Sunday, March 1, 2009

The Show Franchise Notes

Feel like hell tonight -- my jumper was as smooth as Single Malt Scotch today, but I still cannot shake this head cold I have had for like a month now.

Anyway enough about my congestion issues. Here's some Show numbers for you.

My sim season sits on opening day, 2012 right now. So that's three seasons in the books and the off season heading into 2012 finished. Some notable items, in a seemingly random order because I am literally typing this from the notes I took which tend to be all over the place, sorry about that.
  • The Braves beat the Angels in 2011 -- finally a playoffs with the Yankees.
  • I wish I could see the team that each player had played for when looking at career stats. We call this High Heat Baseball Disease.
  • in 2011 ERA started to creep back up with 2 teams over 5.0 ERA and the average being about a 4.1. It's not 100% authentic to today's game but I really like where the stat model is right now.
  • I wish we could play with all fictional players. I'm sure I'm in the minority on that.
  • Top Notch FAs are getting 15-20 million a year deals.
  • A few too many "solid" players (not stars) wallow in the FA pool. No one can use Matt Lindstorm? 35 saves and a 2.98 ERA in 2010 and no one wants him?
  • If a player is not signed during the FA period the odds of them being signed during the year are...not good. Teams (CPU AI) rarely do that in this game.
  • I wish we could view CPU team lineups and rotations and not just their basic roster. Seems like an odd oversight or a weird decision to limit that.
  • I wish we could view the retired players list and see just the MLB players and not every AA ball player who went back to working at Denny's.
  • A lot of retired players are calling it quits with a lot left in the tank. Thome retires at 40 but in 2011 hit .271 with 35 HRs. Lidge retires at 34 (?) after saving 37 games. Hoffman finally quits at 43 after another 40 save season. Reds MR Mike Lincoln retires at 35 after another sub 3 ERA year appearing in 65 games. Ordonez retires after hitting .301 at the age of 37. Too early to tell, but these dudes are aging -- slowly.
  • Chipper Jones in 2011 hit .317 with 39 homers after having a 20 HR season in 2010. Nice bounce back. I'm a guy who prefers a faster aging model than this, but it's not a huge deal. But I'd like to see these players hit the age wall a bit quicker and only retire when they can't do it anymore. Not too many players will quit after hitting 35 homers or saving 40 games with a 2.77 ERA. Not too many guys today have the DiMaggio outlook on greatness. If today's player (generally speaking) can still perform and get paid -- they will.
  • Time to see the rookies / youngsters.
  • The Number of Players on a Major League Roster at the start of the 2012 season who are "game created players" and were taken in the draft: 8 players.
  • 6 of those 8 were taken in Round 1 of the draft, 1 in R2 nd 1 in R3.
  • However, there are a number of players around the ages of 20-23 who are on a Major League Roster at the start of 2012 but were acquired via Free Agency -- not in the draft. (There is a handy screen that tells you how each team acquired each player.) How did they get there? Undrafted players? There are not a TON of these guys but each team looks to have one (some 2). None of them are stars, but many are solid "B" lvl players. Make of that what you will.
  • Still too early in a test sim to see what any of this means, really. I just find it interesting. Curious what the teams will look like in, say, 2020.