RFC: SGCBL

Calling all baseball stat geeks. Solonor’s Groovy Computer Baseball League is gearing up for bidness.

I’m going to be using the wickedly cool Out of the Park 5 as the sim engine for this extravaganza. It’s got really cool features that let you manage everything from your starting lineup and pitching rotation down to the ticket prices in your stadium. You don’t need to own it to participate, but you do need some form of IRC for online drafts and such.

There are still a lot of things up-in-the-air, because I don’t know how many people will be playing or to what extent they will want to deal with player salaries and hiring coaches and scouts and all that stuff. (I love that junk, but then I love that Capitalism game).

I’d like to have at least 10 teams, but my ideal would be 24 (two conferences with three four-team divisions). I’m writing the rules even as we speak, and the central command will be located at https://solonor.com/baseball/. Check out some of the other OOTP online leagues for some idea of what I’m raving about.

When I ran one of these things in the early 90’s, I used a player pool made up of any Major Leaguer who ever played (from 1871 on) that had at least five years of playing time. Hitters needed to average at least 300 at-bats per season, and pitchers needed to average at least 100 innings pitched. I think this time I’m going to limit it to players since 1901 but with the same minimums.

The stats used are career averages – normalized to the average over history. So, for example, if a guy hit 20 home runs in 19xx (when the league average was 5), he would be normalized to 75% above the all-time average of 14 and be set to hit 56 homers that year. Simple, no?

I plan on doing an initial draft for the major league rosters, then letting the computer pick the minor leaguers (it sims AAA, AA and A minors for each team). I’ll provide lists of available players with their new normalized stats.

So, spread the word and send me e-mail (solonor AT solonor DOT com) or leave comments here, if you are interested.