Chris explains…“This is one I’ve been looking forward to for a long time - and I think some BTFrs might like it, given that it’s based on an old thread there.
It’s called “The great 28, part 1 of 2” and it’s me asking SG to put 28 of the best teams of all-time in his 1,000 season simulator to see who is the best. The same thing happened in Count the Rings years ago, but this time I get to do all the choosing (and next week I’ll provide the results of the 1000 sims, and I know from CTR years ago many were uncertain what the results of the 1000 sims were).”
1961 New York Yankees (109-53 actual record, 103-59 pythag record)
Despite winning 109 contests, I considered leaving this team out. Or I considered leaving them in and pushing the 1953 Yankees out as there is some overlap between the squads with their key players, Hall of Famers Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, and Whitey Ford. But if we’re going to bend the overlap rule a little bit, this is the time to do it. The Yankees won 14 out of 16 pennants from 1949-64, so giving them two representative from eight years apart seems reasonable.
1968 Detroit Tigers (103-59 actual record, 103-59 pythag record)
Though not usually thought of as a historically great team, they led the league in runs scored, fewest runs allowed, had a great actual record, a great pythag record, and won a world title. That’s a nifty combination.
1969 Baltimore Orioles (109-53 actual record, 110-52 pytahg record)
Damn few teams win 109 games while underachieving their pythag record. They won 108 games and a world title in 1970, but with “only” 104 pythag wins in that season.
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1. Matt Clement of Alexandria Posted: July 16, 2012 at 11:57 AM (#4183784)I'm interested, but I'm surprised Chris didn't mention any plans to fix that bug.
Or rather than that, they simply plug in plausible line ups and see where the positive events bunch up and where the runs score and whoever has the best record at this? But then how does one account for pitching changes? Seems difficult task.
The bug was fixed.
Unless I overlooked it, I believe Jaffe has not (yet) presented any details regarding how these were set. The MPs can be very specific with regards to individual player and team settings for a multitude of choices, such as stealing, being aggressive on the base paths, platooning, frequency of pick-offs, guarding the corners on defense, swinging away on 3-0 pitches.
You can also set how often your backup catcher starts and other bench guys, late-inning defense replacements, injury replacements, six different saved lineups vs LHP and/or RHP and vs DH and/or no-DH, four-man or five-man rotations with a strict or skip option, various relief pitching roles, etc., etc.
Are these MPs painstakingly set for each contending team and its players, with, of course, an emphasis on accounting for the strengths and weaknesses of each? And by strengths and weaknesses, that includes ALL of them. For example, is each SP's hold rating for possible base stealers considered, and his propensity to throw to first increased or decreased accordingly? Are excellent base stealers told to run at will while the rest of the team is told to NEVER steal? Will the hit-and-run setting be adjusted to account for the speed and contact ability of each team?
It is also difficult for SP with real-life 250+ IP to effectively match their sim total with their real-life total, especially if their profiles are not set properly.
And if many of these strategies and profiles are not set properly for a team, that team will easily suffer within the sims.
Thus (1) more details please regarding how the sim is conducted; or a link to a past article explaining this and (2) I am skeptical of the results, even with the disclaimer that "Now, admittedly, this isn’t scientific, and the debate will always go on as to what the best teams are." Although you could make it scientific if one had the patience, skills, knowledge, and intelligence.
Holy crap, really? Admittedly I haven't upgraded OOTP since version 8, but maybe I should switch to DMB. That sounds awesome.
I haven't presented any detail on manager setting. I don't know the details. I just gave a list of teams. I've never played, owned, or even seen a DMB league or game in my life.
It's not scientific, as I noted, and even with your specifications I still don't think it would be scientific. The whole debate over the best/worst teams ever is not scientific. It's water cooler conversation. It's fun.
That said, I think the assumption of the simulation will be that these teams will be judged on how they performed against their competition at the time. And that's great. However, it doesn't seem fair to have that standard applied to teams pre-1910 when baseball was barely baseball ... I'm willing to discount training/integration/conditioning for teams from the 1920's and forward, but it'd be a really disappointing sim if some team of sharecroppers from 1898 was competitive IMO.
um, its called 'fun'
check it out
Now how the hell you pull that off, I don't begin to know, but I think that might be closer to being what we think of as the best team ever.
um, its called 'fun'
check it out
Yes, but when I play RISK, I don't simply attack willy-nilly at whatever damn country/territory/region I please, and hope it all works out in the end. It is more fun for me to think a few moves ahead, to carefully deploy my army, and to attack with purpose and when the odds are in my favor.
Thus, if I am going to use a baseball simulator for an exercise to see how the best teams of all time fare against each other, then I am going to use the simulator's settings to the best of my ability and take the time to give each team any advantage I can.
And why should prepping Diamond Mind baseball for this exercise be considered a "serious protocol"? If you're going to use DMB, at least use it to its fullest extent and do it ####### right.
And perhaps it was. Pretty please with a cherry on top, provide some of that information.
A couple of ways you could do this:
1. For each player on each of the hand-selected "best" teams, take the best True Talent Level season of his career and add that to the "team". If you had all of the DMB season disks, I believe you can copy and paste players from one season disk to another. So you could start with a "blank" season disk and copy and paste hundreds of players into it, forming your best teams.
2. You could start with the league file already created by SG that contains all the best teams, and you could tweak each player's multitude of ratings, batting table, and/or pitching table to adjust his value to a "True Talent" level. One tricky part would be re-doing the batting and pitching tables with regards to which park factors to use. Might be easier to copy and paste like in (1) above and then do some tweaking.
This would take a lot of time, but I would bet, for some, it would be FUN to do.
As I noted above, I've never played, owned, or even seen Diamond Mind Baseball. I wouldn't even know where to begin with all this, and I'm not going to purchase it just for a few articles.
I feel I impose enough on SG by asking him to run these things. He's a busy man and I always appreciate it when he does any of these favors. So I don't get into asking a bunch of questions on settings - because I literally have no idea what I'm asking about. Again, I don't really know anything about DMB.
If that's not good enough for you, then I'm sorry. Feel free to ignore this and next week's article.
Holy crap, really? Admittedly I haven't upgraded OOTP since version 8, but maybe I should switch to DMB. That sounds awesome.
Really, really.
I recently joined an OOTP 13 league, and I'm curious to see how OOTP's latest and greatest compares to DMB v10a.
About the only good option (that wouldn't take a year or more) would be to use the historical Marcels:
Historical Marcel Forecasts
There's a way to import them into DMB, but then you still have to manually fix all the fielding ratings, pitcher durability, baserunning ratings, etc. But it is doable.
The basic game without any season disks is $30. $155 for the eight "All time greatest teams" sets, which is think by my quick estimated count, runs you about $1 per team. I'm curious to see if one of your selected teams is NOT included in the sets, which would be odd likely in DMB's selection, not yours.
So, yes, $185 can be considered pricey.
I feel I impose enough on SG by asking him to run these things. He's a busy man and I always appreciate it when he does any of these favors. So I don't get into asking a bunch of questions on settings - because I literally have no idea what I'm asking about. Again, I don't really know anything about DMB.
At the least, if SG is pulling the best teams from season disks, especially the "deluxe" ones, then I believe DMB DOES INDEED have MPs already in place for each team. That's pretty cool. For example, for the 1948 Indians (the Kiddo Davis Baseball League is currently re-playing the 1948 season), Lemon threw 290 IP. DMB in the '48 season disk has set the "Using relievers" and "Using closers" options to NEVER for Lemon, while the team selection for the two aforementioned settings are LESS FREQUENT and LEAST FREQUENT, respectively. The Indians are also on a four-man TIME rotation.
I also see team settings vary slightly from team to team for their '48 season settings, thus they're not simply selecting NEUTRAL for all and expecting the user to tweak 'em all as desired (which one certainly could still do).
Thus at first glance, it appears DMB already does the bulk of the work (whether it is mostly sound choices or not remains to be determined) for simming purposes.
But I can see why previous sim attempt(s) had/have recruited "owners" for each great team to tweak the MPs before the simming occurred. That perhaps becomes an exercise in "gaming the system" though to take what is given and use one's knowledge about DMB and its tendencies and biases to maximize one's team's production. But that is what a Manager is suppose to do, yes!?
So I likely answered my own questions above, but HW can still go suck a lemon!
You'd use the Marcels for the following year, right?
That's how I would do it.
yes, that might be even better, but you'd have to average the 5 seasons together first, then import them into a shell of the Lahman database, then import that into DMB, AND THEN you still have to set up all the ratings like fielding, baserunning, bunting, pitcher durability, etc. - that's a LOT of work in Diamond Mind - enough that you'd probably want to use OOTP or something that allows easier data importing to get to a useable file.
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