managers -- BM is designed for players to take the role of owner/general manager. Depending on some random number, one could measure one's results against a table. If the results are poor, and the random number is too low, one is "fired" from the GM position, and must start a new game or catch on with another team.

I've completed a list of Baltimore and Boston (Red Sox) general managers since 1950 and why they either resigned or fired. A few comments:

1. Of course, some GMs were fired for poor performance.
2. GMs were quite willing to jump ship for better offers with other teams.
3. Many GMs, however, left because of power struggles in the front office -- "political reasons". A new owner would come in and sometimes, they weren't the fair-haired boy anymore. Adding this to the table will be very interesting:

TABLE RESULT: Despite your acceptable record in the GM position, you fall victim to a front-office power struggle. The new owner has taken a confidante in the front office who doesn't like you...and guess who was just named the new GM! Did you step on too many toes on your way up? Whatever. It's time to clean out your desk and make a few phone calls....

The Dynasty Writers Manual (Unofficial), from OOTP

On the OOTP boards, darkcloud4579 started a thread called The Dynasty Writers Manual (Unofficial). I felt it was definitely worth writing about.

Too many times have I read dynasties that weren't that great, and I wanted to give advice to people as to how they could make their dynasties better. However, I don't give that kind of advice because people might be offended. ("How dare you suggest my dynasty needs improvement!") Furthermore, I've also read fantastic dynasties that just dropped off the face of the earth.

Reading this thread, I was surprised at how great and to-the-point the following ideas were. Therefore, I have copied and pasted all across the thread, unfortunately, without point-by-point attribution. If you're an OOTP writer, and you see your stuff here...well, I'll let it be known to what few readers I have that aside from minor edits, I wrote none of what follows below. If you're interested in commenting, go to the hyperlink thread above, join the OOTP board, and talk to those that crafted the rules below....

1. Keep the ideas small.

There isn't a point in listing absolute mundane details. Find a key story, that gives folks something easy to wrap their minds into and get engrossed into quickly. Then dive right in.

2. Stat dumps...probably won't work here.

Unless it's presented in an interesting way, dropping a bombshell of stats on people early on, is a surefire way to generally bore most of a reading audience. And more important, who the heck wants to write something that bores them as a WRITER?

3. Meat and potatoes.

I think that it's got to be something that fills people up on the cheap. It needs to be catchy and maybe it'll have some flaws here and there or be a little rough around the edges. But...I think if you can basically transmit the idea that 'here's who the dynasty is about or this is what team we're talking about...here's the main idea, let's go on a little trip.' I think that it'll leave people wanting more...and begging for more detail or more of "this" and less "of that."

4. Planning.

One thing that separates a decent dynasty from a great one is planning. When a dynasty writer has plotted out the path (in at least general terms, if not specific) of the story, the main characters, the focus, and has given some thought as to how/when the story will end, it clearly shows. I'm not saying that a good dynasty can't be written "on the fly", but when the time is put in up front, I believe the dynasty turns out better.

What sorts of posts are you going to make? Is it going to be mostly a stat dump? Mostly story? A hybrid? Like Dagrims said, have some things planned out in advance. Having the bones of the story planned in advance makes it a lot easier for you in the future, but leave room to take new directions as they suggest themselves. OOTP is great at giving you story lines.

5. Spelling, punctuation and grammar ALL COUNT.

Yes, I know you're not professional writers (though some of you are good enough to be), but if a reader has to wade his way through endlessly long paragraphs, incorrect use of 'you're', your' and 'yore'/ 'to', 'too' and 'two', no (or incorrect) capitalization, or a mysterious lack of periods, you're going to lose them.

Spell checkers, grammar and reasonable sentence/paragraph length are your friends. Moreover, they're your readers' friends. You don't have to be perfect. Some great dynasties are written by people who aren't spelling and grammar whizzes. But sloppy spelling, structure and grammar make you look sloppy, and it's not much fun to have to work at reading something.

6. Do your research.

When I read a story set in the 1920s, and the writer's talking about wondering what round he'll be selected in the amateur draft, mentioning teammates with Hispanic surnames or watching games on television, he's lost me.

7. Write about a story that interests you.

Yeah, the goal is to get lots of people interested and posting lots of comments and raving about how fantastic your work is, but the first rule should almost certainly be: write about a story that interests you. Why? Even the most fantastic dynasties/stories/novels/whatever ever written were, at some point, hard to write. You need that nagging feeling at the back of your mind, telling you to get back to writing, when times get tough. The initial rush of excitement is great, and you get through a lot of writing in a hurry, but it ain't gonna last. Believe me.

8. Dole out your posts.

That brings me to my next point: don't blow through an entire 10 posts at once when you first post your thread, even if you've got them written in advance. Dole them out. Let people read and get started before they're confronted with 10 posts at once. Don't take too long, of course, because that'll make people think you never intend to update it again, but take a day or two between posts for a little while. It'll save you from getting to the burnout point too quickly, and it'll allow you to build a readership.

9. Know how much you can bite off.

If you're just getting into dynasty writing, I can tell you that a dynasty trying to track all of a 30-team league, complete with standings, player reports, stories, so on and so forth, is going to be too much, unless you're independently wealthy and have nothing else to do but sit at the computer.

10. Don't try and be fancy.

Images are nice, but don't make them the focal point. If you try and make your posts look visually unusual, a lot of times it's just going to be distracting for the reader and hard for you to keep up. There are exceptions to that, but they're the exceptions.

11. Read those dynasties, and make comments.

To write a good dynasty, read a lot of dynasties, and comment on them. If you want people to read yours, you should be reading theirs.

Try to comment! Not getting comments can be extremely discouraging to new writers - even to vets. What do you say? Anything you want, from "Good job" through "I'm reading" to "Wow, what just happened?" Speculate on what will happen next. Offer suggestions. I can't speak for anyone else, but personally I listen very closely to what my readers say...and if it makes sense and won't wreck the story I'll try to fit it in.

12. Write your posts offline and save copies.

Because if the Baseball Mogul or OOTP boards crash, you're going to be very, very angry when all that hard work disappears.

13. Ask the readers questions.

Is your league facing a crisis? Does a team have to move? Did the game manage to give your team a roster that MIGHT win one game in ten? Get their feedback. Readers like to feel involved. It gives them a personal stake. I suspect that's why "add a player" dynasties are so popular.

Never the Padres

With OOTP's board down for the count this AM, I'd like to highlight an interesting little dynasty called Brooklyn Dodgers: An Alternate History .

It's not a stat-heavy dynasty at all -- you probably won't figure out what Jackie Robinson hit -- and it doesn't really change the history of the MLB that much as it starts in 1947 and not in, say, 1958. What makes it a charming read is the heavy use of period-specific photos, old stadiums, kids looking through knothole fences, etc.

What I've noticed is that the author is apparently a long time between updates. His last update was July 2nd of this year, but twice the dynasty has been "bumped" to the top by people chiming in to say how much they loved the dynasty. For some reason, the dynasty has a lot of fans.

My theory is that the reason the dynasty is so popular is because it's about Dem Bums, which hold a special place in the heart of every baseball fan. When you mention Brooklyn and the Dodgers, you're talking about a much more innocent era, when baseball owners didn't hold extort cities in exchange for material improvements to stadiums. It was an era when love of the game held sway and it was believed that love of the game could conquer all.

Brooklyn dynasties seem to be popular. The Philadelphia Athletics have some love on the Baseball Mogul boards, and I've seen more than one Montreal Expos dynasty. The St. Louis Browns still have a following in some quarters of baseball, with probably more people belonging to the historical societies devoted to the Brownies than ever actually attended a Browns game. (Oddly enough, the Boston or Milwaukee Braves don't seem to draw that sort of following.)

If you're doing a historical dynasty, I think the team you choose actually has some effect on the popularity of your dynasty, no matter how good the writing or creation of the dynasty. A long time ago, I did a survey of BM dynasties, trying to figure out which were the most popular and least popular teams. I've lost the papers that had my polling results, but I don't think anyone had done a San Diego Padres dynasty at Baseball Mogul.

For some reason, the Padres just don't evoke any nostalgia. They don't seem to represent anything special, despite almost forty years as a major league baseball team and despite never winning a World Series. When most people try to put "Padres" and "nostalgia" together in a single thought, the most common topic of discussion is "remember those awful Taco Bell uniforms of the 1970s?" I tell you -- if you want a really challenging dynasty to write, the Padres is the way to go.

Some quick Google searching:

"love of the Yankees": 76,300 hits
"love of the Cardinals": 30,300 hits
"love of the Dodgers": 19,400 hits
"love of the Braves": 16,100 hits
...

"love of the Padres": 7 hits

Egad. Then again, "love of the Expos" gets zero hits. Maybe I need to rethink my theory.

Health Versus Suspension, or the Thumbtack Incident

Rick Honeycutt had a 20-year career as a starter and reliever for several teams, ranging from 1977 to 1997. Among the many teams with which Honeycutt served time were the Mariners, Rangers, Dodgers, Athletics, Yankees, and Cardinals. He would finish with a 3.72 lifetime ERA and a 109-143 loss record. His lifetime WHIP was 1.315. (WHIP = the sum of walks plus hits, divided by innings pitched.)

On September 30th, 1980, as a Mariner starter (he would go 10-17 that year), he taped a thumbtack to his finger with a band-aid, using it to scuff the ball. In a game against the Royals, Willie Wilson hit a double for Kansas City and ended up at second. Looking at Honeycutt from behind, he noted the thumbtack and brought it to the attention of the umps. Honeycutt was given the boot and the league would suspend him for ten days.

To add insult to injury, not only did Honeycutt whine about the ineffectiveness of his technique -- he had only scratched three balls and none of them did what he wanted them to -- but walking back to the dugout, he thoughtlessly wiped the sweat from his forehead with his tacked finger, gashing his forehead and almost putting out his eye.

(* * *)

One of the problems with Baseball Mogul and OOTP is that, of course, you can't duplicate events like this. Adding some sort of "cheat engine" which might generate a random number and conclude that a player every five years or so would get caught at doing something stupid would be a pointless act. The power posters on the Baseball Mogul message board would claim it would be a waste of time for Clay to have to program something like this; I have a more practical vote against it -- we only know the cheaters who got caught. There might have been guys in baseball who spent twenty year careers cheating here and there but never got caught at it.

One can laugh at these real life absurdities, but like it or not, they do actually affect game play. Undoubtedly, Honeycutt missed a start or two during his suspension. As the years go by, a baseball axiom becomes all the more apparent -- "in the end, all you have is your stat line".

All Honeycutt has his is 1980 stat line, all the Lahman database has is his stat line, and all the Baseball Mogul engine has is his stat line. The Baseball Mogul AI doesn't know why Honeycutt missed a tenth of the season, and it will automatically assume that the reason he missed those games was because of health, which impacts Honeycutt's overall health rating.

Clearly, a "sim head" has one of two options, if he remembers Honeycutt's thumbtack drama: to have a sim where Honeycutt is caught "after the fact" (after a completed game and assign him a fake injury that will take him out of ten games), or to assume Honeycutt was never caught in the dynasty. In any event, Honeycutt's health rating should be readjusted to assume that he would have made those missing starts barring the incident. However, the question then becomes "how do you do it?"

Is health in Baseball Mogul on a linear scale? If a player has a health of 50, do we assume that the statistical mean of games he would miss is 81 (i.e., 50 percent of all games)? If a player has a health of 100, do we assume that he plays every game that season?

I'm sure the answer among most dynasty players would be, "Who gives a damn? Ten games is an eyeblink." However, if you're the kind of player who wants a dynasty where Joe Blow did not have a career-ending injury in real life -- for example, a world where J. R. Richard does not have a stroke -- these questions begin to count.

Another dynasty where health questions might be important is a "steroid-free" dynasty. If you want to adjust stats so that Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, and Roger Clemens (*) were not steroid-users, you might be of the school that the health in their later careers should be adjusted upward, to eliminate the muscle pulls and breakdowns that steroid abuse is known to cause. The question of how to adjust health is important.

The only solution is probably a comprehensive list of suspensions in baseball. From that point, the dynasty player can decide how he (or she (**)) wants to change things.

(*) Yes, I know Roger Clemens never tested positive for steroids.
(**) Are there any females playing BM or OOTP? I believe there was one who played OOTP and posted; I have never heard of a female playing Baseball Mogul who posted on the boards there.

Projects for Baseball Mogul

When I began the "Even the Braves" dynasty in 1953, I was surprised to find that after about a year, Willie Mays hadn't shown up. Now I'll admit that I don't know absolutely everything to know about baseball -- for example, I don't know when Willie Mays made that wonderful facing-the-wrong-way, over-the-shoulder, turn-around-and-spin, make-the-incredible-throw-home that we've all seen before. Was it before 1953? After 1953? When? (Answer below if you don't know.)

I waited for Baseball Mogul to toss him in to the game in the Amateur Draft, but Mays never showed up. Later, I figured out why. According to Wikipedia, Mays spent part of 1952 and all of 1953 in the Army. There was a war on, and he was drafted for service in Korea, but never served. He would return to the majors in 1954 and resume his career.

Unfortunately, this causes a problem for any game universe which starts in 1953. Mays, simply, never shows up. As he's not in the list of active players in 1953, he will never exist. Lahman/BM isn't smart enough to figure out that Mays has gone missing and to put him back with his team or somewhere -- anywhere -- in 1954.

I don't know if OOTP treats 1953 dynasties the same way. I'm sure that if I had been aware, there would probably be a way that Mays could be returned to the universe, but it would probably involve some laborious process and I want a quick-and-easy solution. (If you have the "easy" solution, please let me know.)

Therefore, it would be a real service to include one of the following mods to the Lahman database. You could call it the "advanced Lahman database". Or, at the very least, create separate spreadsheets for the following modifications.

1. Players in wartime. I feel very sorry for someone trying to start a Baseball Mogul dynasty in 1944. DiMaggio and a score of other ballplayers will never show up because they've gone to serve.

Players serving in World War I, World War II, Korea, or even Vietnam (if there are any) have the potential to be affected. A spreadsheet should be made available of at least the names of players in the military and when their periods of service lasted.

There's a site called Baseball in Wartime which lists all Major Leaguers who served part of their career in World War II. The interested Moguler would know which players disappear -- or should disappear -- and then come back. (Perhaps one could give DiMaggio a two-year long "injury" that would at least keep him out of the game for a period, for those playing pre-1943 dynasties. It would be a great historical resource.)

2. Proper minor-league names. Every start a dynasty in 1902 in BM only to find that your minor leagues are stocked with teams with names like the "Lugnuts" or the "Jaxx" or some anachronistic modern name? It would be a simple task to compile a list of minor league teams appropriate to the era. As Baseball Mogul's minor league system consists of five fields that one can fill in, it should be simple to add a program that loads the right name and designation for whichever year one cares to start one's dynasty.

(As for OOTP, I've not played it long enough to know if the program loads those completely-incorrectly-named minor league teams. At least post-1969, it shouldn't be too hard to get the engine to put minors in the right places.)

I'd do the spreadsheet work myself, if there was any demand for it.

3. Players by ethnicity. A loaded topic even in the best of times. However, it would be nice to know for 1940s dynasties who is the first black player to play in the major leagues. Or who the best Latin players were for any particular time period.

Ethnicity is largely a self-identified matter, although some players gladly identified themselves as being great black or Latin players. Obviously, Baseball Mogul won't tell you who is black and neither will OOTP (OOTP will simply assign a race -- often wildly inappropriate -- to a player. I have a white Dwight Gooden in an OOTP dynasty, for example.) A spreadsheet could indicate the race of a player, provided with an asterisk to indicate whether or not the player was "self-identified" or rejected a racial identification during his career. (I believe that some Cuban blacks "passed" as whites.)

Anyway, I doubt we'll be seeing any of these features from either Baseball Mogul or OOTP any time soon. If we want the mods, we'll have to do them ourselves.

(About "The Catch": you can go here to find out all about it. It occurred in Game 1 of the 1954 World Series.)

How to Build a Baseball Dynasty

This is from the fine people at Dynasty League Baseball. I'll add my own comments.

The question is: how do you construct a team that is capable of being a "dynasty" team? One that is capable of winning championship after championship after championship? Dynasty Baseball has concluded the following are the keys to victory.

Rule #1: Overall top to bottom talent is more important than a star player or two. A single baseball player does not make that much difference to any team.

I absolutely agree. In the years I've run my dynasty ("Even the Braves"), I've seen poor teams pick up a Mickey Mantle or a Hank Aaron and try to gain ground on the league leaders, but one player isn't going to make much difference on a team of 25 players. Yes, The Mick can hit them out but who hits around him. Let the teams with cash to spend spend it on the superstars.

In general, I only buy superstars when their prices come down to my level. Building a dynasty is all about "exploiting inefficiency" -- trading overvalued players and picking up undervalued players. Sometimes, in contract negotiations, the players themselves aren't even the best judge of their own value!

Rule #2: Evaluate players keeping in mind the most important situations in baseball.

As a "slobbermetrician", I don't have much faith in the situations named in this page. Clutch hitting might not be as big a factor as they make it to be, although sabermetricians are re-evaluating whether "clutchiness" exists. Not walking the leadoff man or not giving up homers with runners on base? Well, that depends on how good your pitcher is in general. You don't want pitchers who give up a lot of HR or walks, and a stat like Clay Dreslough's DICE should clue you in.

Rule #3: The most efficient offenses win more games.

I've always built my offenses around OBP -- perhaps too blindly about OBP, although I will look at the batter's age, health, and fielding ratings before making a final decision. However, there's no absolute metric. In general, given a choice between either OBP or fielding at a primary position -- infield or catcher -- I'll choose OBP but I won't put anyone with iron hands in those spots no matter what kind of bat power they wield.

The author writes about the fleet footed offenses of the 1980s Cardinals. Vince Coleman and the "Smith Brothers" (Lonnie and Ozzie). In general, I set my steal ratings to damn low, as you need to be stealing at about an 80 percent rate to add runs to your team. There are very few base runners that good, and definitely not in the era of the 1950s-1960s which is the time period I'm simming.

Rule #4: The best indicator of overall offensive value is OBP plus SLG.

Bill James suggested that OBP and SLG should be multiplied together instead of added for a more accurate rating. OBP should have a higher value than SLG. A team with a team OBP of 1.000 will score infinitely many runs; a team with a team SLG of 1.000 will score a hell of a lot of runs...but not infinitely many. Some people believe that OBP is somewhere between 1.1 to 3 times as valuable as SLG.

Rule #5: Understand what it takes to win at home and on the road.

In short, understand your ballpark...if it makes a difference. There are some true "pitcher's parks" and "hitter's parks" out there and the advantage you've convinced yourself you have might lie in the park and not the player. If you're simming a late 1990s-present dynasty and are looking for high SLG players, watch out for those ex-Rockies: much of their power value undoubtedly comes from playing in a hitter-friendly park.

Rule #6: Understand the value of scarcity.

That's what building a dynasty is all about. I'd put that at Rule #1 if I had written this article. Building a good ballclub is about exploiting not just inefficiency, but scarcity. If you have to pay extra to get a shortstop with a .350 OPS when no other shortstop available has an OPS above .320, then pay the piper if you can afford it -- you'll be glad having those extra 30 points of OBP.

However, if you can't do that, you can do something called "building in aggregate", discussed in Moneyball. If the difference between the shortstop you lost because he signed a $20 million dollar contract with the Yankees and a suitable replacement shortstop is 50 points of OBP, you can simply replace five of your players for five other similar players that have an OBP that's 10 points higher. You've essentially replaced your shortstop "in aggregate": splitting his skills into pieces, and then finding new players with those pieces.

Rule #7: Don't create a platoon weakness. Exploit your opponents platoon weakness.

I generally ignore this, at least in batting order. I don't think there's that much hitting difference in the lefty vs. righty matchups people make such a big deal about. However, I can see the value in having at least one good lefthander, and I might have to incorporate that into my future dynasties.

On Stat Dumps

One of the great things about reading the OOTP boards for the first time -- aside from the wealth of dynasties there -- is picking up a few new words. One term I picked up at OOTP was the term "stat dump", which is used to describe some types of dynasties.

A "stat dump" could be described as a no-frills dynasty. The term is apt -- a bunch of results of games or league leaders "dumped" out into a post. There's no attempt to create a universe, and there's no insight into the poster's thinking, or even goals. One criticism of stat-dump dynasties is "if your dynasty is just stats, I could just play the games myself!"

There is no consensus as to what makes a "stat dump". I've read dynasties spanning from one extreme to the other. There was an OOTP dynasty I read (can't recall the name) that spent several board pages fleshing the background of the universe before a single game was played! And at the other end, I've seen dynasties which were little more than the results of games.

I think that there's a happy medium between both extremes. Not everyone writes fiction, or wants to write it. People write dynasties because they enjoy baseball, not because they want to be full time researchers. Since I'm a history buff, I like those kind of dynasties. But I've also greatly enjoyed dynasties that focused entirely on on-the-field action.

What keeps a non-historical dynasty from being a stat dump? Insight. Knowing what the writer is thinking is the most important thing.

"Why did you choose that lineup?"
"Why did you make that trade?"
"What are you looking for in a team?"
"What problems are keeping your team from winning?"

Those dynasties have always been a pleasure to read. Everyone's had the experience of being frustrated with a sim that has gone bad -- no matter how hard you struggle, your team is in last place. Reading a dynasty, you get to commiserate with those who are struggling with their own teams, and when they win, you get the vicarious thrill of victory. It's very much like following a real team, and that's probably the highest compliment that can be given to any dynasty.

Moriarty9's "What's The Worst That Could Happen?" Dynasty

Right here.

Game: Out Of The Park
Starting point: Beginning of 2007 season (?)
Speed: Variable -- sometimes single games are highlighted

It's an interesting concept that works well with OOTP's intricate "create your own league" capability. Moriarty9 plays a young pitcher in the independent minor-league level Canadian-American League, and he writes stories both of league games and his personal adventures in a very amiable, conversational style. (There is a romantic subplot.)

Worth a look, definitely.

On Liquidity

Among the various stats that Baseball Mogul generates is a curious percentage called "liquidity". If you pull up the Front Office screen for a team in OOTP, you will not find any mention of liquidity anywhere.

The Baseball Mogul help files (at least the ones on the web) make it clear that "liquidity is not used in the game" -- I suppose it's provided as a matter of curiousity. In the scant number of posts that mention liquidity those posts either a) use liquidity in some other sense than the BM definition, or b) assume that having a high liquidity is a factor in lowering fan support, although Clay Dreslough or any of the the other programmers have never made a definitive statement.

BM defines liquidity as the cash on hand divided by the value of a franchise. For example, suppose your team has $3 million cash on hand and the franchise has been assessed at $300 million by Baseball Mogul's engine. Your team's liquidity would therefore be 3 mil/300 mil, or 0.01 -- 1 percent liquidity. If the team were in debt by $6 million, the liquidity would be -6 mil/300 mil, or -0.02 -- negative 2 percent liquidity.

This definition of liquidity jibes -- sort-of -- with the real definition of liquidity. Briefly, liquidity is the percentage of assets you have that can be quickly turned into cash.

Let's assume you own a business. The assets can be both cash assets and non-cash assets: examples of "non-cash" assets include land contracts, vehicles, equipment, or insurance policies -- in order to sell any of these, you'd have to put them on the market and it might take a while to get your money.

Baseball Mogul uses cash assets/total value (as opposed to assets/liabilities). Furthermore, one can have negative liquidity because one's cash could be "tied up" in debt.

Did any of that make sense? No. Good.

It seems that Baseball Mogul assumes that the only cash asset of a franchise is...well...cash. Everything else is assumed to be non-liquid -- the stadium, the players, the equipment and all the non-tangible assets such as trademarks, etc. This seems to make sense -- there are few things that a franchise owns that it can turn to money instantly -- most of a franchise's value is tied up in the stadium, the property, and player contracts.

It's a pity that Baseball Mogul cannot make use of liquidity, or that if they do make use of it, we're not told how and why it is used. In effect, it is a useless stat -- sort of like the names of the minor league teams in Baseball Mogul -- you go to the League Editor screen and fill in the names of the teams. You can call the teams anything you want, even put one hundred minor league teams in New York City -- the names and locations you choose have nothing to do with how the game plays out, whereas OOTP actually has a functioning minor league system where city location is important. Baseball Mogul needs to either drop liquidity, or find some use for it.

azredsoxfan's Oakland A's 2007 Dynasty

Is right here .

Some basic information:

Game: Baseball Mogul 2008
Starting point: Beginning of 2007 season
Team: Oakland Athletics
Speed: Day by Day
Player mode: One-pitch game-by-game player sim

A simple dynasty with not very much of a "stat dump" (more on that later) feel to it. azredsoxfan gives a brief writeup of the high points of each game. Every now and then, the flow is broken by an article-type post about a trade or injury to the A's. Nice visual layout with different font sizes make it pleasing on the eyes.

Oh Canada

Some pictures from my Toronto vacation. First, our seat from the Rogers Centre, formerly the Skydome:



As you can tell, the roof was definitely closed. Yes, it's artifical turf and yes, it feels like you're playing in a shoebox, but it's also strangely intimate and very comfortable:



And finally, the least flattering picture ever taken of me. No, dynasty players are not all fat slobs. At least I wasn't eating poutine:



However, Canadian law forbids me showing pictures of the Jays' 6-4 loss when Shaun Marcum gave up six runs in three IP, including a home run to Oakland's Nick Swisher.

"YODA55...you seek YODA55!"

The Top 75 OOTP Dynasties of 2006

Let me say that in starting this blog, I'm glad I've discovered YODA55 of the OOTP forums. He covers the dynasties so you don't have to!

The man must be incredibly patient. No wonder it took him six months to complete these reviews.

Maybe I should start "The Top 75 BM Dynasties of 2006". My only question is "Are there seventy-five Baseball Mogul Dynasties?"

Benched

No sooner do I get this blog started than I plan to go off on vacation for three days. I hope to see Toronto, and paranoid me hopes this sudden Torontonian crime wave (a tourist got killed by a gang of panhandlers) doesn't bode ill for my wife and I.

Of course, we're going to the Rogers Centre to see a Blue Jays game. I'll let you know how it turn out. Just don't expect a post till Wednesday.

Baseball Dynasty Blog

Greetings! This is a blog dedicated to the creation of baseball "dynasties": alternate baseball universes (fictional universes) using both real and imagined players.

Particular attention will be paid to dynasties created using the games "Baseball Mogul" and "OOTP (Out of the Park)", which are two of the more popular text-based baseball computer games. Other dynasties, however, will not be excluded.

Hopefully, this blog will:

a) provide resources for those interested in creating a baseball dynasty, or already working on a dynasty
b) highlight particular dynasties and point out what makes them appealing,
c) discuss approaches to creating a dynasty,
d) discuss game-specific problems in creating dynasties, and
e) discuss other manners which dynasty mavens might find interesting.

I hope you enjoy the ride, so "Play Ball!"

--Pet