Since I’ve been writing for Seamheads, the “Seamheads Historical League” is the most exciting project I’ve been involved in.\u00c2\u00a0 From the moment Mike got excited about it when I brought it up,\u00c2\u00a0 I knew the idea would take off.<\/p>\n
Then, as the idea got more elaborate and more involved — like introducing “celebrity” GMs and using ONLY statistics from the player’s history with a specific team to allow players to play for multiple teams — the project became more intriguing.\u00c2\u00a0 It also became more time consuming to get off the ground.<\/p>\n
Here’s the good news:\u00c2\u00a0 There was definite progress made during the past week in moving the “league” toward opening day.\u00c2\u00a0 However, there is still some work to be done and a few of the touches had to be scrapped and moved to a second season, if season one is a hit.\u00c2\u00a0 So far, the increased traffic around Seamheads looks like it will be and even with the delays, there is still likely to be a good three months of offseason baseball for baseball history geeks to enjoy thanks to the SHL.<\/p>\n
If you are wondering what the hold up is, I thought it would be a good idea to put up a post to give insight into why.\u00c2\u00a0 Now that all the rosters are finalized, it is pretty safe to talk about some of the how the simulation is being utilized.<\/p>\n
The simulation we went with for the league is Out of the Park 9<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Because of its limitless customizability, OOTP was hands down the first choice.\u00c2\u00a0 Because of the amount of customizations, I got bogged down in the details in the beginning and lost a lot of time playing with a lot of the bells and whistles while ignoring the core of the simulation.\u00c2\u00a0 The good part of that is there are a lot of ideas that could be added to future installments of the SHL if Season One meets expectations.<\/p>\n Then, the focus went into putting in the rosters and developing player ratings.\u00c2\u00a0 With 40 players per team and 28 teams in the league, that is over 1,000 players to input.\u00c2\u00a0 And to input the players into OOTP, it is not a point and click process.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s not difficult but it is time consuming.\u00c2\u00a0 Add to that, the statistics had to be team specific and there needed to be some sort of neutralization of the statistics to use players from different Eras.\u00c2\u00a0 Again, easier said than done.<\/p>\n These processes involved heavy use of the Lahman Database<\/a>, Baseball Reference<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0and Microsoft Excel.\u00c2\u00a0 It also took about\u00c2\u00a020 hours of trial and error\u00c2\u00a0to find the best possible way to enter the teams and get the most\u00c2\u00a0acceptable numbers.\u00c2\u00a0 Also, to protect the integrity and the consistency of it all, I decided\u00c2\u00a0it made sense for me to be the only one to enter the data.\u00c2\u00a0 That guaranteed\u00c2\u00a0consistency across the board but also has turned the last month or so of my life into numbers, numbers and more numbers.<\/p>\n Since there is still going to be input from\u00c2\u00a0some of the GMs on lineups and such, I don’t want to divulge too much into how the stats were neutralized and want the rosters and decisions to be focused on the players and not the simulation.\u00c2\u00a0 This has always been about\u00c2\u00a0celebrating baseball history and not exploiting a simulation’s\u00c2\u00a0weak spots — every simulation has them.<\/p>\n Finally, in the past three weeks, I’ve also been in the process of moving from an apartment to a house and for the past two weeks, I had limited access to a computer and\u00c2\u00a0the Internet and that has slowed\u00c2\u00a0things down even further.<\/p>\n Now that all of the\u00c2\u00a0hiccups and speed bumps\u00c2\u00a0have been overcome, the league should be starting soon.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0It’s tough to say how soon but the goal is to under promise and over deliver here while giving a good explanation as to why the process is so slow.<\/p>\n Keep checking back for more updates and feel free to\u00c2\u00a0leave comments with questions\u00c2\u00a0if you have any and they will be answered ASAP.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Since I’ve been writing for Seamheads, the “Seamheads Historical League” is the most exciting project I’ve been involved in.\u00c2\u00a0 From the moment Mike got excited about it when I brought it up,\u00c2\u00a0 I knew the idea would take off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/48"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=872"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/872\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}