I’ve just started exploring APBA Baseball 5.75 and even played my first game, a pickup game between the 1961 Yankees and the Cubs. Predictably, the AL champs defeated the lowly Cubs with the help of Whitey Ford who pitched a 3-0 shutout.
I plan to do a more in-depth review (or more likely more than one) this weekend. However, one thing caught my attention. In the Advanced Draft program, there is a “Pankin Optimizer” sub-program.
From the APBA Baseball 5.75 help file:
“The Pankin Lineup Optimizer was developed by Dr. Mark Pankin, and is designed to quickly find high-scoring batting orders from a group of nine selected hitters.”
Dr. Mark Pankin is affiliated with the Retrosheet.org website. As it turns out, I had the privilege to interview Mark six years ago when I did a baseball podcast called Baseball Zealot Radio. I still have the podcast episode archived and the interview while a bit dated, is still fascinating especially for any of you who use Retrosheet (or Baseball Reference who gets a lot of their data from there).
You’ll get to hear my Illowa APBA League manager Chuck Lucas as my fellow podcast host helping me interview Mark.
So if you have a half-hour to listen some good information and some great baseball stories, take some time and listen to the interview with Dr Pankin. It was one of our best episodes we ever produced.
