1901 Replay Preparation

Now that the 1930 and 1949 replays have been completed  it is time to start doing work in preparation for a 1901 replay. Actual gameplay probably won’t commence for a few more months yet as I am in no particular hurry, but in the meantime, I am spending time getting everything together that I want to have in place before play does begin.

Why 1901? 1930 was the year of offensive explosion (the NL had a league batting average over .300) with a ton of Hall-Of-Famers and 1949 featured two down to the wire pennant races plus a plethora of famous names as well. 1901 is a different animal completely. This will be old-time baseball where pitchers really could control their own destiny, stolen bases and sacrifices were the key offensive maneuvers and the year from which "modern day" baseball is counted from.

The replay will be played using APBA Baseball for Windows (BBW) as before. Using cards and dice truly (whether Basic Game or Master Game) has its own unique level of fun, but using the computer to do all of the scheduling, daily lineups and stat work removes that burden from my shoulders. To fully take advantage of this the following steps have been initiated:

1. I already owned a card set from ~30 years ago, so I purchased a 1901 season disk. It is not a re-issued season, so it is the same as the disk released ~30 years ago. Eighteen players per team times sixteen teams = 288 carded players, using the game company's original formula for card creation.
2. Why eighteen? I suspect that since the Chicago White Sox ended up only having eighteen carded players total in order to make all of the rosters equal in size only eighteen players were carded per team. This means 83 players were not carded.
3. There is a lot of baseball research that has gone on over the past ~30 years since this was created, so Baseball-Reference.com (BBR) is being used as my reference tool for necessary updates and corrections. Having said that, there are still more than a handful of players where it is still not known if they were right-handed or left-handed. Most of these were players that appeared for one game and then disappeared forever, but that research is still ongoing.
4. I went to BBR and under the 1901 MLB season and pulled down the batting, pitching, and fielding stats by position into a spreadsheet Once in a spreadsheet, I was able to do some personal preference manipulation, but also went through the process of identifying who the 288 carded players were versus the 83 un-carded players.
5. I also went to the  APBA Transaction Manager (ATMgr) site, a BBW add-on, and downloaded the 1901 lineups and transaction files. Someone went to a lot of trouble to put together lineups for every game in 1901 because even BBR doesn’t include that information. The ATMgr player transaction file also includes a ton of information regarding player movement, injuries, fights, suspensions, and other day-by-day types of notes as culled from 1901 Sporting Life and Sporting News magazines and other sources from the back in the day.
6. To this point, it has mostly been data collection. The next steps were to create a card on the disk for each of the 83 un-carded players. Once it was known who the 83 were I used Steve's APBA Card Computer to work up a batting dummy card for each player and go through the process of creating and populating a new card on the disk. If left or right-handed was still unknown I just arbitrarily went with right-handed. This included filling all of the basic batting, pitching and fielding stats, as well as setting some of the subjective basic APBA ratings (speed, defensive ratings, etc.) This got me up to the full set of 371 players.
7. The next step was to go through every single player on the disk and make several corrections:

• All of the player's last names were changed from upper case to lower case, (i.e., SMITH -> Smith). It's just a matter of personal preference, although I did leave the 20 Hall-of-Famers with their last names in all CAPS. Further, in some cases, names have changed over the ~30 years since the disk was released. When in doubt, I went with the BBR names
• There were two Bill Hallman's, and uncle and a nephew. Just to differentiate between the two names the younger nephew was renamed as Billy Hallman instead
• Missing stats (Player age, complete games for pitchers) were added. Also, APBA lumped all of the players fielding statistics into one and placed them under their primary position - this was remedied by splitting out the defensive numbers per position. Passed balls and stolen base/caught stealing numbers for catchers were available in BBR and were included as well.
• For replay purposes all injury and duration ratings were set to 1 (unless they were already at zero). I don’t mind rest-of-game injuries but I wanted to keep it at that. Similarly, Stolen Base Allowance letters were adjusted to either A or B - I will be monitoring stolen base usage anyway and don’t want to the game providing an unwanted and unnecessary adjustment.
• Along the way, I did find some other discrepancies between the original APBA disk and the current BBR listings. If differences were found I went with the BBR numbers and updated the player accordingly. However, this effort was certainly not exhaustive on my part. If it was found it was fixed.

7. The step that is currently being worked is combining the player's transactions listed in BBR (including major league debuts and finales) with the transactions provided through ATMgr. This is the list that details when to have ATMgr automatically add or drop players to or from a roster throughout the season.
8. Once that is completed the final step will be to load and validate the lineups. Beyond just loading the daily lineups, ATMgr also meticulously validates players names (is it Charlie or Charley?) and even ensures that if players are in a lineup on a given day that they are on an active roster on that day. Once this is completed it will be time to start the replay.

As far as actually starting gameplay, I have a few more weeks of prep work to get through and an upcoming family vacation (new granddaughter!) plus there is some additional research I am working on. I was poking around the internet and found PDF's or on-line only copies of Reach Guides and Spalding Guides from this timeframe (1902 Reach Guide) (1902 Spalding Guide). SABR has a list of these guides from the first half of the 1900s (Link). Not just stats, but pictures and commentary, all of which help set a tone for the timeframe. Before play is started I will provide another blog post with additional 1901 thoughts with data and text pulled from these guides.

And I wanted to get the blog itself created so I am using this note as the initial post. Obviously, there will be more to come, but I may be playing around with color schemes and set-up over the next few weeks as well.