The Best Dynasty Resource...Ever?!?

I've just discovered a brand new dynasty resource that might be invaluable to those looking for historical versimillitude in creating a baseball dynasty. It's called http://www.paperofrecord.com.

The idea behind paperofrecord.com is to create a searchable database of newspapers spanning from the 19th century to today. The database includes newspapers from the United States, the UK, Canada, Mexico, and other countries. Some papers extend back to the mid-19th century.

Yes, you will have to register, but since I don't have a phone (wink) I put a placeholder phone number of the "555" type. But what's really great about this site is that THE ENTIRE ARCHIVE OF "THE SPORTING NEWS" is on the site.

If you noticed the picture, this was obtained from the paperofrecord.com website and a version of the image composition software I use known as "The Gimp". This is the masthead for the very first "The Sporting News" ever, printed in 1886.

And the important part is that this is a searchable database. Want to read articles about the 1897 baseball season as it takes place? Or the 1917 season? Or the 1937 season? Or the 1978 season? It's all here!

And if you're running a Canadian dynasty, hey, just go to one of the Canadian newspapers, search for "baseball" and enjoy the power of paperofrecord.com! I'll be adding this as a "side link" under the "history" section.

legendsport's "The Completely Fictional History of Baseball" has own website!

You can find this spectacularly detailed dynasty here as well as on OOTP. I'll be adding it to the "cool links" on the left.

Apparently, legendsport plans on turning this dynasty into an online OOTP league -- I know at least of one other dynasty that became an online league in OOTP. However, he'll still be reporting the progress of this several-player dynasty, so I recommend it to anyone interested.

Which is the Better Sim for Historical Leagues: BM or OOTP?

In my last post, I introduced a measure called the Noll-Scully measure. The concept behind the Noll-Scully measure is that a perfectly competitive league would be a league where every team was the same -- had the same strength of pitching talent, batting talent, fielding talent, managing talent, etc.

In such a league, you would expect a team to finish at 81-81 for the year -- after all, it is playing against teams as evenly matched as it is, and trying to determine who would be most likely to win any particular game would be similiar to flipping a coin.

However, not every team would finish 81-81 in this league. There would be some random chance along the way. After all, if you flip a coin ten straight times, you don't always get five heads and five tails. Sometimes, you get four heads or six heads -- or an even greater "deviation" from the mean. So there would be some deviations from an 81-81 record.

With a lot of games, the "number of wins" variable approaches a bell curve distribution. One could expect that our "average" team would win between 74.7 and 87.3 games about 68.2 percent of the time. We could expect that it would win between 68.4 and 93.6 games about 95 percent of the time! The chances of one of these even teams in an even league winning less than 69 or more than 93 games are very small indeed: only 4.6 percent.

What the Noll-Scully measure does it that it compares the "scatter" of a perfectly matched league to the "scatter" of any league you give it. The actual measure is (standard deviation of wins in given league)/(standard deviation of wins in perfect league) = (standard deviation of wins in given league)/[(1/2)*(square root of games played)]. The denominator comes from what one would expect in a binomial, or "coin-flip" distribution.

A "perfectly competitive" league would have a Noll-Scully measure of 1.0, since the numerator would be equal to the denominator. I gave a list of Noll-Scully measures for various sports leagues in an earlier posts.

CatKnight then did an interesting experiment. He performed historical simulations for a number of years, and then he compared how well Out of the Park Baseball (OOTP) did with Baseball Mogul (BM). His results follow, and I quote the private message he sent me:

(* * *)

Hi, petrel: I said I'd do some experiments and get back to you on this. Interesting tidings - not entirely surprising.

First, here are the values you took from that article - modern values which we more or less instinctively expect:

National Basketball Association: 2.89

American League: 1.78

National League: 1.76

National Hockey League: 1.70

National Football Legue: 1.48

*******

Now, I ran both OOTP and BM through the years 1901-1925. League balance was still kinda fragile at that time, so it's useful to look at what really happened:

MLB (1901-1925): Average 2.52

Most Competitive: 1.87 (1918)

Least Competitive: 3.39 (1909)

OOTP first: Fictional setup, but everyone in the correct cities with hopefully correct demographics and statistical patterns for that time.

OOTP (1901-1925): Average 1.60

Most Competitive: 1.12 (1913)

Least Competitive: 2.04 (1903)

So...far more competitive - even a bit more so than modern day baseball, but purists might wonder if it's realistic for the time.

BM (1901-1925): Average 2.39

Most Competitive: 1.74 (1906)

Least Competitive: 3.16 (1922)

BM's numbers are much closer to what really happened, though a little more draconian than we modern day fans may be used to.

*****

One of the main questions BM's raised is whether the financial model unbalances the game over time - so Year 1-2 may go smoothly, but by Year 10 competitive balance is gone. Let's look:

OOTP (1901-05) 1.91

(1906-1910) 1.61

(1911-1915) 1.40

(1916-1920) 1.63

(1921-1925) 1.43

So pretty uniform. OOTP actually settled down once the AIs got moving after a few years.

BM (1901-05) 2.10

(1906-10) 2.00

(1911-15) 2.45

(1916-20) 2.47

(1921-25) 2.96

BM did fine for about ten years. After 1920 the situation descended rapidly, partially because the Braves tanked (.299 or worse record) for four straight years and the Phils for two.

No team 'tanked' during the OOTP run. It happened twelve times (7 with the Braves) during BM.

*******

The last indicator of competition is how often one can expect to win the pennant. Here are the results:

Real Major Leagues

10: New York Giants

6: Boston Red Sox, Philadelphia Athletics

5: Pittsburgh Pirates, Chicago Cubs

4: Chicago White Sox

3: New York Yankees, Detroit Tigers

2: Washington Senators, Brooklyn Dodgers

1: Cleveland Indians, Philadelphia Phillies, Boston Braves, Cincinnati Reds

0: St Louis Browns, St Louis Cardinals

OOTP
10: New York Yankees

8: Chicago Cubs

4: St Louis Cardinals, St Louis Browns, Washington Senators

3: Philadelphia Athletics, Cincinnati Reds, Brooklyn Dodgers

2: Detroit Tigers, New York Giants, Pittsburgh Pirates, Philadelphia Phillies

1: Cleveland Indians, Chicago White Sox, Boston Braves

0: Boston Red Sox

A little more inclusive, but not much. Two teams dominating for so long (NYY, CHC) is interesting.

BM
8: New York Giants

7: Cleveland Indians

5: Washington Senators, Chicago Cubs

4: Brooklyn Dodgers

3: Cincinnati Reds, Pittsburgh Pirates, Philadelphia Athletics, St Louis Browns, New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox

2: St Louis Cardinals

1: Chicago White Sox

0: Detroit Tigers, Philadelphia Phillies, Boston Braves

More domination here, and more teams left out - but not our usual suspects. The NY Giants almost always dominate and are directly responsible for a rise in Noll-Scully in the mid-late 1910s, and Washington is (interestingly) the big AL market, but Cleveland's not that large. The Cubs don't usually benefit from Chicago's size.

OOTP - 1901 through 1925 v 2.0

(I then) attempted to recreate what would have been correct financially for this time period:

No free agency

Arbitration after 1 yr (to force the AI to think about a player's true value, as contracts were only 1 yr in this time period)

No revenue sharing

No salary cap

OOTP with corrections above
1901-25: 1.71

1901-05: 1.71

1906-10: 1.88

1911-15: 1.78

1916-20: 1.64

1921-25: 1.55

Best Year: 1.20 (1921)

Worst Year: 2.23 (1910)

This league showed more signs of "have" and "have not" syndrome than the original run of OOTP. Still, while these ratings are more competitive than early 20th century ball, they're comparable to modern figures.

Again, no team 'tanked.' The worst record belonged to the 1903 Tigers (47-93 .335) followed by the 1915 Yankees (52-102 .337). The best record belonged to the 1915 White Sox (109-45 .707). In all, only one team recorded 100 losses, and three recorded 100 wins.

Upward mobility within the league suffered compared to OOTP or even BM, possibly because of the lack of player mobility. Teams would stay down for a decade or more before recovering. Using my current franchise relocation rules, FOUR teams would have moved: Cincinnati and Detroit in 1916, the Yankees in 1918, and Braves in 1925. This is higher than I'd intended and, again, suggests teams in a rut are going to stay there, and those on or near the top aren't going to fall far.

Pennants by Team:
11) Chicago White Sox

9) Pittsburgh Pirates

6) Brooklyn Dodgers

5) Boston Red Sox

4) St. Louis Browns

3) St. Louis Cardinals, Philadelphia Athletics, Philadelphia Phillies

2) Cincinnati Reds, New York Giants

1) Cleveland Indians, New York Yankees

0) Washington Senators, Boston Braves, Chicago Cubs, Detroit Tigers

Again, a bit top heavy with the White Sox and Pirates dominating their leagues.

--CatKnight

(* * *)

Thanks once again to CatKnight for all the hard work.

After reading all of the above, I am forced to conclude that OOTP simply does a better job of historical simulation than BM does. After a while, BM "degenerates", with large market teams dominating, and if one doesn't decide to play by some set of "house rules" balance becomes farcical.

This leads to two questions: 1) how come BM hasn't been knocked out of the market yet, and 2) how come BM doesn't change their engine to be a bit more realistic over the long run?

As for BM and the market, both CatKnight and I agree on one thing: Baseball Mogul's ease of set-up and play simply blows OOTP out of the water. The OOTP curve is sharp, and even though I've purchased OOTP, I rarely play it. There's so much going on in OOTP, the menus are hard to find and you never know exactly where to find what you're looking for. Baseball Mogul's menus are simple, and you can just breeze right through and get started, although with none of the options in setting up leagues that OOTP offers.

In some quarters, BM is damned for its simplicity. However, with Baseball Mogul, at least you don't have to read a 500 page manual to get started.

So how come BM doesn't change their historical engine to be more realistic? CatKnight came up with some theories with which I agree. Either a) Clay Dreslough simply isn't aware of how unbalanced the game becomes over a long period of time, b) he simply doesn't care that it becomes unbalanced, as he figures that most people just want to play in the 2007-plus era with big-market teams dominating, or c) he doesn't intend to make it a priority at this time.

What can I conclude? For dynasty makers, you still have the same choice: BM or OOTP. Making a choice between one or the other has always involved trade-offs. OOTP is actually "tighter" than reality, in that it's actually more competitive than is historically appropriate. BM is "looser" than reality -- it is less competitive than a real league over time. The question -- as always -- is "what do you want"?

How to Write a Good Dynasty

Boy, that's a tough question. It's sort of like asking, "boy, how do I become as popular as Ronald Reagan?"

If someone were to ask me the question as to how to attain Ronald Reagan's facility with people, my first answer would probably be "don't imitate Ronald Reagan". Imitation is something that needs to be broken -- the people who were really "great" sort of found a way to be comfortable in their own skin.

So, if you want to write a good dynasty, the first answer would be "be comfortable". Find a format that interests you. If you want to report day-by-day, do that. If you want to make your reports weekly, monthly, or even yearly, do that as well. You decide how often you care to report on what's going on.

The next step is to answer the question, "what interests you about baseball?" Because if you center on the part of baseball you find interesting, you'll write interesting stories. You won't be able to help writing interesting stories, your enthusiasm will bubble over and it will be contagious.

My interest is in baseball history, and history in general. So my dynasties tend to be rich on background. It's what I like writing about. Another good historical dynasty is CatKnight's "Cardinal Sins" and there are plenty of good historical dynasties on OOTP.

If you like the idea of being a GM more than writing about baseball history, you might choose the format from abben's "Moneyball 1988 Brewers Style" that I heartily recommend -- you write up your dynasty from that point of view. What are the strengths and weaknesses of your team? What decisions should you (as GM) make? Who is hot? Who is cold? What were you thinking when you made that decision? If you're taking the role of GM, people want to know those things.

If you like players a lot more, then you might just want to follow a player. "A-Rod's Incredible Dynasty" could be an idea -- follow Alex Rodriguez through his development as a player, starting with the first season and continuing until his retirement. Can he break The Bighead's record?

If you like the idea of being a player a lot more, you might like the idea of Big Six's "The Base Ball Life of Patrick O'Farrell" which is an OOTP dynasty. He created a player called Patrick O'Farrell in 1904, and told his story through letters O'Farrell writes, newspaper articles, and omnipotent "third person" posts. You could create a player, name him after yourself (or someone else) and tell his story -- and of course, report how he's doing. A modern dynasty might really be cool, because pro baseball players lead lives that make the orgies of Rome look tame.

If you like the idea of being GOD a lot more, you might want to write a dynasty like legendsports's, "The Completely Fictional History of Baseball". You would start the league in 1901, use entirely imaginary players, and tell the story of the league from then on. What teams and players dominated? Which teams and player turned out to be real disappointments?

So I suppose the hints for writing a good dynasty are:

1. Don't imitate anyone, unless you like their formats a lot -- I get all kinds of inspiration reading other people's posts.

2. Write about the aspect of baseball that interests you.

3. Use the spellchecker -- don't let bad grammar give the reader displeasure.

4. Stick with it, even when no one is reading or commenting -- it takes time to build a readership.

What Competitive Balance?

I was looking on the internet for a tool by which I could measure the "competitive balance" of a league -- in other words, what was the tendency of certain teams to dominate play? In short, an ideal statistic would reveal how much of the season would be a "foregone conclusion".

I found such a statistic on the "The Wages of Wins" website at http://www.wagesofwins.com.

It's called the Noll-Scully measure. To explain it in words, Noll-Scully divides the standard deviation of wins for a league during a year by the "ideal standard deviation" of wins in a league where all teams are equal -- that is, over time, each team will have a .500 record each year.

Here are some examples of Noll-Scully measures from the authors, measured in 2005. The higher the measure, the less competitive a league is over the years. All the measures are average measures for the time indicated.

National Basketball Association: 2.89 from 1986-2005

American League: 1.78 from 1986-2005

National League: 1.76 from 1986-2005

National Hockey League: 1.70 from 1984-2004

National Football League: 1.48 from 1985-2004

Therefore, I applied the measure to the years of my "Even The Braves" dynasty, which is a "Baseball Mogul" dynasty. Note that the Noll-Scully measures:

a) are not split into different leagues -- in general, the American League seems less balanced than the National in my league,
b) do not note franchise relocations or infusions of money when teams change owners, or other cases.

The dynasty is now in 1968, having started in 1953. The numbers from 1953 to 1957 are listed below:

1953: 1.74

1954: 2.18

1955: 2.24

1956: 2.36

1957: 2.51

1958: 2.82 (expansion to 20 teams from 16)

1959: 2.78

1960: 2.54

1961: 2.99 (egad! The NBA is more competitive)

1962: 3.12

1963: 3.28

1964: 3.69

1965: 3.85 (expansion to 24 teams from 20)

1966: 4.22 (!!!)

1967: 3.26

Note how dramatically non-competitive the ETB league became in the 1960s. The New York Yankees and New York Giants got a grip on the championships and never let them go. The Yankees have won nine straight American League pennants.

Also note the drop from 1966 to 1967. A penalty on overspending was enacted at the end of the 1965 season. Since it was enacted in December after free agent signing, the New York teams were able to sign even more top-notch free agents -- "the rich get richer!"

However, I suspect that in 1967, non Giants-Yankees teams had a better chance of signing free agents with the money they received from penalties, and also from the fact that both the Giants and Yankees were in debt and only able to sign their own players. However, we've only seen one year of the Petrel luxury tax house rules.

I'll be interested in finding out how 1968 turns out.

Franchise Relocation House Rules

If you run a dynasty, you might have the situation where there's one team that is not only doing very, very badly, but which never seems to recover. Hundred-loss season follows hundred-loss season.

The question you might ask yourself is, "Should I relocate the team?" Maybe moving the team to another city will give it a chance to revitalize its fortunes. But what rules should you use to determine which teams get to go and which teams have to say?

CatKnight was kind enough to provide me his house rules for franchise relocation, and I am happy to host them at this link. As soon as I get enough house rules, there will be a link at the left hand side of the page that points you to the "master list" of house rules.

legendsport's "The Completely Fictional History of Baseball" Dynasty

One of the best dynasties on OOTP is legendsport's dynasty. legendsport has an ambitious goal -- to retell the complete history of professional baseball. All of it. The minor leagues, the majors, hell...everything.

However, since he doesn't have every stat that man ever wrote, he'll do it with fictional players.

Add to this goal OOTP's league-customization capacities, the power of OOTP's Facegen, and some mods for both 19th century players (and 19th century whiskers!) one gets a fascinating record of an alternate baseball history that runs on a parallel track to our current one.

As I write this, legendsport's gotten as far as the 1883 season. Let's hope he achieves this ambitious goal!

A Baseball Mogul Renaissance?

A side note: CatKnight alerted me to an OOTP link by cephasjames, which you can find under the "logos" section on the left-hand side of the page. It is a multitude, a virtual cornucopia of team logo goodness, and I'm sure that most of those logos can be adopted to Baseball Mogul, to uniform building, or to whatever project you want to undertake.

Is it just me, or have dynasties really taken off and blossomed in Baseball Mogul? Yes, I know there's a multitude of great dynasties at OOTP which are not only more numerous but more detailed and of longer duration than most of BM's short-lived dynasties.

However, compared to what existed before at Baseball Mogul, it seems that everyone who has Baseball Mogul 08 is building a dynasty and posting the results. CatKnight has his great "Cardinal Sins" dynasty; there are two great Blue Jays dynasties by Overbay17 and walker60, skudplayer has a Washington Nationals dynasty, HoustonGM, jianoran, the list goes on and on and if I've not mentioned someone, please don't take it as a slight.

Even though BM has its limitations as a game compared to OOTP, it looks like BM fans are taking those limitations and are stretching them in new and interesting ways. After the beating that BM sometimes takes in some quarters, it's enheartening to see.

Free Agency House Rules

I have now opened a GeoCities account where I intend to collect and post the various house rules that people submit. OldFatGuy at the Baseball Mogul board has given me permission to host his Free Agency rules.

The current rules are at this GeoCities website (click the link). Yes, it's GeoCities, but it's free, and "free" is definitely within my budget.

When I get enough pages started, you'll see a link at the left that will direct you to all of the house rules.

Edit: heads up to Overbay17 for noting the busted link. It should work now.

Back on the DL

OldFatGuy wrote up some "house rules" for Baseball Mogul that I thought were quite remarkable. I want to find a place to host them, but I don't know where so that project will have to wait.

Probably won't get back to another blog post until tomorrow or Saturday. After all, I not only like writing about dynasties, but writing dynasties myself. More later.

"Once and For All, Why Not the Best?"

The above title comes from a song from the Jimmy Carter campaign in 1976. Why the title? More below.

Let's suppose you're drafting players for your BM/OOTP team. Normally, you can build yourself into an unbeatable dynasty in BM in two years, anyway, but let's say you're mired at .500 or below. Your problem, my friend, is pitching. You have no starting pitching to speak up, just a bunch of has-beens and never-weres thrown in the rotation to soak up runs for their ballooning ERAs.

The draft has come up and you're drafting in a fairly good position. It's finally your turn to pick, and it's time for your franchise to invest in the future.

The best remaining starting pitcher is Player A. He's okay, a sort of mid-range first round draft pick overall. Other better starting pitchers have gone before him, but Player A is still available and is ready for you to pick up the phone and call him and say, "Welcome to the Lugnuts."

However, there is an outfielder -- Player B -- who hasn't been picked yet. Player B is a top-range draft pick. In terms of pure ability, he's better than your starting pitcher, better enough for it to be noticed -- the reason he hasn't been drafted yet is that there's been a run on pitchers.

Your problem as Lugnuts GM/owner is that hitting isn't your problem. You've already got a core of outfielders that are good hitters and good fielders, and maybe a guy or two to back them up. Currently, Player B's about as useful as t*ts on a duck.

On the other hand -- Player B could be trade bait for a veteran starting pitcher somewhere. Furthermore, if lighting strikes and your outfielders pull their hamstrings or die rescuing kittens from flaming bourbon factories, in a few years Pkayer B will be ready to take their places.

So what do you do? Do you pass Player B up and take Player A, because pitching fills your needs, or do you take the best player available in the draft, regardless of redundancies?

More House Rules

With regard to the house rules thread, I'll provide some of the "house rules" for my "Even the Braves" dynasty.

1) No free agent can be signed for more than $5.3 million/year. This eliminates most of the superlative free agents. However, a free agent can be signed for up to $5.6 million/year on a roll of 1-3 on a d10 (ten sided die). One can reroll, however, every three game days.

One can sign a free agent for any price on a roll of 1 on a d10. One can also reroll every 3 days if one doesn't get a satisfactory roll. This rule, however, should not be abused.

2) Revenue sharing: currently, my "Even the Braves" dynasty has a primitive form of revenue sharing:

a) Revenue can only be taken from the largest spending team in the American League and the largest spending team in the National League. Second-place spenders are not affected.

b) For calculation purposes, one takes the larger of the following two values as team salary:

- team salary before Game 1
--team salary immediately at the end of the World Series

c) If the National League top team salary exceeds $160 million, the offending team is fined at a dollar-per-dollar rate above that threshold. The excess is then spread among the other teams:

Example: 11 team league
Top team salary: $171 million
Fine: $171 million - $160 million = $11 million
$11 million distributed among 11 teams = $1 million/team

Top team salary: $158 million -- no fine and no changes

d) If the American Leage top team salary exceeds $150 million, the offending team is fined 75 percent of the excess. The excess is spread among the other team:

Example: 8 team league
Top team salary: $159.33333 million
Fine: 75 percent of $9.33333 million = $7 million
$7 million distrubted among 11 teams = $1 million/team

House Rules and OldFatGuy's "Card" System for Baseball Mogul

One of the problems with Baseball Mogul is that the AI for each team acts the same. (In OOTP, each team has a priority that determines the goal of the team, giving each team different priorities.)

Since each BM team acts the same, all other things being equal, cash dominates and big-market teams build unbreakable dynasties. However, players have several advantages over the AI. First, players tend to be smarter, and most players can take the worst of teams and manage them to 1936-39 Yankees status within one or two game years. Second, players get first pick when it comes to signing free agents, and the players do not artificially tender several offers at once. They only sign you. (The second advantage might be the cause of the first.)

In one of the Baseball Mogul threads -- "A New Era is Born" -- rockiesfan4ever relates some "house rules" to make your Baseball Dynasty more interesting, particularly as it comes to the signing of free agents.

Here's what I do. I find I have to give rules for myself to keep it challenging too. My first rule is total number of FA I can sign. I base this on last seasons finish and it equals the number of places behind first I finish in the standings. So, if I finish 1st, I can sign 0, 2nd means I can sign 1, third means 2, etc. My second rule is I can only sign 2 (assuming I can sign at least 2 from rule 1) per day. Seems reasonable, most of the top ones are gone the first day. My third rule limits who I can negotiate with. It is a little complicated, but here goes.

I look at the player I wish to sign. I use a deck of cards which has 4 suits (and two jokers), and shuffle them and draw a card and that card tells me whether this player will negotiate with me or not. If I draw a joker it always means the player will not negotiate, so I fail to sign him. If I draw a spade it always means the player will negotiate. The other 3 suits are determined like this:
If I draw a HEART: This player will negotiate with me only if his ambition is less than or equal to 0 (meaning he's not concerned about team success) OR if his ambiition is positive than I must have finished no worse than second in my division. Otherwise, his ambition prevents him from negotiating with my team.
If I draw a DIAMOND: This player will only negotiate with me if his greed is positive.
If I draw a CLUB: This player will only negotiate with me if his personality "fit" with my team is above C. I.E., C+ or better.

Finally, when I get to negotiate with a player, I draw another card. If I draw a joker here, it means he changed his mind and won't negotiate. The suits determine how offers I can submit. If its black (Club or Spade), then I can only make 2 offers. If he doesn't accept my second offer, I lost him. If the card is a DIAMOND, I can only make 1 offer. And if that card is a HEART, then I can make 3 offers.

Sorry for the length. But you asked for ideas. That's how I do it that adds some randomness and some sort of realism (basing it personality and such), and adds a challenge to the human player. That last card I draw determining number of offers just it makes it more challenging financially. If you can only make one offer, you better make one you're sure he's gonna like.

I think it's a great set of house rules -- one of the great things about a great set of house rules is that you wish you had thought of it yourself. Furthermore, it makes great use of the "personality" statistics of Baseball Mogul under the personality tab of a player profile. These stats don't figure into the game, but under the house rules, they have a use.

All in all, a great set of rules. If you have your own house rules, share them in the comments. I'll add my "Even the Braves" house rules -- which are very short -- in a future post.