Historically Happy!

[Mister Bogart]

I am trying to get all my perky posts in before the "Dog Days" of Doom when all the mean people return...but this release looks like it is going to be awesome for those of us that do Historical simming.

I just saw the thing about looking at "real life" stats from within the game. No more having to see some player I never heard of win MVP and having to Google to find out if he was really that good....

I am so psyched!

[rasnell]

Tremendous gains in OOTP 2007 for historical simmer purists like myself:

1. Ability to write your own game news stories.
2. Ability to import any team for any historical year, allowing you to create your own greatest teams of all-time.
3. Ability to import individual historic players, allowing you to create the greatest single franchise of all-time by team.
4. Player recalc is the greatest advancement of all. Leaderboards are coming out very, very well. We're finally getting close to historical accuracy.
5. As you noted, real life stats shown in the player profile.
6. Automatic league finances where salaries, ticket prices and everything shift and import with real life numbers each season. There are still flaws with the front office numbers, but major tweaks are coming for us to test in the next build.
7. Auto expansion is a tremendous advancement for historic simming; it even shifts to DH, adds playoffs, and changes strategy settings at the appropriate, historic time.
8. Play by play is much more detailed, with more variables and more interesting things to read. Most importantly, weather and the play by play directly relate, wind blocking what would have been a home run, pushing balls foul, fielders falling on wet turf after a rain delay.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by rasnell

7. Auto expansion is a tremendous advancement for historic simming; it even shifts to DH, adds playoffs, and changes strategy settings at the appropriate, historic time.

No historically correct post-season schedules though... I really gotta step up the campaign effort on that one...

It'd be really nice to get the 1994-1997 Division Series matchups working like they really did back then...

...because if they did then I could sit back and watch folks say, "Hey! The game is matching up the opponents in the Divisional Series wrong!" to which I can respond, "No, the game is actually doing it right. That's how the matchups were really done in those years."

[Claymore]

Originally Posted by Le Grande Orange

No historically correct post-season schedules though... I really gotta step up the campaign effort on that one...

Puresim does this. I'd imagine it would be as simple as pulling from the database...

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by Claymore

Puresim does this. I'd imagine it would be as simple as pulling from the database...

I doubt that it really does that, because I had to go and research that info year-by-year. It was somewhat trying in that alternative listings of World Series schedules was not terribly common and depended greatly on whether or not there was a close pennant race.

By way of example, the actual planned schedules for the 1944 World Series, depending on which club won the AL pennant (the NL pennant was already decided by the time the schedules were prepared):

         SLA vs SLN             DET vs SLN        NYA/BOS vs SLN

Wed Oct  4 = at SLN    Wed Oct  4 = at SLN    Wed Oct  4 = at SLN
Thu Oct  5 = at SLN    Thu Oct  5 = at SLN    Thu Oct  5 = at SLN
Fri Oct  6 = at SLA    Fri Oct  6 = at SLN    Fri Oct  6 = at SLN
Sat Oct  7 = at SLA    Sat Oct  7 = off day   Sat Oct  7 = off day
Sun Oct  8 = at SLA    Sun Oct  8 = at DET    Sun Oct  8 = off day
Mon Oct  9 = at SLN    Mon Oct  9 = at DET    Mon Oct  9 = at NYA/BOS
Tue Oct 10 = off day   Tue Oct 10 = at DET    Tue Oct 10 = at NYA/BOS
Wed Oct 11 = at SLN    Wed Oct 11 = off day   Wed Oct 11 = at NYA/BOS
                       Thu Oct 12 = at DET    Thu Oct 12 = off day
                                              Fri Oct 13 = at NYA/BOS

Note how the 2-3-2 home field rotation is only used in the all-St. Louis matchup; a World Series involving clubs from different cities would use a 3-4 rotation due to wartime travel restrictions. Note also the off day between games #6 and #7; this began in 1941 to give the club hosting the last game additional time to prepare and sell tickets for the deciding game (this off day was done away with after the 1946 World Series).

This is the kind of historically accurate post-season schedules I'm talking about.

[ctorg]

One additional step that could be taken in the future for "historical accuracy" would be to have historically accurate transactions. I'd imagine this would be extremely difficult to implement for OOTP, but it was something Strat-O-Matic did in their game. Basically, there would have to be a file detailing every transaction in the game in advance for each year, and you'd have to turn off the AI's (and human manager's) abilities to make them so that there would be no discrepancies. Then the AI would make trades each day. Everything from injuries to retirements would have to be controlled by the external file.

This probably won't ever happen for OOTP as it doesn't play to the game's strengths and would be very difficult to get working, but it's something I've seen in Strat-O-Matic, so I figured I'd bring it up.

[legendsport]

Originally Posted by ctorg

One additional step that could be taken in the future for "historical accuracy" would be to have historically accurate transactions. I'd imagine this would be extremely difficult to implement for OOTP, but it was something Strat-O-Matic did in their game. Basically, there would have to be a file detailing every transaction in the game in advance for each year, and you'd have to turn off the AI's (and human manager's) abilities to make them so that there would be no discrepancies. Then the AI would make trades each day. Everything from injuries to retirements would have to be controlled by the external file.

This probably won't ever happen for OOTP as it doesn't play to the game's strengths and would be very difficult to get working, but it's something I've seen in Strat-O-Matic, so I figured I'd bring it up.

There is a transaction database, which I believe originated from Retrosheet, and I think can also be found on baseball-reference.com. The player IDs are not lahman IDs (they're the retrosheet ones), but lahman's master table contains those IDs as well, so the data is there in a format that the game could use. Of course, I have no idea how much work implementing it into the game would be for Markus.

[ctorg]

Originally Posted by legendsport

There is a transaction database, which I believe originated from Retrosheet, and I think can also be found on baseball-reference.com. The player IDs are not lahman IDs (they're the retrosheet ones), but lahman's master table contains those IDs as well, so the data is there in a format that the game could use. Of course, I have no idea how much work implementing it into the game would be for Markus.

Yeah, I've seen that before, I think (unless I'm thinking of something else). The thing is that, IIRC, to work well it would need more information than it has. For instance, player injuries would need to be computer controlled as well so that guys wouldn't get career enders that would mess up history.

Ideally, it would work in conjunction with real life box scores and you could have each day's starting lineups be based on the actual historical starting lineups for that day (SOM does this as well, although box score data for before a certain year isn't complete, I believe).

[legendsport]

Originally Posted by ctorg

Yeah, I've seen that before, I think (unless I'm thinking of something else). The thing is that, IIRC, to work well it would need more information than it has. For instance, player injuries would need to be computer controlled as well so that guys wouldn't get career enders that would mess up history.

Ideally, it would work in conjunction with real life box scores and you could have each day's starting lineups be based on the actual historical starting lineups for that day (SOM does this as well, although box score data for before a certain year isn't complete, I believe).

It doesn't include injuries but does have a lot of information - which gets thinner the further back it goes - 1901 and 1902 have a lot of "June 1901 - player A goes to Boston (A) in unknown transaction" kind of stuff.

I think Retrosheet's got complete season boxes back to the early 60s. That process is ongoing - it's also a TON of information that could be a bear for the game to process. Retrosheet game files are ridiculously deep - a tremendous resource for hard-core replay games like DMB or SOM, and potentially OOTP as well.

[battists]

Personally, I'm just having a hard time reconciling Bogart's perky posts with his hideous avatar...

[Vris]

Originally Posted by ctorg

Yeah, I've seen that before, I think (unless I'm thinking of something else). The thing is that, IIRC, to work well it would need more information than it has. For instance, player injuries would need to be computer controlled as well so that guys wouldn't get career enders that would mess up history.

Ideally, it would work in conjunction with real life box scores and you could have each day's starting lineups be based on the actual historical starting lineups for that day (SOM does this as well, although box score data for before a certain year isn't complete, I believe).

bbref has lineups from every team going back to 1957.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/te.../1957_lu.shtml

I have no idea how this information would be used though.

[ctorg]

Originally Posted by Vris

bbref has lineups from every team going back to 1957.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/te.../1957_lu.shtml

I have no idea how this information would be used though.

I know that SOM uses similar information (although I think they have their own proprietary data) that can be used to automatically set every lineup of every game to what it actually was.

Since OOTP's greatest strengths are not in exactly replicating history, this is probably not a good use of resources for OOTP, but I'm sort of just imagining how it might work.

[PotatoPeeler]

Originally Posted by rasnell

Tremendous gains in OOTP 2007 for historical simmer purists like myself:

1. Ability to write your own game news stories.
2. Ability to import any team for any historical year, allowing you to create your own greatest teams of all-time.
3. Ability to import individual historic players, allowing you to create the greatest single franchise of all-time by team.
4. Player recalc is the greatest advancement of all. Leaderboards are coming out very, very well. We're finally getting close to historical accuracy.
5. As you noted, real life stats shown in the player profile.
6. Automatic league finances where salaries, ticket prices and everything shift and import with real life numbers each season. There are still flaws with the front office numbers, but major tweaks are coming for us to test in the next build.
7. Auto expansion is a tremendous advancement for historic simming; it even shifts to DH, adds playoffs, and changes strategy settings at the appropriate, historic time.
8. Play by play is much more detailed, with more variables and more interesting things to read. Most importantly, weather and the play by play directly relate, wind blocking what would have been a home run, pushing balls foul, fielders falling on wet turf after a rain delay.

That is a very impressive list. I can't wait to try a historical league out. Now that I've got my discount code, I'm off to pre-order!

[endgame]

Originally Posted by battists

Personally, I'm just having a hard time reconciling Bogart's perky posts with his hideous avatar...

Amen to that. It's been a difficult week adding to the horror list: perky posts by creepy clowns, a reference to the return of the mean people, Curtis's happy dance, hairless scrotums... I avoid combining any of them.

[swampdragon]

Originally Posted by Vris

bbref has lineups from every team going back to 1957.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/te.../1957_lu.shtml

I have no idea how this information would be used though.

Retrosheet is a tremendous resource for historical simmers as well. I'm kind of interested in playing a season with actual lineups and seeing how OOTP stacks up on the accuracy front. I know that's not its forte, but indications from playtesters are that the accuracy has improved.

[Assos]

But I have grown attached to www.Baseball-reference.com.... I love this game, re-openned my world to SABR and Stats!

[Curtis]

Originally Posted by endgame

It's been a difficult week adding to the horror list: …hairless scrotums...

I believe Andreas intended that ('A real man doesn't shave his balls.') to be more of a double entendre than it probably sounded to most people. Try thinking of it in terms of baseballs and 'doctoring' them. Some of the earliest surgeons were barbers. Barbers shave things…

This isn't helping, is it?

[Raidergoo]

Originally Posted by Curtis

This isn't helping, is it?

Outlook not so good.

[cephasjames]

Originally Posted by Raidergoo

Outlook not so good.

LOL.

The 8-Ball makes a funny.

[Mister Bogart]

Fear the evil clown of perkiness!

I am just going to drop this clown for something with boobs...boobs are good.