Thursday, April 6, 2017

BASE-A-BALL BIN BERRY GOOD TO ME!

     I guess I'm sort of a tool.
     Back in my teen years, I was a yuge (we live in the Age of Trump!) baseball fan. I loved the Pittsburgh Pirates. But I haven't really paid much attention to the sport lately. Not since 1990 really, when the Pirates had Bonds, Bonilla and Van Slyke. Remember that?
     This year's World Series -- with the perennial underdog Cubs winning -- has re-energized my enthusiasm. Yeah, me and about 40 million other people. I think we all agree: awesome series!
     Anyway, that spurred me to pick up a wonderful text-based baseball computer simulation from Steam called "Out of the Park Baseball 17."
     This game allows you to run an entire baseball organization in every imaginable way, from managing its farm teams to negotiating trades and player salaries and drafting players out of high school.
     That's a bit much for me, though. Fortunately, it also allows more casual fans, like me, to just manage a season. That is, I'm simply playing the games one-by-one and making all on-field decisions. I select offensive batting and defensive fielding strategies, pitching decisions and make all substitutions during each game.
     I'm starting with the 2015 Pirates season. I watched a fair number of their games last year (we get all the Chicago games where I live, and the Pirates and Cubs are in the same division, so they're on TV a lot here) and I really liked the team. Baseball is weird in that you can't really enjoy the game until you bond with the players, and the Pirates had some pretty likeable guys. I loved McCutcheon, for example. Also Neil Walker and Marte. I really rooted for these guys. I loved Cervelli, for some reason. Plus, they had excellent pitching, led by Gerrit Cole.

Pirates defeat the Arizona Diamondbacks! Cervelli has broken out of his slump. So has Marte. McCutcheon homered, but he's still up-and-down. Neil Walker has cooled off, but he's the team leader. You really become attached to your team in this game.
     OOTP17 comes with every team from 1871 to the present. The real reason I bought it is because I wanted to replay the Pirates 1975 season. Stargell, Parker, Sanguillen, Zisk etc. What an offensive powerhouse they were! Lots of fun. It'll be tough to beat the Reds, though. The Big Red Machine. Man, they were good! Looking forward to taking them on.
     Why 1975? Because that was the year I was playing a boardgame called APBA. Each player had a distinct card. Roll the dice (one red, one white) and consult the card and cross-reference with the results card. Ah, good memories! You used to have to keep stats for yourself. With OOTP17, the computer does all that. Amazing the trouble we used to go through in pre-computer days, isn't it?

APBA cards. All you over-50 guys know what I'm talking about! This game still exists, too. I'm tempted to get a copy just for the nostalgia of it. IIRC, a "61" is a base hit!


2 comments:

  1. Hi L, thanks for stopping by. I felt like a tool because I let myself get caught up in the whole Cubs things and found myself rooting for them even though a guy on the other team was named Coco Crisp which normally wouldve had me rooting for them on that basis alone and I don't even particularly like the Cubs still harboring fond memories of a game in April '75 or '76 or so when the Pirates beat them 21-0 and Rennie Stennett went 7-for-7. But now I'm a Cubs fan. What a tool!

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