Deadball 1904

 

I'll be honest with you all, I have never been overly big sports fan. Probably from growing up in a small town that put sports and status above anything else plus being the stereotypical nerd that did not get along well with the jocks, for many years I just wouldn't care what was going on in the world of sports. I still enjoyed going to super bowl parties and I had no issue watching the odd game if it just happened to be on the tv, I just had no preference usually who would come out the victor. 

Then life moves forward, and with it letting go of old prejudices based solely on bad experiences from earlier in life. Now some 20 years later I am sitting down to enjoy watching the cubbies play America's past time with my wife and having a great time cheering them on. But as some one who still enjoys rolling dice, when I found W. M. Ackers dice and paper version of baseball a few years ago, I just had to give it a try. And am I ever glad I did because there is a lot of charm and thought put into his game that really struck a cord with myself and the table top gaming community. 

 What's great is if you want to play with real players from at any point in history be it modern or historical, all you need are the players stats (and really only just a few of them) and your off to the races. Also included however are some very simple tables to roll on to generate new players, top prospects and farm hands just coming up. To simplify the process I created a python script to generate new batters and pitchers very quickly which has been a great time saver. 

This has all led to my current endeavor of running a 1900's league starting in 1904 using the Deadball 1909 rules which can be found here, but with a few house additions. 

I will be using the weather rules from year II, some of the stadium generation rules from the 1909 book, the optional player hot/cold rules, Injury checks after set amount of game days, and adding in the current modern rule of having each team start with a player on 2nd base for extra innings to speed up end games. 

Since I am planning for this to be a long term campaign I am also implementing a retirement check which is as follows. At the end of every season every player over the age of 30 rolls a d10 and adds +1 for each year above 30. If the roll is 10+ they have retired. Due to how to random ages came out that means there will be a few players who will be auto-retiring at the end of the year (40yr old).

To generate my teams I generated around 100 batters/fielders and about 50 pitchers. My script took into account generating players with bonus traits but not for negative ones so to correct for this i roll d100 15 times and for whoever it landed on if they did not already have 2 traits, they got a random negative. This worked out well as after the random draft every one got at least some one with a positive trait and one or more with a negative. 

I tried at first to do a draft with chat gpt however that quickly showed it was a lesson in futility. When drafting it would just go down the list and tried to make up reasons why the player was the best pick. After about 4 picks it didn't even care any more making up player names and player traits that were not even part of the spread sheet. I dropped the whole idea and just opted to throw all the player names in for batters into wheel of names and randomly have each player drafted snake draft style up and down the teams until each team had 12 players, then I did the same with the pitchers until each had 5 making for 8 teams with 17 players. This does leave a few left over players for each batters and pitchers who will remain available for next year doing aging rolls, and possibly retiring just like any one on the active rosters. New players will be generated for each new season with most likely a random selection draft happening unless i can find a better way to do so moving forward.

For those who are interested here are the 8 teams who will be playing, including their game stats, and a fun team logo generated by AI that as some one in the discord delightfully replied looks like what they imagine supervillains had started their own baseball teams which I thought was great. 

New York Skyliners

 

 

Houston Heat

 

 

Chicago Thunder

 

 

San Francisco Waves

 

 

Miami Stingrays

Detroit Dynamos

 

 

Las Vegas Vipers

 

 

Seattle Storm

 

 

I am definitely looking forward to rolling these games out and seeing who comes out on top. I will be rooting for the Thunder but I can certainly tell there will be some interesting match ups to be had.

For any one interested in playing there is a great PWYW copy of the original rules here

Year 2 can be found here 

 I do not yet have years 3 and 4, nor do I have the 2nd edition but I have heard nothing but good things and look forward to adding it to the collection as soon as I can.