Playing the Game of Miniature in Solitaire: Inspiring and Therapuetic

[46defense]

your solitaire baseball a strat-o-matic type game?

[Orleanian In Exile]

No, it is based on a set of rules and tables devised by the sportswriter Jeff Sagarin and inspired by Robert Coover's novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc.; J. Henry Waugh, Proprietor. The table of rolls derives from over 50 years of combined statistics up to the point when Sagarin wrote the game.

[RavennaAl]

Reggie, I know how you feel. I recently finished my solitaire season, and documented it in a full season long post. (It's in the RULES WORLD forum in the Solitaire section) It was quite an undertaking and a real eye opener. I had my suspisions before I started as to how it would play out. What I didn't take into account is that these little guys have minds of their own. Each team developed it's own personality, and they never failed to amaze me.

Each team had strengths and weaknesses, and some teams matched up better against certain teams, and not very well against others. I used passing dice for about half the games and sticks for the others. You would think, statistically speaking, that the QB's would be about equal, since I used the same system and was the only person making the decisions who I was 'throwing' to. And yet, somehow, one QB stood out way ahead of the other 7. In fact, 2 were consistantly better than the rest. Some guys were 'streaky', in that they would get hot and complete several passes in a row, and then get cold and missed several in a row.

One team finished consdierably worse than the rest, and yet with just a few breaks here or there could have just as easily finished with their won-loss record reversed. I had one team that just seemed to quit when they got far behind, and another that somehow kept fighting back when they got way behind. I can't explain why they did what they did, but it sure was fun being able to just sit back and watch them. I can't wait to add a few more teams and start again next year

[Orleanian In Exile]

Originally Posted by RavennaAl

Reggie, I know how you feel. I recently finished my solitaire season, and documented it in a full season long post. (It's in the RULES WORLD forum in the Solitaire section) It was quite an undertaking and a real eye opener. I had my suspisions before I started as to how it would play out. What I didn't take into account is that these little guys have minds of their own. Each team developed it's own personality, and they never failed to amaze me.

Each team had strengths and weaknesses, and some teams matched up better against certain teams, and not very well against others. I used passing dice for about half the games and sticks for the others. You would think, statistically speaking, that the QB's would be about equal, since I used the same system and was the only person making the decisions who I was 'throwing' to. And yet, somehow, one QB stood out way ahead of the other 7. In fact, 2 were consistantly better than the rest. Some guys were 'streaky', in that they would get hot and complete several passes in a row, and then get cold and missed several in a row.

One team finished consdierably worse than the rest, and yet with just a few breaks here or there could have just as easily finished with their won-loss record reversed. I had one team that just seemed to quit when they got far behind, and another that somehow kept fighting back when they got way behind. I can't explain why they did what they did, but it sure was fun being able to just sit back and watch them. I can't wait to add a few more teams and start again next year

It's bizarre but that is how it seems to work out. You notice patterns developing with your teams season-by-season. In my baseball, my Utopia Philosophes, for example, have in four seasons developed a tendency to play their best ball when struggling to come from behind in the standings to roar into the final stretch week. They've taken three league pennants and two championships in this manner. I've got two teams which have become bitter rivals and seem to play their most aggressive games when matched up against one another. Two of my Notional League teams found themselves deep in the hole around midseason and mounted comeback drives in the second half that saw one just miss out on the n.1 seeding for the Transcendental Series tournament and the other just missing out on a postseason slot. The first one had started out strong, had the league lead through much of the first half of the season, then went into a dive and fell below .500 before they began their climb back upward; the other started out slow and was just about in the cellar at midseason when they began to claw their way upward to challenge the league leaders.

For this year, I extended the season by an additional six weeks and reduced the active rosters from 16 to 12: from three starting and three relief pitchers to just three pitchers who would double on starting and relief rotation, and one utility fielder most often used in a pinch-hitting situation, and for some pitchers the change seemed to inflict a negative effect. Last season, Barnabas Collins of the Sussex Vampyres won the Satchel Paige award for finishing the year with a 1.79 ERA, the second-lowest in the league that season, and a 4-2 W-L record. He pitched much the same way for most of this season but seemed to go into a terrible slump in the last five weeks; blowing games and saves, going in some innings where he couldn't seem to find the strike zone, and winding up with 5-5 record and an ERA somewhere in the 3.80s (haven't updated the stats yet so that's just a guess). Almost as if the added stress of extra games and relief appearances got to him down the stretch.

And all this in a game which is determined entirely by the random rolling of three dice. It is, to say the least, a phenomenon.