I’ve been considering simulating an entire 162 game Major League Baseball season. I am not talking about taking one team and simulating 162 games. We’re going bigger than that, like the entire league’s schedule bigger. That’s 2,430 games, not including playoffs.
Why? You ask.
Why not?
The playoffs will happen, too. As
Tolkien wrote, “There can be only one.”
Was that Tolkien or Mortal Combat? I’d look, but there’s no use in straying too far from the subject yet. The point is that if you’re going to play a full season then you have to see it to the conclusion of crowning a single champion. God knows, I won’t be the winner.
This urge – it’s not an obsession yet – started with the gradual migration of my childhood crap to the home I share with my wife. Buried in one of the plastic tubs were my baseball cards and the Baseball Card All-Star Game.
The gist of the game is this: You create two teams and their batting lineups from whatever conglomeration of baseball cards you want, and then you play. No batteries required.
My bad. “There can be only one,” is from Highlander. Like the board game, Highlander was made in the 1980s. It’s about a band of immortals that duel with swords with the goal of decapitating the opponent. The last man – I think they were all men in the original movie – won the prize of being immortal. I don’t remember the plot well enough to understand the full crux of why they were determined to cut each other’s heads off, so I am not sure why they couldn’t all agree to put the swords down and find a better way to pass the time. I guess once you get an idea in your head, it’s hard to shake. No matter how illogical, time-consuming, or all together pointless it is.
I can relate.
The gameplay is simple. There are ten columns on each side of a laminated piece of cardboard. One side (shaded gray) is for players with twenty or more home runs during the most recent season listed on the ball card, and the other side (shaded pink) is for everyone else. The column headers are batting average ranges, and there are eleven at-bat outcomes in each column. The outcomes are numbered two to twelve, and you achieve an outcome by rolling a pair of dice. Simple. Roll a seven, you strikeout.
The game rules ignore pitchers, but for posterity’s sake, I include them. I choose rotations and develop bullpens. When the dice turn on a starter, I go to the pen and even take a look at which arm each reliever throws with to see if it provides an advantage against an upcoming batter. Perhaps I should enact a rule that I roll the dice with the hand that corresponds with the arm the pitcher uses. Details like that matter.
For instance, Highlander starts at a professional wrestling event where the Fabulous Freebirds were the main attraction. The Freebirds had a couple different incarnations, but the most successful combination was the trio of Michael “P.S.” Hayes, Terry “Bam Bam” Gordy, and Buddy “Jack” Roberts. The group terrorized the southern territories in the 1980s, waving the confederate flag while also portraying somewhat androgynous characters. Only in professional wrestling can “redneck” and “androgynous” get over in the south as a successful gimmick. In all other walks of life, those two terms, especially in the south, mix as well as oil and water. Watch enough 1980s wrestling broadcasts, and you’ll likely get hooked to such clichés as things mixing like oil and water. Another good one is the immovable object meeting the irresistible force. That means something, but after a million uses, it doesn’t mean anything to me other than something to do with Hulk Hogan charging into Andre the Giant.
Baseball cards and professional wrestling occupied much of my childhood. I have a tub of old wrestling magazines purchased from a local bookstore at a rate of three for a dollar on Thursdays when my mom would go grocery shopping. And if I were being completely honest, the day my dad brought home a VHS player after work probably still ranks as one of my best days. Not only could I watch important films like Highlander, but also I could start renting wrestling videos from the store. Remember when there were stores to rent movies?
For most, opening Highlander with a wrestling scene didn’t add much, but for me, it’s probably why a line like “There can be only one” is still floating around my subconscious. It doesn’t seem like much, but it mattered to me. Stuff like that always runs through my mind when I am writing. So does the baseball game.
While writing this, a bulb lit up above my head. It’s the best thought I’ve had today. The pitcher can bat despite the fact that most card sets do not include a pitcher’s hitting stats. See pitchers are like my writing career, very few hits. Ba-dum. We can assume every pitcher slugged under twenty home runs and had a batting average below the Mendoza line. This is a monumental thought in my desire to simulate a season. By employing this method, I can recreate the unique nature of both the National and American Leagues. Before this revelation, I employed a designated hitter in every lineup. Lame.
A note on the Mendoza line: The dubious honor for hitters with an average below .200 is named after former professional shortstop Mario Mendoza. For position players, sustaining a mark below .200 likely means their days on the roster are numbered. Mendoza accomplished the feat four times in five seasons in the late 1970s. It’s a fluke that he survived that long, and now his name is associated for failure in a game that he likely spent his entire life trying to perfect. Double lame.
I am an aspiring writer, but as of this paragraph, I am making Mendoza look like a hall of famer, unless you count publication in the sports section of the local newspaper. I’ve done that thousands of times, but I don’t count it. Before the sports reporters gather the pitchforks and torches, I am proud of my journalism career, it’s just not my current aspiration.
I don’t know if there is a writing equivalent to Mendoza. Someone who achieved their goal of publishing, but did so at such a mediocre level that it’s viewed by the industry as trite or meaningless or even detrimental – as Mendoza’s inability to hit undoubtedly hurt his team. Maybe Stephanie Meyer is that writer. Her Twilight books were panned by the industry despite selling like hotcakes. I guess I’ll try to avoid the Meyer Line. Except I’d love to get published, as Meyer accomplished, and boy, the money she made wouldn’t bother me either. I am a sellout, after all.
Christopher Lambert is a little bit like Mendoza, except that it feels like Lambert got cut after one bad season. Lambert played the leading role in Highlander and its subsequent sequels, but I can’t name another movie he starred in. Heck, I can’t name another movie he appeared in, much less was the lead. I also refuse to cheat and check on Google for his filmography. I suppose Highlander is trite and meaningless (although it does make you wonder if living forever would be all that wonderful), but I can’t say it’s any more or less detrimental to the film industry than the bevy of action movies from the 1980s. And nobody refers to an actor falling below the Lambert Line or a film below the Highlander Line.
The professional wrestling equivalent to Mendoza? The Honky Tonk Man. Or maybe X-Pac. I can’t decide. My mom once called me wishy-washy. She was right.
The inclusion of pitchers is controversial. With such a poor batting average, the likelihood of a hit would be low, and let’s face it, scoring runs is more fun. The argument persists in MLB, as well. Pitchers don’t practice hitting because the money in their ample paychecks is derived solely from their ability to throw pitches either at blistering speeds and/or with brutal movement. A few pitchers take pride in hitting, and occasionally one will get a hold of a ball and drive it over the wall. Fans love that. Americans love the underdog, and there might not be any bigger underdog in sports than a pitcher gripping a bat. Of course, America hasn’t been the underdog since the end of the Civil War. We’ve dominated the world theatre and throw fits when the slightest thing happens that doesn’t benefit us. We’re a strange folk. Selfish. Erratic. Comfortable. Endearing. Comical. Probably smelly.
The pundits – the new age pundits for the old-school guys detest change – call for the designated hitter to be adopted by the National League. The American League has utilized the designated hitter since the 1970s. We of the age of sabermetrics and reason and alternative facts have evolved beyond the momentary satisfaction of seeing a pitcher flail at a ball two feet out of the zone. Sometimes we are all just too damned smart for our own good.
I was never good enough to swing anything other than aluminum lumber that pinged when it made hard contact rather than making that crack that poets, musicians, and lazy sports writers romanticize. Maybe there is an App with the wood bat sound that I could play while simulating the season. The only sound the game offers now is the dice bouncing off the board – a square board with a field pictured and rectangles at each base to place a card when hitters become base runners after hits or walks. Hearing the dice rattle around for seconds takes me back to my youth, to quiet days in my bedroom playing the game. I probably fantasized about simulating an entire season at that point, too. The dice sound really doesn’t stir my poetic soul like the crack of a bat does for so many others. Better check the Google Play Store.
My abilities were so limited that I remember only two in-game at-bats. The first was early in my Little League career when I drew a walk, tossed my bat, and as my cleats squished down on first base, I gave a huge sigh of relief. My coach was incredulous at my reaction. Instead of standing at the plate fighting for a hit, I was satisfied to accept either a walk or a strikeout looking. I didn’t have the confidence yet to take true hacks and have faith that my bat could actually connect. Keep in mind, I am a guy who has thought about writing for most of his life, and at thirty-five is finally dedicating the time to do it and investigating opportunities for publication. I’ve never been quick to stick my neck out.
The second at-bat came during a tournament years later. I creamed a pitch – I mean I smashed that ball so hard that the seams receded into the rawhide – and it ended up one-hopping the fence in left field for a ground-rule double. My dad missed the hit while at the concession stand; I don’t know why I remember that. That was the closest I ever came to hitting a home run, and by God, there must not be a better feeling than hitting a dinger because that double felt amazing. It felt so good that I still think about it two decades later. I wonder what seeing my name in print will be like. Hopefully like standing on the second-base bag on a summer night with the moths swirling around the lights and the breeze whistling in my ears.
Frank Deford, a former Sports Illustrated writer, became a sports journalist after his college basketball coach told him he wrote about basketball better than he played it. I didn’t have anyone in my life quite so blunt, but I came to the same conclusion. After college, I caught on at the paper because I thought I could write a little, and they were willing to pay me to do it. Relishing in past glory never really entered the equation. Mostly it confirmed that most athletes were naturally better than I was. That’s okay, can they churn out roughly five thousand words on a board game? Take that, athletes.
I don’t cover sports anymore, or I don’t do it enough to consider myself a journalist. I took a gig with better hours and better pay about a year ago. See sellout reference above.
The extra time has led me to writing on my own, but it hasn’t been easy. You know, having ideas is one thing. Having talent is another. Heck, having a strong enough vocabulary concerns me. Many evenings with a blank screen before me is like standing at the plate way back in Little League, hoping that the pitcher doesn’t throw three strikes before ball four. Sigh.
So I linger on the feasibility of completing a season.
The first step is creating teams. I have thousands of baseball cards, all from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. It would probably be best to pick an entire set. I have one of those – a 1991 Donruss set I bought on the cheap at some point. These cards have either a green or blue border around the player photos, and I am not sure how they decided on who got what colors. The cards came out before the 1991 season, and thus depict the stats and results from 1990.
The early 1990s were a different time. To be attached to a phone meant also being attached to the wall. Computers were used primarily for data processing and rudimentary games. It’d be the mid-90s before their true use as pornography hubs would be realized. Al Gore was a politician and not a tech whiz or a climate cop, and his wife, Tipper, had just lost a battle to censor popular music against the guy from Twisted Sister and John Denver. And when someone told a joke about Donald Trump being president, everyone laughed.
I was eight in 1990 and living on a farm in rural Illinois. My brother was eight years my senior, so you know, he didn’t want anything to do with me. My sister was four years older, and, you know, I didn’t want anything to do with her. In terms of entertainment, we had an Atari that we hooked up to a 13-inch TV in our kitchen in the evenings. That TV had rabbit ears and two dials to pull from two different kinds of aerial signals. The signals were acronyms. I think one was UHF, but that might just have been a Weird Al Yankovic movie. We didn’t have cable or a satellite dish, which by today’s definition qualifies as child abuse. I am not complaining, but I probably did then. That life wasn’t so bad. It had its nuances and routines, and as I get older, I appreciate that. Without all the modern distractions, overthinking baseball board games was a definite option for me (when professional wrestling wasn’t on the tube).
Each league had two divisions in 1990 rather than the three now. There were twelve teams in the N.L. and fourteen in the A.L. Two teams made the playoffs from each league, as opposed to the five that make it now. The Rockies, Marlins, Rays and Diamondbacks didn’t exist, and the Nationals were the Expos and played in Montreal rather than Washington D.C. Interleague play during the regular season was still a dream in Bud Selig’s mind, and the players could pass as my neighbor rather than powerlifters in uniform.
Not everything made sense in 1990. The Cincinnati Reds and Atlanta Braves were in the N.L. West, while the Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals were in the N.L. East. Of course, the Braves had moved from Milwaukee to Atlanta, so they simply occupied the former Braves’ spot in the geography-based divisions. Changing divisions basically needed unanimous congressional approval at that point. It’s happened a time or two since 1990, including the expansion to six divisions, but a lot of that happened after MLB broke its fans’ hearts with a strike that claimed the World Series in 1994. Expo and White Sox fans – the two teams most likely to make the World Series – will never forget that strike. Most other fans didn’t forget it until Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire started hitting genetically enhanced dingers in 1998. Steroids were the Band-Aid the sport needed to heal most fans. Even when the homers came into question, most fans only half-heartedly cared. The purists raged, but the rest of us shrugged our shoulders and kept watching. The Bill Clinton sex scandal was pretty much the same way, at least until 2016 when twenty-year-old transgressions helped keep Hillary Clinton out of office. We’re a pious country again and will be until we’re tired of it. I give it three years.
The latest thought: Do I recreate the exact schedule from 1990? The Baseball Reference website provides results and box scores. A truly revolutionary idea is to research the lineups and pitchers from each game and play with those. The sticky wicket is that a baseball roster is constantly changing. Some guys are promoted from the minors for a game or two, but never receive a baseball card. The point being is that there would be variances, and once you have one, the whole experiment is tainted.
Although the variances are what frees this from being some humdrum replaying of a 27-year-old season. This freedom opens a door for my creativity. Within reason, I can do anything I want with the lineups, so long as I hold to a personal code that what I am doing is in the best interest of that team and adheres to basic baseball philosophy.
I also have the prescience of knowing which young players become great and which turn into duds. John Kruk, for example, is in my 1991 set. It’s early in his career, and he almost appears svelte and is listed as an outfielder. I know that in the years to come, he gains weight, plays first base exclusively, and becomes a key cog for the Phillies as they vie for a world championship. Having this knowledge has me leaning to moving him to first base, replacing a mediocre Ricky Jordan, and seeing if Kruk’s talent bears through when dice are used rather than bats. This power is intoxicating.
The 1990 season, which started with a lockout that lasted a week, finished with the Reds beating the Athletics, the defending champions, in a four-game sweep in the World Series. The outcome was as surprising as it was dominating. It’s like when Christopher Lambert’s character slices the head off the hulking antagonist in Highlander. The antagonist was huge, and Lambert came across as sort of a prissy antique dealer. On paper, the bad dude was the clear favorite. I guess that’s why they have the sword fights.
I could only be so lucky to have such a surprising end to a simulation. Endings are important. We dwell on them. The end of movies and books. The end of games. The winners. The losers. All of it is a simulation of our lives, and our hopes that we end appropriately, dramatically, exceptionally, and so on. That’s part of the reason doomsday predictions are so prevalent. As if our lives are so important that our end will coincide with the destruction of the earth. Most people are going to be disappointed by their end. It’s likely going to be the clichéd old, lost in a deluge of pain relievers or dementia, and without any last-second deep thoughts spouted from our lips. And the rest of the world will keep moving.
But should we care so much about the end?
Growing up a professional wrestling fan, I inevitably was involved in discussions about the predetermined nature of the matches. Once I grew old enough to form a logical opinion, I didn’t see the reasoning for people to dismiss it solely based on the notion that one person was picked to win and the other picked to lose. The joy isn’t only in the result. It is in the performance. The drama. The athleticism. The story being told. It is entertainment. Christopher Lambert, after all, stood tall at the end of Highlander, because the script called for it to happen. Hulk Hogan did the same hundreds of times.
If this simulation comes to fruition and I complete it, I imagine I’ll feel a sense of vindication and relief. Maybe sadness? The same emotions are likely if I were to get published.
Before I dwell on the sadness, we should
talk about stats. Simulating this season isn’t occupying my mind only to see if
team records would align with the actual results. Although that is an
interesting thought, my mind is on the stats.
With the game theoretically assigning higher probabilities of hits for those with a track record of doing so, it is my interest to find out if players would perform on par with the stats displayed on the card.
Keep in mind, we’ve eliminated all the variables of actual baseball: weather conditions, player health, umpire preferences, and so on. Also eliminated are defensive errors (breathe a sigh of relief all you players with stone hands), double plays (a pitcher’s best friend), and managerial idiosyncrasies concerning player management, base running, bullpen use, and bunting.
It’s baseball in a perfect world. Every ball in play is either a clean hit or an out.
There’s something completely 1990 about that and utterly un-2017 about it. We can look back at 1990 through rose-colored lenses and wistfully dream of being in such a simple era. I am not just talking about baseball here. Because it’s the past, we can aptly identify the good and bad outcomes in every situation. Heck, the bad stuff doesn’t seem that bad. We made it through it, didn’t we? Besides, doesn’t it feel like everything was more cut-and-dry? Maybe that’s because I was eight in 1990, and the world fit contextually in the small set of truths I had developed and accepted.
Truth in 2017? A clean hit or an out? That’s too simple for a world so compelled to argue about everything, and so quick to damn reason if it doesn’t fit into the narrative being wrote by our team.
The fact is that the hardliner against professional wrestling wasn’t going to be convinced to appreciate it because it was “fake.” Today’s world has similar lines drawn on hundreds of issues, and so many can’t be persuaded to change their thoughts, even if you show them the smoke from coal plants eating a hole in the ozone layer while a windmill’s blades stand still a mile away.
And politics. God, politics. I can’t believe how much politics occupies my mind. In fact, this whole business about simulating a season is one of the few things that can consistently distract me from the insanity overcoming this country. I don’t even like politics. I’ve never followed it, but now I can’t escape it.
It pisses me off.
Future presidents will worry about approaching the Trump Line. There, I said it.
Okay, breathe in…breathe out.
I trust that rational people in positions of power exist. It’s all I can do. … and play the baseball card game.
The compiling of stats creates a two-fold problem. One, it complicates the actual gameplay and increases the time for each game. A conservative guess being that it adds ten minutes per game. Probably more.
Statistical tracking starts with creating a baseball scorebook using one of the dozen or so wire-ringed notebooks that also migrated over in the plastic tubs. It occurs to me that whole forests have died from notebooks that get used a little bit one school year and then get deposited in some closet or drawer in the summer, and then new ones are bought for the next school year. Most kids probably dump the notebooks on their way out of school on the last day. I couldn’t do that. The blank pages offered so many possibilities. It saddens me that so many pages remained blank when I discovered them years later. It’s like I had dreams, but none of them were worth writing down.
That’s a half truth. I didn’t fill the notebooks, but I did use many of the pages and then systematically ripped them out, lest risk facing the embarrassment of somebody finding them and reading my personal thoughts. Part of me is still paranoid of people reading things I write. Yes, I was published thousands of times in a newspaper. Yes, there were mornings when I woke up and hoped no one would notice the by-line. It’s a hard habit to kick.
Keeping score for a baseball game is nothing new for me, but the creating of the scorebook for each game takes time. I don’t keep quite as detailed notes as I did when covering games at the paper because I don’t have to worry about turning some of the action into a narrative later. It’s such a strange thing that I’d focus on something so obsessed with numbers and devoid of narrative. The last few years at the paper I was the sports editor, and my main emphasis was to get my reporters to worry less about the numbers and the games and focus on telling the story of the players.
Of course, I am not dealing with real people. At least not people that are real anymore. They are thin pieces of cardboard with dated images, stat lines, and the faint smell of bubble gum. My experiment is to see if the random nature of dice can recreate those numbers. It’s heartless, monotonous, and the perfect distraction from the dysfunction of the government and the lackluster realities of my writing abilities.
Keeping the stats is the first part. Tracking the stats is the second. Becoming a sellout has provided me with Microsoft Excel skills. I even created a spreadsheet to track upcoming writing contests with columns for the fees, the deadlines, the word-count restrictions, and hyperlinks to the contest websites. I’ve found I like creating spreadsheets more than I like updating them. Updating is work. That’s why God created everything in seven days and then wished us good luck. Creation is divine. Maintenance is the hard work.
Excel is a beautifully soulless program that through the manipulation of data cells is the logical way to chart things like statistics. The one thing that it won’t do though is enter the data for me, and there’s a lot of data entry just to set up 26 rosters, plus team results, and league standings. I’d really like to track league leaders, too. It’s too bad I don’t have it in the league budget to hire an assistant.
Once all the teams are set, some of this will go faster, but it’s still roughly thirty minutes per game and let’s say ten minutes of entering the results into the spreadsheet. That’s forty minutes multiplied by 2,430. That’s 97,200 minutes to play the entire season. Using an Excel formula, let’s make that number make more sense. All right, add a pair of parentheses, a slash, and a sixty, and the result is 1,620 hours. A couple more key strokes and that translates to 67.5 days. That’s faster than an actual baseball season, assuming I did nothing else, like eat, drink, sleep, and defecate.
That’s just the regular season. The playoffs would be another few hours, depending on if each series went seven games. It’d be swell if they did.
When it ends, whether dramatically or with an underwhelming thud, I’ll have to face the reality of this venture. That’s where the sadness enters. Whenever something ends, there’s some level of sadness because whatever joy derived during the journey transitions to the past. The sadness, in this case, will be multiplied by the reality that those hours could have been filled by writing. Also, how dorky is it that I had nothing better to do?
I have to admit that the numbers above are less daunting than I thought they would be, which ultimately has me second-guessing my math. When I was in seventh grade, I won math student of the year honors. My interest and ability in the subject declined thereafter. Too much, too soon, I suppose. Truthfully, stuff with numbers came rather easily to me. Writing was more of a challenge.
And I still don’t know if I am any good at it?
That’s the ego confrontation I am hiding from with this whole baseball season business. For all the years of tinkering, I have more vindication concerning my ability to do junior high math than I do of any discernible writing talent.
In writing, there are an incalculable number games to be played before achieving anything, and there’s no guarantee that achievement is even waiting. Baseball is an appropriate comparison. It’s the game of failure. A great player records an out seven out of ten times he steps up to the plate. A writer faces and receives rejection at a much higher clip, especially a new writer.
It’s an emotional risk to set out to do something where the probable result is utter failure.
I loathe thinking about it like that, but it’s ever-present in my mind right next to thoughts about our oxygen being choked out of existence by carbon emissions and Donald Trump’s increasingly orange-tinted face.
It makes me reach toward distractions.
Maybe the immortals in Highlander needed the threat of losing their heads to distract them from the reality of living forever. I suppose you can only bury so many friends, family, and lovers before it numbs the heart. There is life found in death. That sort of explains why they spent centuries whittling their numbers down to one. It was a barbaric act of mercy. The one left was the cursed victor.
Baseball dwindles teams down to one each season. Even if every team returned the exact same players and played the same schedule as the season before, the results would be different. I guess I don’t really need to do a simulation to know things will turn out differently. The reality of varying results provides hope. As a fan of the Cubs, I spent most of my life clinging to that hope. Then 2016 happened and with it the reward for all those years of waiting.
Can the same happen to my writing career?
I hope so.
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