Social Distancing and New (Baseball) Beginnings

Well!  It's been quite some time since I've updated this blog, and what a decade the teens were, eh? Whoo. I never got terribly far with the last league--I didn't have time to really learn a new game and make it do what I wanted, so I used a quickstart that was available rather than trying to replicate the kind of leagues that I wrote about earlier in this blog's history.  Eventually that petered out, though I don't remember whether it was work and travel ramping up or if other things just took up my free time.

With the COVID-19 pandemic currently underway and affecting sports around the world, including the start (and perhaps the entirety) of the Major League Baseball season, I thought I'd give this another go. Technology has advanced, and while my free time is structured very differently than it was when I was last successful at running a league like this, I'm game to give it a go.

I'm using Out of the Park Baseball, the newly-released version 21. Rather than try to continue with what I was doing before, I'm basically rebooting. I'm using the best edition of each current team in the DH era, as determined by Pythagorean record (rather than real record). This is mostly for ease and so I don't have to deal with what's "fair" when the 1927 Yankees play the 1995 Indians (for instance). It turns out both the Astros and the Brewers have had their best seasons while in the AL, so the AL has 16 teams and the NL would have 14. To bring the NL up to a more aesthetic (to me) 16 teams, I've added the 1994 Expos (the Expos' move is the only relocation of the era) and a more fantastical choice, pretending that the Marlins moved to Charlotte in ~2006 or so and adding a "Charlotte Knights" team that's really the 2008 Marlins in different uniforms. They won't be competitive for the title or anything, so it shouldn't throw things off very much (I'm using a balanced schedule). It also seems like it'll be an interesting (perhaps only to me) experiment of how a not-great-but-decent team does when facing all-timers every day.

I did two other things of some (though perhaps little) note: I broke the DH-era rule for the Pirates and included the 1972 team. They're a bit better than any other Pirates team in the DH era, it's only off by a year, and that way Roberto Clemente can be included. Finally (I think), I rebranded the Cleveland team to be the Blues, one of the original names for the AL franchise. I figured since I objected to their current name (a feeling which has evolved over the decade this blog has been on hiatus) and I could do something about it, I would.

The next few posts will talk about the teams in each league. I certainly plan to have the time until that post be much less than the time taken from the previous test to this one.