Team Preview: Jinan Leopards

Okay, let's get another team preview done, for the first time in about two weeks. This week I'll cover the Jinan Leopards

StadiumMy imagination always gets rolling when I take a look at the hitter friendly layout of the Baker Bowl. I mean, it's only 280 down the right field line, with that big tin can fence out there. Seems like the perfect park for a country setting, which is why I let the Jinan team use it. I renamed it the Shandong Bowl, since Jinan is in Shandong Province.

Starting Rotation
1. Dennis Martinez
2. Mort Cooper
3. Jack Morris
4. Rube Foster
5. Connie Rector
SS. Fred Hutchinson
SS. Lazaro Salazar
SS. Red Fields
SS. Masaru Kageura

Jack Morris went to school here at BYU, as many of you already know. Masaru Kageura is actually chiefly a hitter, and is actually on Jinan's starting lineup, but he had a brief pitching career as well. I'm guessing that wasn't all that rare in Japan in the late 1930s.

I couldn't find a good website for information on Connie Rector, for some reason. In fact, it's hard to find anything more than anecdotal stories of Negro Leaguers, on and off the web. It makes me curious as to what statistical source the people who created the All-time Negro League disk used.

Relievers
Tom Henke
Mike Henneman

Starting Lineup
1. Jackie Robinson 2B
2. Jack Clark 1B
3. Koji Yamamoto CF / Chino Smith LF
4. Masaru Kageura 3B / Kosuke Fukudome 3B
5. Moises Alou LF / Reuben Jones RF
6. Ellis Burks RF / Koji Yamamoto CF
7. Joe Cronin SS
8. Roy Campanella C

Bench
Marty McManus
Sid Gordon
Edgardo Alfonzo
Jay Bell
Dots Miller
Freddy Parent
Mike Stanley
Earl Battey
Toru Ogawa

Anyway, sorry for the lack of comments. Just glad to get another one done.

Mid-week Notes

Every time I think I'm out of the water, something drags me back in. I've been working on my final packet for my Chinese class, putting the final touches on a history paper, trying to speed through an Independent Study German class and so on. Sometimes it feels like it never ends.

Presentation on Japanese Baseball

This week in my Japanese history class each student has done a short presentation on his or her research paper. I did my presentation on my wonderfully dry paper about Taiwanese nationalism. I probably should have done something about baseball instead, but I thought that doing something actually related to my major would have been more worthwhile.

Nevertheless, there was a presentation on the history of Japanese baseball. A girl in my class did a pretty interesting research paper, based primarily on a paper by Daniel Rhoden (sp?) on pre-WWII baseball in Japan. She mentioned a high school team, Ichiko, which challenged and beat the all-western Yokohama Club in a four game series in 1896. I wouldn't mind learning more about this -- anybody know of any books or research papers (other than You Gotta Have Wa)?

Had I known earlier that she was researching this topic, I would have loaned her my copy of the modern classic Sayonara Home Run! for illustrations. Oh, and 2DBB would have loved every minute of it.

More Season Preview

I (hopefully) will write up the next Team Preview tomorrow afternoon. It all depends on how quickly I finish my homework. That, and I'll probably have to find some time beforehand to make a few changes. Diamond Mind's automatic draft system is simply awful, leading to teams with way too few pitchers, or absolutely no reserves on certain positions. But you probably already knew that.

This should be a fun project, since I'll be playing from China starting around the second half of August. I'll post updates on both the Diamond Mind Yuku and Delphi forums, too, especially if I'm unable to access this blog in China.

APBA Journals

I don't think I've mentioned this yet. I've been scanning old copies of the APBA Journal for Francis Rose over at the APBA Journal official website. Most of these are old Journals my dad saved from when he played APBA more frequently. There is one from 1976, a few from 1983-1985, some from 1991-1992, and a few I picked up in 1998-1999. I've currently scanned through September 1991. It's a pretty time-consuming project, but it's really a lot of fun. There's nothing better than taking an hour off in the afternoon, listening to a live game and scanning a few of those journals at the school library.

I've always wished there was something similar for the Diamond Mind community, but I'm afraid that the internet has made such ultra-specialty journals obsolete. And, to tell the truth, it's more fun to follow replays game-by-game on blogs and forums than waiting for a short APBAlone update after the season is complete. Still, the Diamond Mind community could use a centralized report of league winners, and it would be nice to have a place to store DMB-based baseball analysis as well.

Of course, the first step ought to be connecting the Diamond Mind Online and Diamond Mind websites.

Sunday update

Now that my Econ 432 paper is done, I can write a little bit.

First of all, thanks to all those who read my blog over the weekend. Special thanks to Ted Roethke for his comment. I'm aware of IS' new deals with baseballlibrary.com and Baseball Prospectus. I think it's a step in the right direction for the hobby as a whole, but I'm not sure if it's enough. I'm also not entirely convinced that internet banner advertisements have quite the same effect as print ads did a few decades ago. We'll see what happens in the future. I really hope that IS puts a link to the "stand alone" DMB game on their website.

Fantasy baseball vs Simulated baseball

There seems to be a disconnect between Dayne's fantasy-based vision for DMB and the way this industry has progressed. Those of you who regularly visit the Diamond Mind boards are well aware of the protestations against an online-only game by most "stand alone" fans. My guess is that their feelings have a lot to do with playing games like APBA, Strat-O-Matic and DLBB by hand. Once you bought the cards, you had them literally in your hand, and nobody could take them back. You could do whatever you wanted with them, create any crazy innovation you want, or even study them and come up with complicated theories of card creation (yes, I've been reading a lot of old APBA Journal issues). However, if the future is entirely located with games like Simnasium, all of this will go out the window.

Simnasium (or Diamond Mind Online, I suppose) also takes away the "manage your own big league team" aspect of the simulation. If you look at old APBA and Strat-O-Matic advertisements, you'll notice what a prominent role the concept of managing a team yourself played. That was, to my knowledge, always the big sell of these baseball simulations. However, when games are played automatically by a centralized computer system, without any more human input than adjusting a few managerial tendencies. Gone is the thrill of pulling the pitcher early, of pinch-hitting for the overrated slugger, or calling surprise bunts and steals.

My problem with fantasy baseball is that it doesn't allow the player to do anything other than draft and trade. Simnasium perpetuates this problem, as does the online Strat-O-Matic game. Now, I'm not going to deny the popularity of such a product. Fantasy baseball fans will certainly enjoy playing similar fantasy games with the best baseball players of all time, or with seasons such as 1986 and 1941. Still, it doesn't seem like the proper way to approach the simulated baseball market. I'd much rather see Simnasium try to direct the fantasy fans over to the simulators, not the other way around. After all, why give up a feast for a bowl of ramen?

Google Searches

Quite a few visitors to this site come from Google searches such as "compare APBA and Diamond Mind." I hope they aren't too disappointed, since my goal here is not to pit one game against another. APBA, Strat, Diamond Mind, Action PC, OOTP, SBS and every other baseball simulation has its own set of strengths and weaknesses, and I don't want to take too much time to merely compare how each game works. I've played APBA for over a decade, Diamond Mind for over 5 years, and Strat-O-Matic for under two weeks, and I'm very pleased with all three. Instead of discussing the merits and weaknesses of each, I want to use this blog to put each game (or drafted team, or what have you) in the proper historical context. After all, the thing that's really interesting about baseball simulations is not how the game engines work; rather, it's how they make long past eras of baseball history come alive.

Anyway, sorry for the lack of pictures today. You'll have to wait for the next team preview -- I'm not quite in the mood at the moment. It's back to reading for the time being.

Oh, and my league begins on April 14th. Mark those calenders!

Latest News

My Latest News

It's been a pretty relaxing Friday. The semester's almost finished (about time!), and my homework load is slowly diminishing. I went through a run-through of a big presentation on Chinese - Japanese relations earlier today, 10 minutes long in Chinese. Hey, it's hard enough to study that stuff in English, let alone a foreign language -- try teaching it to natives in their language for 10 minutes. Luckily, I don't have to give the final presentation for a week and a half.

Anyway, to celebrate my wife and I had a Korean night. We had dinner at a little Korean restaurant near Center Street here in Provo. It's hard to find good Asian food anywhere in Utah, not to mention little University towns like Provo, but it wasn't all that bad. We then relaxed and watched a Korean love film, Love So Divine (신부수업, or 神父教育 in Chinese), subtitled in both
English and Chinese. It was pretty good. Not quite My Sassy Girl, but good for a few laughs. There were a few baseball references, too, including a poorly staged ballpark scene. Anyway, all in all it's been a pretty good day.
That's what's new in my life. I don't know if I'll do much updating on this blog this weekend, since I've got to work on a big 10 page paper on China's economic growth (thankfully in English). That, and I have to translate into English a 9 page paper I wrote last semester in Chinese. It never ends!

League News

I finally finished transferring the 1934 and 1941 schedules into my league. Action will start with one game on Monday, April 14th. I'm not going to get done with the team previews by that time. Those will come slowly, one by one, since it takes a long time to put those together (over a half hour each!). But don't worry -- it'll get done. I'll try to play my league in "real time," making sure that each league day corresponds directly to a day in real life. That may be difficult, however, since we're moving to Nanjing, China in the middle of August. We'll figure something out.

I'll probably post game results to the Diamond Mind Yuku forum as well as this blog. My chief motivation is worry that I won't be able to post to this blog once we're behind the "Great Firewall of China". There's no telling when a site like this will suddenly become unavailable, and it's difficult to tell if it's available there now. But that's a long way in the future.

Growth of Diamond Mind

I've been meaning to write on this subject for over two weeks now, but have never had the chance. My regular readers (all 12 of you!) know that I've been posting old APBA and Strat-O-Matic advertisements from time to time. I stumble across such relics fairly often in my spare time, usually while browsing through old Sporting News articles or kicking back with scans of old comic books. The thing that's most interesting to me, though, is that there were such professional, well-thought ads promoting those baseball simulations, something which is sorely lacking today.

There's been a lot of controversy over at the Diamond Mind forums (especially the Delphi ones) about the future of the company. I don't want to get into the politics of whether Dayne's takeover was beneficial, or whether Diamond Mind will become neglected in the shadow of Simnasium. Honestly, after experiencing the post-Seitz fall of APBA, I've learned not to put so much faith and hope in the future of a single mom-and-pop company. If it fails, we all go somewhere else for our baseball kicks. However, one thing that I do worry about is general lack of interest in games such as Diamond Mind. If nobody my age plays these simulations, it's a safe bet to say that nobody's going to maintain these games when I'm 40, 50 or 60.

I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but at some point in time the big simulation companies simply stopped advertising in print. I haven't seen an APBA ad in a single sports publication for over a decade, not since the old Baseball for Windows ads in PC Gamer magazine in the early 1990s. I remember seeing Diamond Mind advertisements in old Baseball Weekly magazines from 6 or 7 years back, but those have completely disappeared. And does anybody know of a single comic willing to run an ad for Strat? I may not be a marketing expert, but I have a hard time understanding how these companies expect to grow (or do anything but stagnate) with absolutely no advertising.

My dad started playing APBA Football after reading a long, color, two-sided ad in an early 1970s Sporting News. This was more than the "Be a big league manager!" byline on the ads I posted a few days ago. This ad (I've read it myself) gave a fairly comprehensive overview of how the game worked, of the concept of statistical accuracy in sports simulations, and even showed examples of cards and boards. My dad must have been impressed by the scientific approach to the sport, if not the professionalism of the ad. And his experience was not unique. I've read dozens upon dozens of similar experiences young "gamers" had when they were teenagers in the 60s, 70s and 80s.

I guess part of the problem is that there's no central Sporting News-esque publication for budding sports maniacs to wean on. Still, there must be some way these companies can reach their potential market. If Diamond Mind is going to help ESPN out with a season preview, why not try to get a mention of this on SportsCenter? If sims such as Out Of The Park Baseball really intends on bridging the gap between visually oriented games and text simulators, why not advertise during ESPN2's Madden Bus show? There's simply got to be more these companies can do than set up websites, moderate forums and watch their target market grow old and grey.

I don't buy the argument that kids these days don't care enough for the sports to play these kinds of games. I was a teenager not long ago. I knew kids who spent hundreds of dollars on Magic: The Gathering cards, even after a powerful computer engine was made. Why not spend that money on Strat-O-Matic? I have quite a few friends at school who are sports junkies, who live by ESPN, participate in fantasy sports leagues and attend games during the summer. Can't this market be approached somehow? All I know is that I grew up with video games (played quite a few, too), and I still had enough attention span left to play APBA and DMB. Now, I'm anything but normal, but I know I'm not that abnormal.

Well, we'll see what happens in the future. I just hope that the concept of baseball simulation isn't entirely lost on my generation. When we have people like Bill Staffa, who took a simple card game and made it incredibly accurate, or Robert Bofors, whose testing of homebrew disks allows for incredible accuracy, not to mention Francis Rose, who is working hard to present the entire history of APBA fan innovations at no cost, it would be a shame to see the industry croak and die. I know most of these companies may not be thinking much about growth right now (Diamond Mind, for one, seems to be shrinking), but I sure hope they reconsider. There is a large, untapped market out there, sitting right under our noses.

May 5th, 1908: Detroit at St. Louis (AL)

This was a fun game to play!

May 5^th, 1908

ST LOUIS – A frenzied crowd of faithful Browns fans gave Jack Powell a loud, long ovation as he stepped into the batter’s box in the bottom of the eighth inning this afternoon.

The occasion was not a perfect game, nor a legendary strike-out feat, but rather the impressive efforts of one man to lead his team to victory over the champion Tigers. Jack made the mighty Tigers look like tame pussy cats, shutting them out on seven hits in only 90 pitches. Powell shot the pill to the plate with ease for all nine innings, and the Tigers failed to manage even a single rally.

But that’s not all. Powell was also distinguished as the clear batting star of the game, collecting two hits in four trips to the plate. His monstrous seventh inning triple over Cobb’s outstretched glove in the seventh inning set the stage for a three run St. Louis rally, the only scoring of the afternoon.

Tiger hurler Ed Killian left during that fateful seventh, his second loss of the season looming ominously over his head. George Mullin came in to put out the fire, but it was too little, too late, and Detroit never even put up a fight.

And so it was. Powell’s eighth inning strike out was greeted by a loud, deafening ovation from the home faithful.

The Browns travel to Chicago next to take on the White Sox, champions of ’06.

Click here for boxscore.

May 4th, 1908: Detroit at St. Louis (AL)

Hope you're ready for another 1908 game! I'll see about updating another team profile tonight, but I'm not making any promises. As you might have guessed, I've been pretty busy lately. I'll try my hardest, though, to keep the updates coming!

May 4^th, 1908

ST LOUIS—As expected, the American League champion Tigers made short work of the Brownies today, winning 4-0 in quick fashion. St. Louis only managed three hits all game, falling prey to the elusive “Finger-Nail Ball” of Ed Summers.

Leading the way for the visiting Tigers was none other than the famous Ty Cobb. Cobb collected two hits in four trips to the plate and stole a base in the process. His batting average, at a cool .400, nearly doubles that of the best Brownie starter.

The only positive aspect for St. Louis was starter Rube Waddell. Veteran Waddell relied on a deep bending curve ball, as well as a zipping fastball, to strike out a total of nine Detroiters, while only issuing one free pass. However, the few who did catch up with that fastball made him pay.

The two teams meet again tomorrow afternoon at Sportsman’s Park.

Click here for boxscore.

April 25th, 1908: Boston (AL) at Washington

Here's the last game of this series.

April 25^th, 1908

WASHINGTON – The local Nationals got a 6 run lead, played hard for 7 innings, then became complacent and blew it to the visiting Red Sox. The Red Sox reminded Washington that baseball games are still played in 9 innings, not 7, even when played on wet grounds.

The chief embarrassment came during the Red Sox’ 3 run 9^th inning. With two outs and a runner on first and third, Boston pulled a trick reminiscent of the Orioles teams of old. Amby McConnell, the speedster stationed at first, took off without warning, drawing a throw from Washington catcher John Warner. But Warner forgot to check Bob Unglaub at third. As soon as Warner released the ball, here came Unglaub, barreling through at a high speed. The return throw was not in time, and Boston extended their lead to 9-6. Such misplays do not offer much optimism for the National’s 1908 pennant chances.

Charlie Smith then completely fell apart on the mound, walking four in the top of the 9^th inning, one with the bases juiced. This prompted the hometown skipper to go to Casey Patten, the third National hurler of the day, for the final out. Not even a last-ditch Washington rally could save the game, as the locals eventually fell, 10-7.

The late Washington collapse spoiled an excellent performance by rookie pitcher Burt Keeley, as well as an impressive first inning offensive explosion. The highlight of the explosion was leadoff hitter Clyde Milan’s long drive over the right field fence. Despite his infinitesimal .083 batting average, Clyde showed ‘em that he can drive it when it counts.

The Red Sox wound up winning the series, 3-1.Washington travels to Philadelphia next, and the Red Sox will visit the New York Highlanders.

See boxscore here.