Playing a “Preseason” to Brush Up On A Game – Detroit 2019

Rebooting the new channel has meant a chance to start fresh with a new baseball project. Most of my baseball rolling has been done with Strat-O-Matic (SOM): TBL’s 1 and 2, the Phillies 2008 Replay, a King of the Hill type tournament, and even a 1922 series between the St. Louis Browns and New York Giants. all in either SOM basic, advanced or super-advanced.

The one baseball project I started that didn’t involve SOM was a TBL 2.1, that I was calling the Tenacious History Maker Baseball League (THMBL). I played a few gamedays of the project in History Maker Baseball (HMB), but decided one TBL at a time was enough.

That brings me to today, where I’ve had HMB for over 3 years now and not much use. I decided that when TBL 2 was over, version 3 would be in HMB using the 2019 season I purchased last year. More recently I’ve decided that this will be the first 10 team league I’ll try where I will manage 1 team through the 54 game season, and the random engine selected the Boston Red Sox (the other games will be quick-played with the standard Plaay chart).

Having played it sparingly, I decided that I needed to nail down the engine and mechanics before recording for the world to see. I thought of a few potential ways to refamiliarize myself, but I kept returning to the idea of a “Preseason.” I went back and forth whether to play with Boston or another team. I decided I’d let a random choice occur, with the first team NOT in my project to come up being the one I’d play out. Detroit ended up being selected, which was cool for me because they sucked and it would give me a chance to get used to losing.

At first, that was the case. I also used the random generation to select opponents, and the Yankees, Athletics, Indians, and Royals were chosen. I did an Away-Home alternating schedule just to help simulate that aspect.

The Tigers struggled early on, with the first three opponents being clearly out of their league. They were able to squeeze out a win from each of New York, Oakland, and Cleveland though, which set up Kansas City as a chance to finish level par. They did, winning each game by a single run, with a walk-off win in Game 1, and two Shane Greene saves to finish off the finishing sweep.

Below are the final batting and pitching stats. I will be using Sheets to track the Boston season statistics.