22
April

Call for your league’s innovations and tools

Devoted reader Steve Stein writes in an email:

 

“How about a post on cool tools your APBA league has devised?”

 

I think partially this is Steve’s nice way of saying “Tom, get off your butt and update the blog, wouldya?”.  And that’s a fair point, I’ve been so involved with covering the University of Illinois baseball team the APBA Blog has been put aside temporarily.  My bad. 

But Steve has a good idea.  What good tools or dedicated systems has your league devised to make stat-keeping, schedule-making,or any part of running a league easier or more effective?

Steve goes on with some of the innovations that his Transcontinental Baseball League have implemented.  But instead of springing them on you now, I’d like to include as part of a larger and more detailed article with more input from other leagues. 

So this is a call to those of you in leagues.  Please share your league’s innovations and tools that make your commissioner’s and stat-keeper’s and webmaster’s lives easer. 

Just email them to tbz@apbablog.com

thanks!

3 comments

26
June

Do real life off-field actions affect who’s on your league team?

willie_wilsonLR

APBA to the masses sometimes gets rolled in with the fantasy leagues ala rotisserie leagues.  One difference among many, I think, is the connection to the players.  The connection (at least for us board game players), comes from handling and viewing the individual player cards.  Corny as that may seem.

Which leads me to this question…  I’m just curious how many APBA leaguers out there take more than their players’ stats and performances into consideration when forming their team?? 

In other words, do players’ personalities and off-the-field actions have an impact on whether they play on your team.

Back in 1983, when it came out that Willie Wilson used drugs, the manager who had it him on his team, dropped him like a hot potato.  It was a big deal because Willie was his surprising first pick in a expansion draft.   There was no doubt about his action though as he did with quite a fanfare (as was his style). 

For my part, I traded pitcher Eric Show when I found out he was a member of the John Birch Society (ballplayers, as a general rule, don’t lean to the left and I’m okay with that but the JBS was a little much for me). 

I honestly don’t remember who I got but I think it was a comparable starting pitcher. 

So what about you?  Whether it be drugs (either the street kind or PEDS), wife-beating, other illegal activity or political beliefs… or maybe just being a jerk, do you have line that can be crossed?  Where you say, “Nope, I’m not going to put him on my team” or in the words of Donald Trump, “You’re Fired!”

Or is APBA purely a numbers game to you and as long as your players produce for your team, they stay?

3 comments

2
April

I Hate Playing APBA!!!

Let me explain myself before I start a riot here.  I’ve been playing APBA baseball since 1970, 40 of my 53 years on earth.  I LOVE the game of baseball, enjoy APBA, especially seeing the stats grow over a long season, trading & drafting to build my ballclub, the Chicago Champions of the Illowa APBA League, for over thirty years. 

However I realize there are flaws in the game, it’s not perfect, it’s a dice, tabletop board game.  Over the years, the IAL put in place slight modifications to make the game better.  One modification was an unusual play chart (used w/o bases empty, 23s & 41s were foul balls with the bases empty), another was the random error chart, and a third is a pitcher’s hitting card (used by all pitchers with less than 10 at bats).  We also used a catcher’s throwing chart, based on a catcher’s defensive rating, giving catchers with higher defensive ratings more of a chance to catch a runner trying to steal.  We also put into play rules to prevent sacrificing as an offensive weapon, with a runner on 2nd, 8′s & 9′s were just good bunts, rather than play for runner at 3rd fails and 14s were not walks against pitchers with control.  Use the infield defense when bringing the infield in.  And finally, 9 secondbaseman on 20s & 10 shortstops on 18s do not commit errors with the bases empty.  In the old game, you’d say two on doubles and could separately basecoach stealing.

Then a few years ago, the APBA Game Co. came out with new boards.  Since then the IAL has been removing these modifications.  The first to go was the catcher’s throwing chart, the result, catchers defensive ratings were suddenly not as important as they were before.  Next casualty was the error chart, now it was important to know what error numbers your opponents outfielders have, so you know how to position your outfielders (ie., if your opponent has all 15s, put your best outfielder in LF).  Also a leadoff man with a 20 or 18 was an extra onbase number, unless your opponent has a 9 2Bman or a 10 SS.  Then we went to the game out of the box’s version of coaching, if you coach a guy then he can’t steal & must also be coached on the bases.  Finally the unusual play chart bit the dust, now 23s are an extra onbase number & 41s are an onbase number, going to second on an error, with the bases empty.  One of the worst things I’ve discovered thus far, since removing modifications in our league, has been a runner on 2B, 2 outs, with a shortstop at bat (you have to basecoach him or risk losing him on an out stealing, thus making the 3rd out at 3B).  Then there’s the concern about a big inning being ruined when a firstbaseman (the only guy capable of hitting into a triple play) hitting into a tripleplay on a 41.  39s are automatically doubleplays, with 1st & 2nd.  You get the benefit of knowing the possibilities on the table before the dice are rolled, and can take appropriate actions or grit your teeth & suffer the consequences.  Then I’ve already lost a game when a play for the runner at 3rd failed, thus nullifying my advantage of having an A&B* pitcher in there.

The only three modifications we still have in place are the pitcher’s hitting card, 9s at 2B & 10s at SS don’t make errors on 20s & 18s with the bases empty, and the infield in goes by the infield defensive rating.

Although my team has gotten off to a sub .500 start, 14-16, this has nothing to do with winning & losing, this has much more to do with playability.  The modifications made the playability alot better.  What I mean by better is, not being able to whore the game more in order to win.  Last year my Champions won 98 games, but I didn’t like not using the error chart, and moving my outfielders around to counteract my opponent’s error numbers.

I’d love to know some of the modifications other leagues are using.  And/or your thoughts on whoring APBA in order to win.  CLuke’s always promoting Skeetersoft  innovations, which might be something to look into.  APBA is much more limited than Strat-O-Matic especially regarding pitchers.  IMHO, APBA needs as much help as it can get and taking out modifications we’d implemented over the years was not a good move.

8 comments

12
March

IAL’s Proposed Rule Changes and how I might vote

This weekend is the Illowa APBA League’s World Series/Draft weekend.  Of course, one part of the weekend which I enjoy the most is the league meeting… and I think I’m the only one who seems to get any pleasure out of it.

Below are the five proposed rule changes to our hallowed constitution to be discussed at our league meeting plus a little background.  I also added how I might vote.  I say “might” because I don’t want any joker at the meeting holding me to it.

“But you said you were against of the extra pick!!”

Here they are:

 

Proposal #1

 

Reinstate the “extra pick” in return for submitting an article each month. After the draft, there will be an extra round, in which a manager may drop one player in order to draft another. This extra round is only open to those managers who submit articles for every month in which they played games.

Background:

Quite simply, this rule is to reward “good behavior” as Steve Stein puts it.  We used to have this rule and rescinded it, I think partly because it made our teams too strong.  However, manager involvement as far as submitting articles, has not been that great so perhaps a carrot approach is worth a look.

My Vote:  No.  If I had my druthers, I’d get rid of penalty points for lateness.  We’re adults here.  I don’t want to read a two or three sentence article because someone fulfilled their requirement for the month.

Proposal #2

 

Eliminate the Unusual Play card

Background: Our league historically has used a lot of modifications to the basic game… the Unusual Play Card, the Pitcher’s Hitting Card, the Error card to name a few.  However, as of late, there’s been a feeling among many of the managers of the IAL to get back to the basics and just play the boards.  We voted out the Error chart last year.  I think some liked it so much they wanted to try to see if we could get along without the UPC as well.

My Vote:   Yes.  It will be difficult.  I’ve played with the UPC pretty much all my adult life.  Not only in IAL life but I’ve even adopted it in any solitaire play too.  But I’m willing to give it a try.

 

Proposal #3

I would like to propose the use of the DH for 2010

Background: Pretty self-explanatory.  The IAL has used the National League rules for all 34 years of its existence.  Every year it’s tradition to end the league meeting with a vote on the DH.  It’s normally a perfunctory vote.  This year though, I think it’s being seriously considered.

My Vote:  No, never, absolutely not

 

Proposal #4

Each manager decides whether DH is used for the season in his team’s home games.

Background: See above…

My Vote:  My vote stays no.  It’s one thing to vote for the DH all around but this “home manager decides” doesn’t fly with me.

 

 

Proposal #5

I also propose that “No Stealing” goes the way of other base coaching. Either the runner is coached on everything or on nothing.

Background: As we play it now, runners can play it safe but can still be allowed to steal.  This rule would disallow that.  Playing it safe would mean “PLAYING IT SAFE”.

My Vote:  Yes on that one.  That makes sense to me.

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31
January

APBA Hot Stove: Is it me or is it getting hotter in here?

Our season has pretty much ended in the Illowa APBA League.  We still have a few have a few minor and not so minor details to take care of.  The last electronic newsletter hasn’t come out, we’ll need to vote on our All-League team and most importantly, the playoffs and the World Series will need to be played.  That usually waits till the weekend of the draft. 

That all said, it’s hot stove league for us.  Trade talk is at a high right now.  And with me with the second pick I have a lot of suitors, I tell ya. 

An informal poll here, how many of you in leagues can trade in season?  We toyed with the idea a couple years ago.  A manager even proposed it in our yearly league meeting but quickly rescinded it. 

The feeling among some of us is that it would be too difficult to keep track stats both short term over the year (especially considering our limits rule) as well as long term. 

See, while we do use a fantastic master Excel spreadsheet for our league stats, doing multiple teams for one player might be beyond its scope. 

And for those who do trade within a season, how do you accomplish this with a minimum of confusion? 

 

PS no trades yet for me.. but don’t hold your breath.  I got hot stove fever!

2 comments

31
December

APBA league historical record-keeping and documentation: it’s worth it

O.Z. League manager Dom Provisiero and I have been in contact the past few weeks on the issue of keeping historical stats and other relevant for leagues.  This has been an interest of mine for a while so I thought I’d share my thoughts.

 

Accumulating the Data

Documenting your APBA league’s history of stats, transactions, standings and anything your league deems important and worth remembering can be a tedious task in the short run.  However, I’ve found that once the process is in place, it’s well worth it.  Our league, the Illowa APBA League, has kept lifetime stats for every player and pitcher in our 33 year history.  We keep them in an Excel spreadsheet that updated every year.  

We didn’t always do this though.  Sometime in the 80′s, (The APBA co-Blogger) Tedd spent hours/days inputting years of our data from newsletters into digital format.  At the time, the best format available was Norton Textra, a DOS-based text editor.  But the important thing was that it was being documented.  Each year, the data was updated with new stats.

 

Taking Stats to a new level:  Sortable Data

 

Along came the 90′s and Microsoft Excel.  Our commish, Mike Bunch took the existing text files and with a lot of tough love, he converted it to the Excel format.  The difference of having our lifetime league stats in a sortable, filterable format was quite dramatic. 

Oh, the things that we could do!

  • Sorting All-time leaders for all stat categories
  • All-time single season leaders
  • Leaderboards for a particular season
  • (my favorite) all time worst "leaders"
  • single season leaders by a particular team
  • (for those who want to reminisce) filter by team and year and you have the roster and stats of any team for that year

The possibilities are endless.

 

Sharing the info

Of course, having this data is one thing.  Sharing it is another.  Among our league, we are content to pass around the Excel spreadsheet for managers to play around with.  But what if we wanted to share our wealth of info with other APBA fans and especially other leagues.  Of course, the Web is the obvious answer.  I’m not a database programmer but if you’re not too concerned about how it looks, Microsoft Excel will save a worksheet to web format.

So I cleaned up the database fields a bit (only the stuff everyone would be interested in) and put the Illowa APBA League Register on the web.  Thanks to the team effort of Mike and Tedd, it’s been updated every year and you can see it here. 

There are some side products of our league register that give it more meaning.  For example, our All-Time Leaderboard (both career and single season).  Also, our league Hall of Fame which we vote for annually.  Finally, I put up a manager register which included won-loss records plus all-time records for pretty much every skipper who has rolled dice in our league (caveat:  this hasn’t been updated in a couple years). 

Another project I undertook was something I called Season Spotlight.  Starting with our initial season, 1975, I would do a quick page on that season.  Each page would have the standings, leaderboard, and maybe a short writeup.  Here is the entry point for the IAL Season Spotlights.  A lotta fun for us old guard who like to reminisce about the old times.  The project is still in the works… I’m up to 1986. 

 

Collaboration

Enter Dom Provisiero, from the O.Z. League.  Now I’ve known Dom via email since the early 90s.  He and I have been seem to correspond with each other say, every three or four years.  The last time I heard from him, he asked about our league database and was asking how we did though he said their league wasn’t QUITE ready to go through with it. 

Well, two weeks ago, I heard from Dom again and it seems his league was ready to document their league stats.  So I emailed him our league spreadsheet in case it might give him some ideas.  We also set up a phone call. 

After all these years talking to Dom via email, it was nice to put a New York voice to the name.  It was indeed a pleasure to talk to him.  He had a chance to peruse the spreadsheet and passed it on to a friend with some Excel and database skills. 

In his research, Dom did find a web site which belongs to the Mid-West Baseball League that does a pretty incredible job of displaying stats, transactions, draft history.  If I knew anything about web programming, I’d want our leagues’ page to look a little like theirs.  Take a look at the MWBL’s page.  It might give your league some ideas. 

 

Summary

One piece of advice for any league… it’s never too early to begin documenting the stats and data for your league.  Even if you don’t make it look all pretty, at least make sure you collect it into one repository.  Down the road, you’ll be grateful.  While, we at the IAL have been pretty good about it, there are still some holes in our history.  There are years where we don’t know who won our MVP or Cy Young awards.  While we could probably obtain transactions and draft picks via most recent years via newsletters, those during our early years are gone.  There’s a lot of work that goes into it but if you have an APBA league with a rich history, it’s well worth it to document it. 

I’d love to hear how other groups have documented their leagues stats and/or history.  Let us know in the comment section.  If you have it on the web, leave a link… I’ll post it. 

5 comments

28
December

Comparing APBA League Drafts

Our league won’t be drafting till sometime in March but with the release of the 2008 season disk, I’m sure there will be some leagues beginning their seasons soon (if not already).

I’m opening this post up for APBA leagues who are drafting in the upcoming year to let all of us know how their leagues draft went.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a rookie draft or if you’re drafting from the full stock teams… however you do it.  Let us know.  Either way, it’ll be a good fodder for discussion.  :)  I’ll put a link to it the post in the sidebar.

Fill out the form and I’ll post the results  (for the larger leagues, I may cut the list down to the top 10-20).  Be sure to let us know what type of league and draft it was.

Good luck drafting this year!

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  3. (valid email required)
  5. Type of draft
 

cforms contact form by delicious:days

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23
November

APBA Leagues: How does your league handle player usage?

Just a post to start a discussion on how leagues limit player usage if at all.

Why limit player usage at all?  What’s the point?

  I guess a couple reasons.  One is accuracy in stats.  While it is true that if your APBA leagues of  the 8-12 team variety and is drafting from the entire MLB pool, your stats will be skewed.  Batting averages will be down and ERAs will be high.  (that’s not to say that some leagues get around this.  Some may use stock teams.  Others may artificially keep the draft pool limited.  I’d love to hear how). 

Another reason is realism.  Closely related to accuracy but not quite the same thing.  While I would love to bring in Brad Lidge in the second and leave in him to finish the game, it just isn’t realistic. 

Finally, limiting player usage is just plain fair for everyone in the league.  Managers can’t just draft that nifty rookie with no potential but whatta card! and bat him cleanup 162 games.  You get the idea. 

The Illowa APBA League handles player usage this way:

Position Players are restricted to the number of games and at-bats

Pitchers are limited to games started, games relieved, and innings pitched

Sounds simple enough but we have a couple complimentary rules that go along with it.  Beginning with how we handle secondary defensive positions.

  • If player has a position listed first on his card, he is unlimited at that position (up to his actual games).
  • If a player played 40 games (inclusive) or more at a position, he is unlimited (again up to his actual games).
  • If a player played 10 to 39 games (inclusive) at a position, he may play 40 games at that position.
  • If a player played 1 to 9 games (inclusive) at a position, he may play 10 games at that position.
  • If a player has a position on his card that he did not play, he may play 1 game at that position.

Maybe it sounds gratuitous but it gives us some leeway when draft time comes and we’re trying to fill our depth chart. 

Regarding pitching, we have instituted a rule that helps out managers to stretch out their limits.

“D” pitchers are limited to twice their games and innings. They may also be used in relief.

The D pitchers rule does indeed help us and one would think it lead to skewed stats and D pitchers leading the league in IP and maybe some other categories since they are allowed to pitch so much.  This usually is not the case (who wants to pitch a D anyway?) but I must confess that this year, my Thunderchickens’ Scott Olsen is getting his share of innings due to me going with a smaller bullpen than I would like.  Ugh!

 

Summary

Overall, our player usage limit system works pretty well.  It attempts to deal with the accuracy and fairness issues described above and does so fairly.  I admit, it does nothing about the realism issue.  There is nothing to prevent me from say, using my A* for the 2nd through 9th inning for every game till his innings ran out.  Managers in our league are pretty good about stay pretty true to the game and we don’t see much of that. Let’s face it, it’s not in our team’s best interest. 

If we’re good (and most of us are), we calculate our remaining limits for the players on our team after each month.  Actually, I just have Excel just calculate it for me.  If we happen to go over our limits at the end of the season (hey, it happens to the best of us), there is the chance our draft position will be penalized.  So we do our best to keep both eyes on our limits.

If anyone else out there in leagues has other methods of limiting players so that supercard pinchitter doesn’t play every day, I’d love to hear them.  Leave a comment! 

 

 

 

2 comments

29
October

League Draft Order methods

 

There are a few ways APBA keeper leagues can determine draft order for rookie drafts.  Depending on how it’s done, it can emphasize league parity or competition.  I thought I’d run through the methods our league (the Illowa APBA League) has tried (or considered trying) throughout our history with their advantages and disadvantages. 

The IAL has never used a division format so I’d love to hear from any division league and how they do it. 

 

Worst-to-First

Put simply, the draft order starts from the last place team (or the team with the worst winning percentage) and moves on up till you get to the first place team (the highest winning percentage). 

Of course, the biggest benefit is that this method helps the teams that need it the most.  As someone who has had some cellar-dwellers, I can speak with some authority on the subject.  The first pick in the draft will help a last place team right itself either by picking a franchise rookie or even by trading that pick. 

The disadvantage of Worst-to-First is that assuming a team is out of playoffs, there is a built in incentive to lose.  Yes, we’re all grown-ups here and no one intentionally loses.  But that said, does every team pull out every stop to win when they know they will be penalized?  It depends on the maturity of the league. 

 

Race for the First Pick

This method depends on how your league is structured but worked well for us for a while.  We were an eight team league at the time.  Instead of the last place team getting the first pick, the 5th place team would.  The draft order would simply would go 5-6-7-8-4-3-2-1. 

The advantage is that everyone is still fighting all year round.  Even those in the bottom division would have an incentive for winning.   It was kind of like a second race to follow which was fun in a way. 

Similar to the advantage to the first method, the disadvantage to this is that teams stuck at the bottom just might not get the help they need. 

 

Throw them in the Hat

One idea we tried (or at least considered) was taking the teams in the bottom half of the standings and just randomly choosing the draft order.  After that, the top half would go in reverse order with the winningest team picking last. 

Consider this only if you can’t make up your mind collectively.

Are there other ideas out there I haven’t even come close to?  

Leave a comment if you have one.

8 comments

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