Sim Baseball

[Mike D.]

Where a lot of folks older than me talk about playing Strat-o-matic for hours, for me in the late 80's it was "Earl Weaver Baseball" which was a surprisingly sophisticated for it's day. You could "play" the game, but the best part was that you could play "GM" and simulate seasons or seasons. Man, we spent many a rainy day back in those days drafting, entering, and playing seasons, and when we got a disk of "all time great" teams ('61 Yanks, '73 Orioles, etc) the fun only continued. Good times.

18 years ago, in 2002, my brother started an "Out of the Park Baseball" sim league, using OOTP 2.0. We named the league for a recently deceased hall of famer, calling it the Ted Williams Memorial League. It was based on 1999 players, and we started with the 2000 season.

Early stars included guys you'd expect like McGwire and Pedro, but also prospects who developed a lot differently than "real life". Rick Ankiel won 300 games. Ruben Mateo hit 500 home runs. Every year, the game would generate players to be taken in the rookie draft, moving us ever further away from the "real world".

Along the way, owners came and went, we upgraded to version 6 of OOTP ("current" version is 19 or 20, so we're still WAY behind), and we had several commissioners. I've been running things for the last few years.

And by "last few years", I mean...yeah...we're still going...18 years later. We're currently in the year 2049. meaning we're simming our 50th season!

That's very cool that they have online leagues you can "subscribe" to. My advice would be to play multiple seasons...single seasons are kind of glorified fantasy leagues, and losing teams lose interest pretty quickly. Having the ability to really BUILD something, though, can really make things interesting.

The TWML keeps me busy from a sim perspective, but if enough people were interested, I might be interested in checking out the 70's.