Roger's 1901 APBA Replay

When the 1900 season ended there was relative peace in the world of baseball.  After a shaky decade financially things had started the rebound a little as the National League had shed four of their weaker franchises following the 1899 season (Cleveland, Louisville, Washington, and Baltimore). Brooklyn won their second consecutive pennant, and as the NL moved into its 25th year of existence it looked like things might have finally stabilized for baseball's only major league. 1900 National League Champion Brooklyn Superbas But Ban Johnson and the Western Association, the strongest of the minor league's organizations, had other plans. The Western Association had long established themselves with strong leadership and good players, but they felt confined by the National Agreement that laid out the basic rules and structure of professional baseball, including rules on not poaching players from other teams and establishing territorial rights. Johnson and Charles Comisk...

I didn't intend to wait this long before starting my 1901 replay, but I was interrupted by a couple of house projects and work-related issues. Most of that is behind me, plus winter is here, so I am finally ready to light the fires on this replay. Now that part one ( link ) of the replay set-up is complete it is on to step two: reviewing the player transactions and making additional card adjustments in the area of errors. Baseball-Reference.com (BBR) includes listings of major league debuts, major league finales, as well as a list of player movement that occurred before, during, and after the season. The ATMgr player transaction file comes with its own list of player transactions during the season, most of which overlap with what BBR has. The three BBR listings were dumped into a spreadsheet, their formats massaged so they could be lumped into a single file, and then additional tweaking was completed so the BBR file could be merged in with the ATMgr file. Now it was t...

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 uniq...