The Ten-acious Baseball League v 1.0

Strat-o-matic Baseball is an enjoyable, realistic baseball simulation. It involved cards, dice, and a game board that you don’t really use once you’ve gotten the hang of it. If you buy the full current game set, you receive 27 player cards for all 30 Major League Baseball teams, plus some traded player cards and some other odds and ends. Where you go from there is often simple: follow the basic rules, get a few games under your belt, and then shoot for the stars.

That’s what the Ten-acious Baseball League is for me. I play this game solo, since my kids have yet to catch the baseball bug. I wanted to find a way to simulate a major league season without the sheer number of games. So my idea was to pick 10 teams (hence, Ten-acious) from the 2015 set and, well, “let it roll.”

Rather than pick the top 10 teams based on record, I thought it would be more fun to make it a random choice. I enlisted Random.org to juggle all 30 names into an unordered list, and I grabbed the first 10 teams. They are:

Chicago Cubs, Chicago White Sox, Colorado Rockies, Detroit Tigers, Kansas City Royals, Los Angeles Dodgers, Milwaukee Brewers, Minnesota Twins, St. Louis Cardinals, and Texas Rangers.

As might be expected, there is a decent diversity in terms of the good (top regular-season record St. Louis & World Series champion KC), all the way to the “ugly” end (Colorado & the Brew Crew).

Each team will play the other 9 teams in two 3-game series (one home, one away), amounting to a 54 game season. At the end of the season, the top 4 teams will be seeded into 7-game series to anoint the Ten-acious Champion. The league will use the designated hitter exclusively.

With respects to the idea of AB/IP limits, I don’t think that makes complete sense. If a Strat player likes to replicate seasons, it’s understandable. In this case, a team like Colorado probably stunk because Justin Morneau only played in 49 games due to injury. My expectation would be that Strat-o-matic would increase the likelihood of Morneau getting injured, thus limiting his appearances. We’ll see I guess.