Since July of 2004 I have been doing full-season Major League Baseball replays using the Replay board game. I have completed 12 MLB seasons and one Negro National League season. Those seasons are 1908, 1923 NNL, 1941, 1952, 1956, 1957, 1960, 1966, 1967, 1972, 1975, 1978, and 1979. I am currently in May on a 1930 season replay. I use actual lineups and transactions. I have an Excel scoresheet file that uses Retrosheet game logs to print scoresheets for each game with the starting lineups pre-populated. I score the games with a pen on those sheets and then enter the stats into an Access database that I created.
After each day’s schedule is complete, I post brief game stories, along with some real news stories from that day on Replay’s Delphiforums board. After each Sunday’s game, I post an updated stats report called “The Replay News”.
There are a few especially memorable or unusual things that have happened in my projects. In 1908, the Tigers rallied from 17 ½ games behind on August 7 to take the American League pennant by a half game. Amazingly, the Red Sox won the 1941 pennant over a much better Yankee team. By runs scored and allowed, New York should have won handily as they did in real life, but Boston kept winning close ones. In fact, the Red Sox have dominated my projects with World Series wins in 1967, 1972, 1975, and 1978. Dave Kingman hit 65 home runs in the 1979 season.
After I finished a few seasons, I decided to make another database that contains the final stats from all completed projects, so I could make my baseball encyclopedia. I republish the encyclopedia after each completed season. The latest edition is a 592-page PDF document. It includes a recap of pennant and World Series winners and award recipients; a list of no-hitters; a section of season-by-season individual stats in the format of the Neft and Cohen Baseball Encyclopedias; single-season and career top tens in batting and pitching categories; a section of player-by-player stats as in a MacMillan Baseball Encyclopedia; and a comparison of actual to replay “career” (including just the seasons I have played) totals for batters and pitchers who have played a significant amount.
My Gaming History
My first foray into baseball game-playing with real big league players involved playing games with my baseball cards where the at bats were decided either with the spinner that came with my baseball lunchbox I got in second grade or with the rounded-corner cards included in the 1969 Topps packs that had a picture of a player and a result like “Home Run”, “Ground Out”, etc. Of course, these games didn’t do anything to reflect the players’ actual abilities so I kept lusting after the Strat-O-Matic, APBA, Negamco, and the like games I saw advertised in baseball magazines. Finally, my mom got me Strat-O-Matic Football with the 1971 cards and then their baseball game a year later. Through 1970’s, I would try to play the current in-progress season with the most recent card set by moving the players to their current teams. I would keep track of player stats on index cards one card per team. (I wrote small.)
In 1979, I started a new job and my boss was an APBA player. I tried that game because I lived less than an hour from Lancaster, PA, where they were then located so I didn’t have to wait out mail order. They also had begun to release some complete old seasons. I think 1927, 1931, and 1948 were the first ones. Through the 1980’s, I played APBA, both in a draft league and doing solo past season projects. I would switch projects a lot, rarely getting one of those seasons into June.
In the 1990’s I switched to computer versions of APBA and then Diamond Mind and did various projects with them, including playing in a couple of leagues.
By 2004 I decided I missed the immersion that cards and dice provide. After checking out a few games on-line, I decided that Replay Baseball seemed like what I was looking for so I ordered the game with the 1978 set. The game obviously really clicked with me.
Why Replay for Me?
There are a lot of baseball simulations available today. Many of them are just terrific and there is no best one. The good ones have their individual characteristics make them the game of choice for some part of our population.
Replay just works for me. First off, Pete Ventura (the current producer of the game) is one of the finest people I have ever met and the Replay message board is full of very kind people. I play full-season replays with as-played lineups, so I pretty much need to have all or mostly all players represented in my card sets, something Replay does. I want to play my games as much as possible in spectator mode rather than making decisions for the individual players and Replay’s baserunning options allow that. Perhaps the biggest thing that pushes me toward Replay is that the interaction between the batter, pitcher, and fielders feel about right to me.
