Jack Torrance - contributing reporter
Nearing the end of team selections - this time randomizing the AL North but we pushed the button so many times we only randomized this one 5 times just like the last one. It's a good number and is the only prime number that is the sum of two consecutive prime numbers. Chew on that for awhile.
Syracuse (slicknick777)
Fargo (thebigdogs)
New York (SenorPloppie)
Tacoma (mcandrews)
Stay tuned for their player and team reviews.
Jack Torrance - contributing reporter
Time to randomize the AL East. Because there are two active users on discord, two team selections that start with the letter B and my finger slipped = 2+ 2 +1 = randomized 5 times.
Cleveland (ewd330)
Baltimore (bjc30)
Philadelphia (rawdk27)
Boston (tlowster)
Stay tuned for their player and team reviews.
Jack Torrance - contributing reporter
Time to randomize the NL South, no pay wall or presidential border walls here!?! Since Charlotte pinged me on discord, we used the 10 divisions he's played in to randomize the original order.
Charlotte (Getbedarded)
Mexico City (Hockey1984)
San Antonio (FW_Kekionga)
Nashville (TeamVIP)
Stay tuned for their player and team reviews.
Jack Torrance - contributing reporter
Divisions are following suit and deciding to randomize, the NL East is next up. We'll eventually cover the teams in more depth and similar to the previous, we went over to our friends at Random.org and listed the teams in the order they joined the world - another words, the order they would have selected in. Since Wally was first to agree to join the world we are using the number of playoffs appearances on that account for him, which is 13. Here are the final results. They will sort in order they appear on the team selection windows.
Scranton (Jordan)
St. Louis (pimpbotlove)
Cincinnati (WallyRez)
Indianapolis (Rhyco)
Stay tuned for their player and team reviews.
Jack Torrance - contributing reporter
Alright fans, with the AL and NL North both reviewed, we'll jump to the AL South. But before we cover the teams in more depth, the owners agreed to be randomly sorted within their division. To keep this fair, we went over to our friends at Random.org and listed the teams in the order they joined the world - another words, the order they would have selected in. Since the idea originated with New Orleans (I'm still not convinced he wasn't drunk when he came up with the idea), we decided to use the number of times (28) he has been to the playoffs in his HBD career and used that number to randomize the list. Here are the final results. They will sort in order they appear on the team selection windows.
Durham (mike22182)
Montgomery (TheManUtley)
New Orleans (Avalanche313)
Texas (Gorangers16)
Stay tuned for their player and team reviews.
Jack Torrance - contributing reporter
With the AL North covered, let's shift over to the NL North. Home for daubs2334, staeben, oakman310, and ROHockey10!
On repeat before I start, let me preface this with - make sure you review the team before you make your selection. I could have easily missed something that might change your opinion of a team or player. For Arb info, we've make a blanket assumption of 3 ML years = Arb1, 4 = Arb2, 5 = Arb3. This is also one of the few times we'll use OAV when talking about players. If you select a team but realize you picked the wrong one, please let myself or Jordon know via discord. I will likely confirm that you are happy with your selection before giving the password to the next person.
They'll be choosing from:
Jack Torrance - contributing reporter
My Hardball Stitches owners, faith followers, and everybody else here not sitting on a cushion! Let's dig into the teams of the AL North. This will be the first post of many as we lead up to the start of Season 1. This selection order for this division will be slicknick777, SenorPloppie, mcandrews, and then thebigdogs.
But before I start, let me preface this with - make sure you review the team before you make your selection. I could have easily missed something that might change your opinion of a team or player. For Arb info, we've make a blanket assumption of 3 ML years = Arb1, 4 = Arb2, 5 = Arb3. This is also one of the few times we'll use OAV when talking about players. If you select a team but realize you picked the wrong one, please let myself or Jordon know via discord. I will likely confirm that you are happy with your selection before giving the password to the next person.
They'll be choosing from:
There it is folks, there is your AL North. Slick is on the clock!
Catherine Trammell - contributing reporter
One (or more) thing(s) to know about each of our owners, see if you can pick up on a theme.
bruinsfan911, Managing Editor
Hello Hardball Stitches! My name is Ellis, but most people in these corners of the internet know me by the moniker bruinsfan911. I've had several people ask which bruins that refers to, and the answer is the Boston Bruins (rather than the UCLA Bruins.) More specifically, it refers to a singular Boston Bruin: Marc Savard who at the time that I created my WIS account was one of our stronger offensive threats (this was pre-concussion.) As you may have guessed with the Bruins as my NHL team, I'm a New Englander and die hard Red Sox fan, but I'm happy to have taken up residence in virtual Dodger Stadium and southern California...hopefully I can replicate recent MLB history!!
Anyhoodles, the goal of this post is to introduce myself (done) and then tell you a little bit about what I will be contributing to the blog. There are three segments that I will definitely be doing on a regular basis. The first of these is a Hall of Fame deep dive using a wide variety of advanced statistics that the spreadsheets mini and I have created will both calculate and keep track of. This is something I have been doing for just over thirty seasons in FYC and across basically all of my worlds since I started there. Over the years my methodology for that has evolved based on the data that I have available, but having the chance to track all of the data that I'd like to right from Day One was a big part of the reason that I jumped at being a part of Hardball Stitches.
Secondly, I'll be doing another one of my traditional segments from other worlds: A look at the Awards Ballot for every season. This segment originally grew out of my desire to have a good way to compare both the hitters and pitchers for the Rookie of the Year Awards. I can't remember exactly when it happened, but at some point I decided to calculate the Wins Above Replacement totals for those ten candidates to make it more like comparing apples to apples (A+ card game, by the way) rather than apples to oranges. My next thought was "if I'm going to calculate that for those guys I might as well do it for all of the guys on the ballot too." Third on the hit parade was "well if I'm going to do all that work and I'm already writing other blog posts it makes sense to share so that it's not just me taking this math into consideration for the voting process."
Thirdly, being in a world from Day One makes tracking Trade Trees much, much, much easier which is always something that I have been interested in doing and have done so somewhat successfully before. However, being able to keep up with the twists and turns from the very beginning rather than starting 30 or 40 seasons into a world's history means that I'll be able to track twists and turns in real time and the spreadsheets mentioned above will make it possible to have "live" aka season-by-season updates on the WAR totals attached to the various branches of the trade trees that start to grow.
As I have eluded to several times so far, I have either run or contributed to a number of blogs throughout my Hardball career including all of my current worlds: FYC, Plumpy Rules!, Stickball and Around The Horn. Back in my blog hay day when I only had one world and was running FYC's blog pretty much solo, I published the following poll via Google Forms about potential segments:
Minihouston - Editor-in-Chief
Starting a series of Comissioner / Editor-In-Chief logs, mostly just on goings or thoughts of the current world. And to start cataloging the start of Hardball Stitches.
While collecting data and the history of the Cobbfather world, I wondered what it would be like to start with a world from scratch. Starting Year 1 with a true look at career numbers and not just who ranks in the top 5 in a certain category. Seeing many players who were top at their position miss out on the HoF because they weren't a top 10 HR hitter. Now I get it, that might be a different conversation because some people just don't care about the HoF voting and others are too new to a world to know anything about a player on the ballot. But having a blog writer whose willing to put in the time to share their thoughts so the league can vote with a little more info, could be fun. Then perhaps the guy whose #1 all time in saves, by nearly 30% more than #2 has a chance to make it in the Hall. Or the 2B who leads all players at his position in most every hitting stats, stands a chance as well. Or the SS whose has the most career Gold Gloves - a stat you can't exactly track in the current HBD but we will on the blog - misses the Hall of Fame. Having time to dedicate to tracking some of the things HBD doesn't always include in their historical records. Not only that but a world where many records are not drive by those early HBD years before big adjustments were made to the sim. Having power rankings throughout the season to see where your team falls, or having playoff predictions, draft and free agent recaps, all to add to the experience of the world. It's a lot of work, but I'm looking forward to it - if it isn't already obvious. :)
As commissioner I welcome all feedback and will do my best to handle thing that come up. I will say, my preference is to settle everything in private. A believer in praise in public, criticize in private. I'd much prefer discord but will settle for Trade Chat for those of you not on the discord. If you have an issue with someone or how they are doing things; please feel free to DM and I will bring it to their attention. The blog takes on a lot of my free time and I hope we can all be respectful of not only each other but the quality of the league.
For those of you not in Cobbfather, I did this writeup 2 seasons before winning the World Series about my first experience with HBD - having joined the game for the first time when my fantasy baseball league folded due to Covid. Learning the game was definitely a HUGE learning curve for me and hopefully I've gotten better about "rebuilding" a franchise. Now I know what some of you are thinking - that's a tank job! And I don't fully disagree, though in my defense it wasn't intentional and a lot had to do with a lack of knowledge of what I was doing. I underestimated Free Agent and what categories mattered more, and as many brand new owners I put a little more faith in the OAV - especially with pitchers. I also vowed to leave the team in better shape for the next owner than the one before we did. One of my pet peeves is when an owner completely sells the farm and signs a bunch of awful contracts they know they won't be sticking around for, leaving the next owner with no farm and what we can Fat Cats (big contracts and no value - they eat all the food) at their ML level. With my current run, rejoined Cobbfather after 6 seasons off, I've made it a point to do a better job at rebuilding and making sure it's not tanking. This might keep me out of the top 5 picks but I think I can still build a solid team with the other things I've learned and hopefully with some good trades. I'm working on a similar writeup for this second run, though the current S62 will be my last as I shift focus to Hardball Stitches. Hopefully the next owner will appreciate the rebuild I started for them.
Until next post!
-mini
Jack Torrance - contributing reporter
