Turning Baseball Love into a Baseball Game

I knew immediately I wouldn't be able to do a graphical game. I can't draw that well either in 2-D then or 3-D now. I don't have the uber-bucks it costs to get a 3-D graphics program. So, my game would have to work off of stats if I wanted to stand any kind of chance of making something.

I learned how stats work, what's good/bad, how to calculate them, and cobbled them together into pen and paper efforts to see if I had something that could work as a system. It did work, but being young, I had no clue how to really set player's skill levels so that the performances made sense and weren't just largely random (nevermind the fact that player skills aren't really static in real life).

So the learning continued all the way up until now where I thought "okay, now I know what I'm doing." Well I did...and then I stumbled on the world of sabermetrics - the study of baseball stats to predict/analyze player performance.

With the wide new world of sabermetrics available, I began rumaging through Google trying to soak up more and more information. I ended up running into stats for things I had never heard of before. BABIP? SLOB? DIPS? What the heck is all this? Rates for this, percentages for that? And then when I thought I had THAT down, I find out there's more to figure out? BABIP based on flyballs vs groundballs? BABIP for grounders to different parts of the infield? A new look on how pitching works.

I made notes and started analyzing the stats on a whole new level. Even in "fan mode" I find myself looking a stats a different way.

Could this be what I've been missing in trying to create a baseball game all these years? Could it be with this new information, maybe now I'll be able to create a system that really works? Ideas popped into my head for a game that would be derived almost solely on this information, and hardly at all at the "surface" stats. Forget making it so a .300 hitter will hit somewhere around .300 frequently, if I can take what makes that player hit .300 and model that, I won't have to worry about the result - it takes care of itself. That's the mindset. Time will tell if it works, or if it's just another flop of an idea.

Ah. Missing information.

Something I never thought about with this approach. Some things just haven't been discovered yet. Some things have, but aren't going to be on the internet. Many things are still just theories and models for reality (since real baseball works on physics). Other things just aren't measured (or measurable) using current methods and technology.

The other problems:

• Just how detailed do I want this to be? It's supposed to be a game, not a sabermetric lab project.
• How much will I be able to do, given my limited programming skills?

• How much will the player be able to understand and how well can I explain it in help text, etc?

These issues will have to be worked out if I'm going to have a shot - and of course this is just all on the field stuff, the game between the lines. What about schedules? What about player growth and decline? What about injuries? What about rosters and transactions? For the longest, none of that really entered my mind - probably a product of my pen-and-paper mindset. Most of those things could be handled easily in that medium. People can make their own schedules. Rosters and transactions would just need rules. The "interface" would be the players themselves talking out a deal and swapping cards or such to make the trade.

Right about now, I'm starting to wonder again if this can work. At the same time, I'm still trying to absorb more information. It's an interesting paradox - thinking you can't do something while at the same time trying to gain more information on how to that something.

Then I said, well, you never know until you try!

And there's where I am now - trying. Note-taking. Trying to work out those issues.

So far, there's not a lot of progress, and most of it is on the "infrastructure" side, which can be difficult enough for me. I figure, if nothing else, I'll learn some programming working on a fun (in theory) project dealing with a subject I enjoy.

Hopefully, it won't just be another lost effort. Perhaps someday, one day, I'll write myself a working baseball game, computerized or back to pen-and-paper, if only just for the feeling of accomplishment.