Sorry, just had to preserve this one for posterity. Kind of the ultimate pitching duel, a six hour and forty-seven minute game.
Don Sutton pitches a 4-hit CG shutout, followed by 12 innings of scoreless relief work.
Only in a pitcher’s park.
Month: March 2020
May
“The Captain looked over the town with great satisfaction, noting the many fine opportunities for future plunder.”
Well, the first month of the 2021 season went about as expected. 16-10 (.615), 1st in most pitching categories, 1st in Deff and ZR, 1st in base running, 2nd in stolen bases. Typical stuff for a run prevention team.
Runs Allowed 1st, Runs Scored t-13th. The bats are a little more sleepy than we’d like, but it’s early.
Currently we’re division second -½ game out, behind Seattle Reign. Looks like a team built around pop, which means we can expect some interesting series against them.
Training proceeds. About midway through the season we should be able to stabilize and assign more permanent lineups, but there’s already enormous flexibility. We don’t appear to be giving away many games to defense.
Pirates Plunder 91 in 2020
The Lincoln Towing Service Lot is full tonight, with 91 plundered victories en route to the AC East Division title.
The Captain’s secret Plunder Maximization Strategy appears to be working well so far. Lincoln Park finished 1st in ZR and DEff, 1st in Runs Allowed (554), and 13th in Runs Scored (637).
Staff Ace Shane Bieber won the league ERA crown with 2.53, and closer Taylor Rogers finished second in Saves with 44.
The 2020 post-season bracket will be:
ACW-Quid Pro Roll Podcast
NCC-Ohio Marching 110
ACC-Roswell Aliens
AWC-Exeter Blue Hawks
NWC-Nancy Stars
ACE-Lincoln Park Pirates
NCE-Milwaukee Vacuums
NWC-Portland Mets
NCW-San Diego Beach Bums
AWC-French Ravens
Pennant Chase
Well, it looks like there will be some plunder this year, mates.
Division 1st (+7) Overall 5th. Mag#23 w/29 games to play. Unless there’s a sudden complete collapse, we should cruise to the division and into the playoffs.
Essentially, the pitching is running at or near 1st in every category, as are the defensive stats (ZR and Defeff). The offense is shrug doing what offense does in a pitcher’s park, limping along. Runs allowed 1st Runs scored 13th. Pretty anemic O, but the defense is more newsworthy.
Cross Training:
Paul Dejong 74,-,18,68 (1,2,3,S)
Ozzie Smith 17,90,75,118 (1,2,3,S)
Ron Hansen -,42,88,104 (1,2,3,S)
Honus Wagner 4,29,98,104 (1,2,3,S)
Essentially any of the four guys can cover any of the positions. I’m screwing around a bit too much, really, but a couple of four-position defensive backup players will surely come in handy at some point down the road.
The series? Well, we aren’t the best team in the league, but we might have a shot. Not a good shot, looking over the top teams.
All things considered, not an awful first season.
Jul 3, 2020
Approaching the All Star break. As usual, defensive teams are heavily under-represented in the All Star voting.
On a less discouraging note, we lead the Division by 8 games, 4th place overall (48-32 .600). Early projections: Pessimistic Projection Model™ says LPP ends the season with 92 wins, Remaining Schedule Model™ projects 101. Obviously the margin of error in both cases is still enormous.
Position training continues. It’s possible that we could rotate the infield (and start everyone in on training a new position) in early August.
1st in AC for Runs Allowed, 9th in Runs Scored. Pretty typical of a well-functioning run prevention team, to this point.
Ichiro had himself a 5-for-6 game in June, and we had a 4 DP game (of course). The outfield had several Gunning Them Down games (OF assists). Coco Crisp is (arguably) the best run-producer on the team at this moment @ 3.3 WAR, he takes walks and steals bags and has surprisingly good pop for a Defense Guy. Geronimo Pena is having an excellent year with the bat, apparently he’s been eating his Wheaties and has the best ISO on the team so far (.238, .519 SLG).
Nearly all of the pitchers are having career years, of course, given the boost from the ballpark and the fielders vacuuming up the base hits. Shane Bieber and Bucky Walters are both solid 1-2. But the relief staff has been simply stellar, five with ERAs under 2. Taylor Rogers has 27 saves, which projects to 55 by end of season and leads the league.
Mayday
No, not like that.
May Day, the first of May.
The Pirates set sail in their inaugural season in high spirits, with vast treasures to acquire and new lands to plunder. The “defense first” strategy was tempered only by the introduction of several staple players into entirely new positions.
For much of the month, the ball player’s unfamiliarity with their positions led to some obvious blunders and simple learning-curve mistakes. But with so many solid defenders on the roster, the natural talent quickly reappeared.
Honus Wagner, the Flying Dutchman, worked the leather at his new home on Third Base. Ron Hansen started the season at short, while second base was shared between Geronimo Pena and Kazuo Matsui. Paul Dejong settled in (somewhat uncomfortably) at first, unhappy to be shifted from his previous spot at SS in AAA.
Behind the plate was Christian Vazquez and his backup, Grayson Greiner. The outfield is anchored by the solid glove of Coco Crisp, with Edman in Left and Zimmer in Right.
Midway through the month, management acquired Joe Mauer, an experienced 1B, to back up and help train Dejong. The two worked out together every day, and Paul is to showing substantial defensive improvement.
Slowly, as the team shook off the rust, the Pirates battled their way out of the basement and powered up the standings. On the last day of the month, Lincoln Park took over the division lead and the benefits of defense begins to be more apparent.
On the first day of May, the management goes all-in on their commitment to the defensive long-term future of this team, acquiring two more top flight prospects from their AAA affiliate. We are pleased to announce the addition of RF Ichiro Suzuki and SS Ozzie Smith, two more outstanding defensive prospects!
But that’s not all, we’ve also added the arm of rookie Shane Bieber to anchor our starting rotation!
What this means to the (several) other outstanding shortstops and 2B already on the team, and who will be shifting to what positions for the future, is all part of the Captain’s secret “plunder maximization strategy.”
Only this is certain: there is never a dull moment at the Lincoln Towing Service!
Hoist the black flag, men. It’s time to slit some throats!
Entry Pool Follies
Let’s see what kind of memorable moments from the Entry Pool…well, we had a monster 31 run game from the Warm Beers. Guess that happens in the Dominican Republic? A nice fat paycheck, though, which netted us Javier Baez–the best SS who fits the Cerveza theme.
The Pirates put together their SS infield. Honus Wagner, 3B. Ron Hansen, SS. Paul Dejong, 1B. Dejong was too good a stick to leave him holding Hansen’s jockstrap, but I didn’t really have anywhere to put him, except 1B. 2B is Kazuo Matsui and Geronimo Pena. Lot of gold glove potential in this infield. Outfield, not so encouraging.
Tulsa acquired the first 20 of their 34 Braves. Work in progress.
Knight Raid scored several gold achievements and set to work on their overall strategy.
Nemesis needs help. Bad pulls, slow start, no income to speak of.
Auction House Search Guide
Not mine, but it’s a really really useful explanation of basic regex from Chris M.
And if I save it here, I’ll always be able to find it.
Perfect Team 21 Ratings v1.0
EDIT–DEP. Future updates will be found on the “Spreadsheet” page here.
Player Search parsing for spreadsheets
OOTP 20 specific, but I don’t expect things to change too greatly for OOTP 21.
A topic that I see on the forums rather frequently can be paraphrased as “How can I get the player ratings for use in a spreadsheet?”
OOTP has released the card database at least once, (for PT21 they seem reluctant to do so) but you may not need the full db for your purposes. What players really want is a handy spreadsheet including the ratings on all cards they consider important, right?
The devs didn’t include a specific report for this purpose, for several reasons we don’t need to go into, but there’s a rather marvelous and powerful “Player Search and Compare” utility that allows you to construct whatever custom report you want.
For example, you’d like a spreadsheet of left-handed starters ratings:
League Menu>Player Search and Compare
From the View pulldown menu, select “Customize”. You’ll be offered a lot of optional fields you can turn on (or off) in your report, for example:
Feel free to explore, some of these options (a couple hundred fields) are really really useful, and some are just…not. Many fields are related to the OOTP standard challenge mode, fields like “salary” and “injury” that don’t have any PT equivalents.
At any rate, a LHP Starter report should Filter (obviously) for Throws Left and Starter. (Check out the filter options, too. It’s also quite useful.)
Set up the General fields you want, and ratings are in the Pitching Ratings tab.
The resulting report view (with these filters) would look something like:
When you’ve got all the fields you want for your spreadsheet, make sure you save the view (View pulldown, save view). You can use the same view again tomorrow, next week, next month, any time you need to update your data, etc.
Almost done! Time to export.
You could write to disk, but finding the exported report is given a rather obscure filename and finding it on your machine is tons o’ no-fun. I prefer exporting to browser, choose “open report”.
See the handy “open in browser” button top right?
Once it’s in your browser, right-click, select all, copy, go to your spreadsheet and paste. Nice, neat, sortable fields.
Victory!
Notes:
Player Search is league-specific. If you want to see every player in the game, you’re going to need multiple seasons and multiple teams and keep updating your player list frequently until you’ve seen all (or at least most) of the available cards.
*The live cards will need to be collected and updated weekly, once the new season begins. This is where the CardID field will be extraordinarily handy. For example, if there are six Pedro Martinez cards, which one are you looking at? CardIDs are unique, and each of the Pedro cards will have a different CardID. Very, very handy for database update queries or the Excel equivalent Remove Duplicates.
The non-Live/historical cards are easy. They won’t change, set it and forget it. The “Live” cards also become static after the final end-of-MLB-baseball-season release.
There are a couple of hours every day where these reports get really wonky, around 2AM. All of the pitchers listed have 0 batters faced and no stats at all, for example. Should be fine for ratings collection, but if you’re collecting statistics keep an eye out for ‘dead’ hours. I believe, but haven’t confirmed, this is when the servers at OOTP are updating their statistics. Nothing to do but wait it out.
Starters pitching in relief show up as two sets of ratings (different STU) for the same card. Be aware of this. Two-way players can appear as both pitcher and hitter, and position players cross-trained in other positions (defensive whiz SS trained at 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, for example) can show up on any of the four ‘lists’.
*Corona Virus Update:
MLB is not playing games at the start of the 2020 season due to the covid-19 pandemic. When MLB games resume, the live cards will be ‘live’ and need updating, but at the beginning of the season they will be static.
Face The Curtain 