Homer History

Amy and the boys were out of the house for a couple of hours, so I had a rare evening alone at home. What to do with myself? How about a baseball doubleheader?!

I had a ballgame on TV and Strat-O-Matic set up on the rug! The latter game was far more entertaining. In a dust-up between the Blue Legs and Canaries, Tim Keefe sent the first ten Legs down in order before Willie Keeler broke up his perfecto with a home run -- the first of Wee Willie's career. I thought that was going to be the game's most memorable moment until the bottom of the seventh, when George Davis crushed a two-run shot to put the Canaries up 8-2. Davis's blast was the sixth of his career, which moves him past King Kelly, Hugh Duffy, and Honus Wagner for first place on the all-time home-run list. After the Canaries secured the final out, I realized that another milestone was reached -- Tim Keefe tied Cy Young for the most career pitching victories with 13. 

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Homerin' Honus

After three games, all three teams are tied at 1-1. We've seen a lot of offense thus far in this young season, highlighted by Canaries shortstop Honus Wagner clubbing his fifth career home run. That ties him with King Kelly, George Davis, and Hugh Duffy for the most homers in league history. With several players sitting on four dingers, we're likely to see this milestone reached again before the season ends.

Opening Day

At long last, baseball is back! The living players have their Opening Day tomorrow, but the dead ones -- the ones in my Strat-O-Matic league, anyway -- kicked off their fourth season of play tonight. In this contest, the two-time-defending-champion Haymakers visited the Canaries. After last year's collective whiff against Old Hoss Radbourn in the play-in game, the Canaries started the season hungry to claim their first-ever title. They jumped all over Cy Young in the first, and led 6-0 after four innings. Tim Keefe, the Season 3 Pitcher MVP, was cruising until Jesse Burkett and Cap Anson hit back-to-back homers to cut the Canaries' lead to 6-3. The champs continued to put pressure on Keefe, but he wiggled out of jam after jam. The key at-bat came in the top of the seventh, when pinch hitter Elmer Flick dug in with two on and one out. Keefe induced a weak grounder and the Haymakers failed to score. Rube Waddell relieved Young in the eighth and gave up a two-run homer to Roger Connor while still managing to rack up three strikeouts in the inning. When the Haymakers went down meekly in the ninth, the Canaries celebrated an 8-3 win. Season 4 is underway!

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Welcome, Resolutes!

I have my work cut out for me in creating player cards for the likes of George Wright and Frank Grant, but this exercise will allow me to field a fourth team in my nineteenth-century Strat-O-Matic Hall of Fame baseball league. I'm still a long way, however, from finalizing those game stats; in fact, I'll go ahead and play Season 4 with the original three teams and then add the expansion team for Season 5. I haven't worked out the details for how Wright, Grant, and the other new players will be added into the league or how the expansion draft will be conducted, but one thing I do know is the name of the fourth team. After considering many defunct teams of yesteryear -- the Mutuals, the Forest Citys (yes, that's the correct plural), the Atlantics, and even the Kekiongas -- I've landed on the Resolutes as the name of the new team.

A New Nine

What do Charlie Comiskey, Frank Grant, Clark Griffith, Ned Hanlon, Connie Mack, Wilbert Robinson, Sol White, George Wright, and Harry Wright all have in common? They're members of the Baseball Hall of Fame and are not included as playable characters in my Strat-O-Matic set because they were inducted in non-player categories. They were all players in the nineteenth century, however, and they're all bona fide Hall members, so they ought to be included in my league! And with nine more potential players (only one of whom, Griffith, is a pitcher), we would easily end up with enough guys to create a fourth team -- and without resorting to the use of early twentieth-century players such as Christy Matthewson or the middle infielders from "Baseball's Sad Lexicon".

Consequently, I've commenced the long, laborious, and most likely foolish attempt to build Strat-O-Matic stats for these gentlemen. To get started, I'm diving into Baseball Reference to get better acquainted with the site and how to find and manipulate the data I'll need to crunch. My task has some additional complexity because two players (Grant and White) were early Negro League stars for whom little data is available and two others (the Wright brothers -- no, not those Wright brothers!) date back to, literally, the dawn of professional baseball. Despite these challenges, I'm excited about exploring the numbers and bringing some new guys into my little fantasy league!

Hmm...

I could try to create player cards for Hall of Fame position players who were not included in the Hall of Fame game set because they were inducted into the Hall for other accomplishments (e.g., as managers, executives, etc.). I feel pretty confident that I could come up with reasonable baserunning and defensive stats, and by identifying statistically comparable offensive players, I could re-use existing hitting charts from other cards. And since we have plenty of pitchers already, I might just have a fourth team after all! I think I'll do a bit more research. I do happen to own a book that provides complete season-by-season stats for all major-league ballplayers for every season in the nineteenth century, so getting the raw data for the comparisons should be pretty straightforward.

So...Many...Pitchers...

My nineteenth-century baseball league is breezy and fun, without all the meticulous record-keeping that I do for its hockey equivalent. I can play through a nine-inning game in a half hour, and even though I almost never play multiple games in a single day, the season seems to fly by. Coming up on Season 4, I got to thinking about whether I could add a fourth team to the league, as I'm very much enjoying the process of creating an expansion team in my historical hockey league.

To add a new team, of course, I need more players. Currently, I'm using only players who debuted at the major-league level no later than 1899. Given that the Baseball Hall of Fame has inducted a rather limited number of players from professional baseball's earliest era, I have only enough players for three ball clubs (the Haymakers, the Canaries, and the Blue Legs), all of which have eight starting position players, two position players on the bench, and five pitchers. (And to get equal numbers on each team, I kinda had to fudge the career start date for one player.) However, we can get by with one bench player and four pitchers, so if I were to add an expansion team, I could immediately draw three position players and three pitchers from the existing teams without compromising their ability to put a full team on the field.

How do I get more players? Having exhausted the supply of Hall of Famers from the nineteenth century, I could push the timeline forward a bit into the early twentieth. Many scholars of baseball history mark 1903 as the beginning of the modern era (i.e., the National League, the American League, and the World Series played between their respective champions). What if I opened up to players whose careers started between 1900 and 1902? Would that three-season window give me enough players to add another team?

Well, Frank Chance would be able to welcome the remaining two-thirds of Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance, but otherwise it's just pitchers. So many pitchers! Christy Mathewson, Eddie Plank, Addie Joss, Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown, Chief Bender! The problem, of course, is that I don't really need pitchers. I need position players, and they're in rather short supply. If I keep pushing the timeline forward, I'll end up with "modern" players like Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, and such. They're baseball immortals every one, but the point of this league is to create a fantasy of nineteenth-century baseball, and these guys are decidedly twentieth century. So, for now at least, we'll have to put aside the dream of a baseball expansion team. Until then, it's Wagner-to-Ward-to-Chance! (Seriously, with an infield like that, how have the Canaries not won a championship yet?!)

Hot Stove Action

One of these days I need to get started with Season 4 of my nineteenth-century baseball league. Season 3 featured the Haymakers winning a record 13 games (in a 20-game season) with a +18 run differential on their way to a second consecutive championship. Basically, they dominated. On the flip side, the Blue Legs had an 8-12 record but with a -24 differential that indicated they were even worse than that .400 win percentage. Their 77 runs scored was the fewest ever for a 20-game season, and 23% of those runs came during a single 18-run garbage win. With only three teams in this league and a fixed number of players, how could I improve the woeful Blue Legs in a way that didn't feel like I was cheating the Haymakers or Canaries?

A couple of trades came to mind. The first was an exchange of talented but underperforming hurlers, with Kid Nichols going to the Canaries in exchange for Al Spalding. The Legs lost some games in the late innings last year, and Spalding will certainly help with their relief efforts. Nichols, meanwhile, gives the Canaries a valuable innings-eater and spot starter behind Tim Keefe and Pud Galvin. Next, the Legs and the Haymakers pulled off a shortstop swap that (in terms of cold, hard game stats) clearly favors the Blue Legs but (at least narratively) also makes sense for the Haymakers. The trade sent Hughie Jennings to the Legs in return for Bobby Wallace. Jennings is by far the better hitter and, in game terms, is defensively the equal of Wallace. Last season, however, Jennings got tagged for quite a few errors (entirely the result of bad luck), so the Haymakers have essentially run him out of town in favor of Wallace.

Yes, I've deliberately nerfed the Haymakers, but I can't have a 42-run difference between the top team and the bottom team in a league that has only three teams. Even with some positive regression to the mean, the Legs were looking at another tough season. The Canaries, meanwhile, don't really need any further tweaking, so I think I've got three relatively balanced teams ready to roll for Season 4!

Repulsed!

D-Day didn't go so well for the Allies in this alternate reality. As time passed, it became increasingly obvious to Matthew and me that Nathaniel's German forces would be able to hold back the Allied advance. Here's a pic from late in the game...

To win this game, the Allies must have maintained sole possession of three key cities -- Cherbourg, Saint-Lo, and Caen -- for at least one complete turn prior to the end of the tenth turn. As the Americans, I made the mistake of sending way more troops than was necessary to take Cherbourg (in the northwestern part of the map); in retrospect, it should have been obvious to me that a smaller force could have taken the city, given that it's so far from all the map zones where German reinforcements can enter play. The extra men I sent all the way out to Cherbourg would have been more valuable in the middle of the map at Saint-Lo. On the eastern side, Matthew had seized Caen early on, but his mistake was failing to establish a ring of troops around the city; he allowed Nathaniel to push back into Caen midway through the game and continue to harass the British until the clock ran out. As for Saint-Lo, we never managed to take the city, even for a moment.

All things considered, it was a really fun experience. Matthew is keen on reading up on the 1942 version of Axis & Allies, so I foresee more World War II action in our future!

Beachhead

Nathaniel is teaching Matthew and me how to play the Axis & Allies D-Day game. I don't have a whole lot of experiencing playing any games from the Axis & Allies series, but I'm enjoying this one so far. It doesn't have any of the resource management aspects of other games in the series, focusing instead on troop movement and combat.

It took us a while to set up the board -- you need to queue up the minis for your waves of reinforcements in addition to placing your starting troops -- but the game moves pretty quickly once you get rolling. There are helpful cards that let you know exactly what you need to do during each of the 16(!) phases of every game turn.

Thus far, we've played through the initial Allied bombardment and the storming of the beaches, as you can see in the image below. Nathaniel is playing as the Germans (black minis), Matthew is the British (tan), and I'm the Americans (green).

The game choice was not accidental, as I recently shared Saving Private Ryan with the boys. Although the film's geography isn't realistic (the city where the final battle takes place doesn't exist), it's cool for the boys to be able to see the overall layout of the D-Day invasion.

Shots on Goal

Following up on my post last week about the scoring spike in Season 2, I got to thinking about sample sizes. Granted, anything I'm doing here in this fictional league involves really, really small sample sizes. But if I look at shots on goal instead of goals scored, at least I have an order of magnitude more data. How do the three seasons compare when I look at shots rather than goals? Is there a jump in shots on goal that might help explain the increase in scoring in Season 2?

• Season 1: 1595 total shots on goal (33.2 per team per game)
• Season 2: 1509 total shots on goal (31.43 per team per game)
• Season 3: 1491 total shots on goal (31.06 per team per game)

This data tells a different story! Rather than a ton of shots in Season 2, what we're seeing is a year-over-year decline in shots. I'll definitely keep an eye on that trend as we proceed to Season 4 and beyond. But with no increase in shots in Season 2, I remain convinced that the scoring spike was nothing more than good luck for McGee and Taylor -- and correspondingly bad luck for the poor goalies!

Stress Test

After dealing with Alexander, the remaining companions tried to flee, but were caught between two groups of aliens. They dug in for a frantic firefight, and things got ugly in a hurry.

With acid blood burning holes in their body armor and lashing claws and teeth all around them, the five men struggled for their lives. One unfortunate private had his skull smashed in by an alien's mouth-within-a-mouth, and another was nearly disemboweled (and yet survived thanks to Malone's lucky roll on a first-aid check). Matthew's character unleashed a torrent of gunfire until -- after racking up an astounding twelve stress dice -- he ended up falling into a catatonic heap on the floor. And as Nathaniel's character was overcome with terror, as well, things were looking grim for the heroes. Their only hope had been to hang on long enough for one very important friend to arrive...

All throughout the campaign, a certain predator had been following their movements, watching from afar as they investigated Project Caliban. A few prior interactions had suggested that the predator was on their side, in a manner of speaking, so his arrival in Sycorax was a welcome development. As the battle raged, the predator fought his way to join the companions and arrived just as the last xenomorph stood poised to slaughter Malone, the last hero still capable of offering any resistance. The alien perished in a suicidal charge.

As the dust settled, the humans limped out of Sycorax and the predator rigged the base to self-destruct. Matthew's character accepted an invitation to join the predator on his ship, while Nathaniel's character, the other surviving marine, and Malone fled the planet aboard their own ship. And what became of the Queen Mother? When the base exploded, she was destroyed...or was she?

Queen Mother

The four surviving squad members slogged through the Sycorax complex, fighting room to room as they made their way toward secured wing where they could access the Project Caliban data stored within the supercomputer Mother. To get to Mother, however, they had to defeat the brute shown below.

I was expecting it to be a challenging encounter, but the marines managed to sneak through the corridors using the aliens' own infestation to conceal their movements. They launched a surprise attack that cut down the beefy alien before it could make even a single attack!

Nathaniel's marine ran a bypass to open the door, allowing the squad to enter. They called up their two civilian allies -- a former criminal named Malone and a synthetic or "artificial person" named Alexander -- from elsewhere in the base. The boys' characters entered Mother's chamber along with Alexander.

Expecting to find an alien queen, they were shocked to learn that it was Mother who had released the xenomorphs from captivity, allowing them to run amok within the base and slaughter the human soldiers and scientists of Project Caliban. Calling herself the Queen Mother, she had decided that humans were unfit to control the xenomorphs. Then, in a heartbreaking scene, Mother reprogrammed Alexander and turned him against the heroes. Just as the boys were forced to destroy their friend (I had, in fact, built up Alexander as the primary NPC of the campaign and went out of my way to depict him as kind and helpful), a xenomorph hunting party returned to the base...

Knock, knock!

Our surviving Colonial Marines are now in the midst of their assault on Sycorax, the headquarters of Project Caliban. They've found that the base has been overrun by the xenomorphs, including this nasty bugger who was lurking around the main entrance.

After fighting their way through a labyrinth of rooms and corridors, the troops have found no indication that the xenomorphs escaped from captivity. It appears that they were deliberately released...

What was the deal with Season 2?

Today I'm going to take a look at the scoring data from the first three seasons of my Strat-O-Matic historical hockey league.

• Season 1: 136 total goals scored (2.83 goals per team per game)
• Season 2: 157 total goals scored (3.27 goals per team per game)
• Season 3: 139 total goals scored (2.89 goals per team per game)

As the old Sesame Street song goes, one of these things is not like the others. Why did we see such an offensive spike in Season 2? Did something happen that led to an explosion in scoring?

The short answer is: No. It's just dumb luck. We are, after all, dealing with extremely small sample sizes (twelve-game seasons).

In Strat-O-Matic, as in real life, goaltenders are the players who have the largest overall impact on the outcome of a game. Likewise, both in the game and in real life, their results are highly volatile (i.e., luck plays a major role). For example, it takes about 3,000(!) shots for a professional goaltender's save percentage to stabilize to the point where we can start to see his true talent emerge from the noise of random chance.

So the story of Season 2, then, is that goalies were unlucky? That's part of it. But it takes two to tango, and skating players were the ones scoring all those goals. However, the jump in scoring came not from all players, but really only from two players: Frank McGee had 18 goals and Cyclone Taylor had 16. If we give them the average of their Season 1 and 3 totals instead of what they actually scored in Season 2, then the league total for Season 2 drops to within a couple of goals of 1 and 3. I think the best explanation for Season 2, then, is that two guys got lucky and ran the table!

Alien Assault

Tonight, at last, I got around to building the map for the climactic final chapter of our first Alien RPG storyline. Using tiles from the super-awesome AVP miniatures game, I set up the floor plan for Sycorax -- a base deep in the heart of the jungle where scientists of the United Americas concocted the nefarious Project Caliban. I think the boys are really going to dig it!

Unfortunately, with the lighting in the ceiling of our game room, just about every photo I took had a terrible glare coming off of the tiles. I salvaged two pictures, but neither of them shows the map from a good angle...

I'll direct your attention to the green tile in the center of the map in the image below. I had an extra jungle tile that didn't seem to fit anywhere, so I decided to give Sycorax a botanical research lab inside the base!

Once we get the mission underway and we have minis populating the tiles, I'll get some close-up shots that, hopefully, will be glare-free. 

Season 3 Awards

The Thistles may not have won the championship, but they racked up four of the six end-of-season trophies. The Comets took home the other two awards, leaving nothing for the Victorias or the Bulldogs.

Scoring Title: Dan Bain (Thistles)
Bain was promoted to top-line center after the Thistles traded Tommy Dunderdale to the Bulldogs, and he didn't disappoint. With increased playing time and better linemates (Alf Smith and Tommy Phillips), Bain racked up 20 points (7 goals, 13 assists), one better than Frank McGee's 19. It's cool to see Bain taking a step toward stardom, but I should point out that his 20 points would only have been good enough for fourth in the league in Season 2 and third in Season 1.

Forward MVP: Frank McGee (Comets)
McGee scored a league-leading 12 goals, and his plus/minus was a solid (for him) +3. This is the second straight Forward MVP award for the Comets' big gun. As a side note, McGee now finds himself tied with Cyclone Taylor for the most regular-season goals in league history (37).

Defenseman MVP: Hod Stuart (Thistles)
It was a down year for Taylor, and Stuart capitalized. He finished sixth in the league in scoring (6 G, 10 A) and was +4 on the season. His goal in the third period of the season's final game propelled the Thistles into the championship series, but Stuart was making great plays all year long as he finally emerged from Taylor's shadow.

Goaltender MVP: Riley Hern (Thistles)
His performance in the playoffs notwithstanding, Hern was the league's top netminder in Season 3. He tied for the league lead in wins (4) and goals-against average (2.67), and was first in save percentage (.915).

Rookie of the Year: Tommy Smith (Thistles)
Alf's kid brother did it all: He was a regular on the power play, he killed penalties, he took critical draws, and he put up respectable numbers (6 G, 3 A, +2) centering the Thistles' second line. And on a team known for taking lots of penalties, Tommy Tools was called for only a single two-minute minor during the whole season; his brother could learn a thing or two from him about gentlemanly play.

Playoff MVP: Mike Grant (Comets)
Hod Stuart beat him out for Defenseman MVP, but it's great that Grant won't walk away empty-handed. The Comets' top blueliner had a dominant postseason (3 G, 2 A, +3) and led his team to a championship.

Without Cyclone Taylor winning two or three awards, as in seasons past, I'm glad to be able to recognize six different players recognized for their superb efforts!

Strat Cup, Game 2

We have a new champion! After the Vics won back-to-back titles in Seasons 1 and 2, the Comets are now Strat Cup winners in Season 3. The deciding game was far less memorable than the prior contest, but, in any case, here's how it went down...

A few minutes into Game 2, Comets winger Blair Russell beat Riley Hern to give the visiting team a quick 1-0 lead. Mike Grant doubled the advantage later in the period on a feed from George Richardson. Percy LeSueur was sharp, although he was not called upon to make a flashy save until midway through the second period when he robbed Tommy Smith on a shorthanded chance. Late in the second, Grant repaid Richardson's earlier pass with a beauty of his own that allowed Richardson to tally his first career playoff goal.

The Comets had a 3-0 lead heading into the third period, but we saw in Game 1 that such a margin is not insurmountable. In the second minute of play, Dan Bain and Hod Stuart made a couple of sharp passes to set up Alf Smith for a goal that got the home fans leaping out of their seats. (Well, it got me out of my seat!) Now down by just two with 18 minutes to play, the Thistles could sense a comeback brewing.

It was not to be. Shortly after a power play expired, Russell found Grant open for a slapshot, and that was that. With his second goal of the game, and third of the series, Mike Grant had given the Comets a 4-1 advantage. Their season in dire straits, the Thistles shook up their lines, putting Tommy Smith in between Tommy Phillips and Dan Bain, and pairing up Dickie Boon and Hod Stuart on the blueline. It seemed like the last five minutes of the game were spent entirely in the Comets' defensive zone, where LeSueur held his ground amidst a barrage of shots. When time at last expired, the Comets celebrated their first championship. Mike Grant (3 G, 2 A, +3) earned the Playoff MVP award.

I have a bit of record-keeping to do, and of course I still need to figure out all the remaining awards, but for now this game brings Season 3 to a close!