More Baseball Experiments

Deadball was enjoyable, but it's not exactly what I want. The problem with DB is the same as with other baseball game simulators - time.

Time issues with game simulators
Baseball game simulators, like Deadball, typically take 30 minutes or so to play. 

For a one-off game, this is not a problem. 

However, consider what happens when you play a season, even a greatly shortened one. Let's assume an 8-team league with 28 games per team. The time spent to complete the season is 

8 x 28 / 2 = 112 games x 30 minutes = 56 hours

Wow, that's a time commitment!

How about a season simulator?

There are games that allow you to simulate seasons quickly. I tried one out.

Ultra Quick Baseball from Downey Games lets you resolve a complete game with the roll of a couple of dice. Essentially, you look up offensive and defensive ratings per team, roll some dice (2D6 to be precise), then look up the runs each team scores in the game. There will be more rolling in case of a tie, but it is not onerous.

The problem with games like these is that there is no baseball "feel." The scores could very well be another sport, such as soccer or hockey. This approach may be OK to fill in gaps in a season if I don't want to play all games, but it does not really work by itself.

Or a quick play game simulator?

I found a couple of game simulators that allow complete games in 5-15 minutes. I decided to try one out. It is called Quick Play Baseball.

QPBB streamlines the game by starting each inning with a random situation. For example, it may start with bases loaded and two outs. Essentially you are skipping over some at bats and fast forwarding to a crucial point of the game. Another interesting facet of QPBB is that it used standard playing cards rather than dice as the randomizer. I much prefer dice over cards so I converted it.

I played a quick game to test it out.

On the positive side, it was quick (but more than 5 minutes) and I figured out a way to keep individual stats.

On the negative side, it did not really let you play out a rally. Essentially, you have one at bat to score. But if you get a hit that doesn't score runs, the inning ends. That just feels anti-climatic, so I ended up playing out the entire inning. Unfortunately, this kind of counters the quick play aspect of the game.

Strat-o-matic?

As I previously mentioned, I played a lot of Strat-o-matic back in the day. It is an excellent baseball simulator. I notice that they have a Hall of Fame edition, This is tempting. I have visions of a league made up of Hall of Fame players.

And a crazy thought

One thing I've been noticing in my replays is that in most games, teams have rallies in 3 or 4 innings. The other innings tend to be over in 3-4 at bats. My crazy thought is just to play those innings. Essentially, I'll just play out a few innings and assume 0 runs scored in the remaining innings.