Statis-Pro Baseball Great Pennant Races 1950 AL (corrected pitching cards)

 

The Splendid Splinter batted .317 with 24 HR in only 89 Games for the Red Sox in 1950.

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Statis-Pro Baseball Great Pennant Races: 1950 AL (corrected pitching cards)

Note that I have every intention of finishing my 2024 baseball ⚾️ project; I purchased a copy of Great Pennant Races for my birthday, and decided I needed to try to quickly update the 1950 pitchers. I had to see if this could be done and if this would make the set at least playable, because the position player cards originally created by Avalon Hill were done very, very well.  But the pitchers cards as received from the Game Co. were very difficult to play. 

I’d owned this set at least twice before, and it contains the 1950 AL, 1964 NL, and 1967 AL.  But the cards were made by Avalon Hill in 1978, before they updated the pitching card methodology using David C. LeSueur’s revised methodology (All-Star Replay, Volume II, no. 4).  

AH All-Star Replay Vol 2 no. 4.pdf

The older versions of the cards, used for the 1978 and 1979 seasons as well as this set, were created by a methodology that was at best an approximation. You can apply this method from the second generation instructions, as they had the charts for pitcher’s results at the end as a service to gamers who wished to create their own cards.  These charts used the number of batter’s hits, walks (net ibb) and strikeouts that the pitcher allowed per inning, referenced against the pitcher’s PB rating to provide gamers with the number of splits that should be applied to the pitchers card. The replay results were disappointing, and so I sold the sets. 

It was David’s method that changed my line of thinking.  Mr. LeSueur’s example was two pitchers with a PB rating of 2-7, and a 1.0 strikeout to innings ratio. That’s 18 strikeout results on their cards. Let’s also assume the first has a walk rate of 0.20 walks per inning- that’s two walk results.  The second has a rating of 0.6 walks per inning- that’s 10 walk results. In actual play the first pitcher would have fewer strikeouts per inning because 8 results that are walks on the second pitcher’s card are outs on the first pitcher’s card. The effect was particularly pronounced for pitcher’s with 2-5 and 2-6 ratings; the results coming from batter’s cards were not removed from the chart’s columns the way they should have been, and so these pitchers allowed more hits and walks and received fewer strikeouts than they should have. Mr. LeSueur’s method changed this, and Avalon Hill used his method to manufacture the pitcher’s cards from the 1980 season on.  They were an immediate improvement; they introduced the concept of the “good” 2-6, a pitcher like 1968 Mickey Lolich or 1984 Milt Wilcox, good enough to outpitch a 2-7 with similar stats. 

When I had these sets before, I loved the batting cards, but the pitchers were an issue. The batting cards seemed like whomever made them really cared about the quality and balance of the players. But the pitching…. a good staff like the 1950 Yankees seemed to be embroiled in too many 13-11 games. But it wasn’t until I created a model with the std opponent and the stock cards that I saw just how far off these 1950 stock pitchers really were. 

You can model pitching results against the team’s opponents, for this excel is a handy tool. When you do this for the stock 1950 Boston cards it becomes obvious that the mid tier Red Sox pitchers, guys like Stobbs, McDermott and Masterson, get badly represented by this method. Since they handle about 40 percent of Boston’s opponents they make the staff unsustainably bad.  I’m not going to argue they are top tier pitchers- Parnell, Dobson and in particular Kinder held those roles- but all three of these men were actually winning pitchers, with a combined record of 27-16, a record that even with this historically great offense they would find difficult to match using these stock cards.

The predicted model from the LeSueur cards in the link above: 

Clearly, this is more like what you’d expect. You’ll get some rounding errors and the simple model estimates HPB and sac flies where the more modern cards I’ve created do not, and of course intentional walks aren’t included on the cards. But a pitcher like McDermott in particular, a hard thrower who walked a lot of batters but was hard to hit, is carded much more accurately in the “1980 plus” methodology. He’ll still make you nervous, but on the days where he is right or against the right type of lineup he can now be very effective. 

It’s instructive to also look at a better pitching staff, 1950 Detroit: 

The original model does them no favors, either, with the extreme pitchers, like Fred Hutchinson, now walking 28 extra batters, allowing many fewer hits, and low by more than ten percent on predicted strikeouts.  The average 1950 batter simply doesn’t strikeout on their card, so if pitchers are undercarded for Ks you will see profound deviations.  

The Tigers had the best control in the 1950 AL, so their deviations in this model will cause a lot of problems.  Overall, the effect is not as bad as it was with the Red Sox, but it’s still pretty bad. The net impact of these deviations is to make the predicted 1950 Tigers staff about as bad as the real Red Sox were (6th out of 8), and as noted above, the predicted Red Sox pitching becomes just unplayable. 

Above, 1950 Detroit pitching accuracy also improves using Mr. LeSueur’s model.  Adding these improved pitchers cards to an already strong batting card set will make this team (and league) fun to play. The beauty of this is adding and editing these pitching cards (from the original 80 to 92 now) is much easier than changing or adding batting cards. Batting cards take a ton of time to create. 

Note that this set is not normalized, meaning it’s not designed to be played against 1968 or 1977. It’s intended to be self-contained. Normalization I can also do, but it would require changing the batter’s cards, too, and possibly fine tuning that method for teams before 1960. I think before I attempt that, I’ll finish 2024. But, enjoy this pitching set!

Addendum: This wouldn’t be Statis-Pro baseball ⚾️ without a confusing off-card reference. There were several Pitcher’s Batting Cards done throughout their history. One set I have from 1983 (Courtesy Delphi Forum) is this set, which I would not use with the Great Pennant Paces cards:

SP_Pitcher_AB83.pdf

It’s not that these are bad cards; it’s that they don’t match up with the numbers on the pitcher’s cards and the actual hitting stats at all. Pitchers Batting Card 10 is the best card in this set, but the worst in the set that follows! 

This is the sheet that came in the Great Pennant Races game box (click on it):

And while I can’t be absolutely sure it’s the perfect match it does look roughly correct. 

For those who don’t like those cards, here’s Individualized Cards.

1950 AL Individualized Pitchers Batting Cards (Chart)

Jan 2, 2025:

Real cards for 1950 AL pitcher's batting.  Includes 7 extra players. Most pitchers use P for out column, 

but not all, some are real hitters, like Fred Hutchinson and Mickey McDermott, and they frequently pinch hit or played a position on occasion, i.e. Ned Garver. Use the column on the card for them. 

I've added extra players for positions without backups, i.e. Charlie Silvestri at Catcher for the

Yankees. Note that Pete Suder of Philadelphia also played 4 games at 1B with no errors (E0),

this should be added to his card so he can back up Ferris Fain.

50AL_Pitcher_Bat_Cards_extras.pdf

Fred Bobberts

Original Date of Publication: 12/17/2024

On Strat-O-Matic Football rosters and schedules…

On Strat-O-Matic Football rosters and schedules…

SOM PRO FOOTBALL LINKS

Since it came up again on the Forum:

Question came up why Dick James (who led the team in ints with 3) is not listed as a cornerback for the 1959 Washington Redskins. Most DBs of that era were strapping guys who played in run support; James was 5 feet 9 and 179 pounds, most sources including PJ Troup have seven DBs listed as starters for the four defensive backfield positions and James is not one of them. 

I think I got it right in that Ben Scotti Gary Glick, Doyle Nix, and Dick Haley all had 8 or more starts, and Richie McCabe and Chuck Cichowski both started some.  Bill Stits played for two teams in 1959.  but In general I try to place at least two sub DBs on the card so the team is playable, but I don’t try to have every player who made a play carded.  That’s a baseball thing, in football we are trying to get playable rosters over some arbitrary goal of completeness.  

Simply put, there is no requirement that I’ve heard that stipulates every player who made a play needs to be carded at every position.  This action has not been performed for most if not all seasons we have made; it would be a heckuva data check to have to try this for all the seasons we have carded.  The effort would not be, in the parlance, a piece of cake. 

In the case of the 1959 Redskins they were manifestly horrible against the pass, turning the Fifties quarterbacks they faced into 1976 Bert Jones on the aggregate, so it should be obvious that any additional backs that were uncarded should be zeros. 

A few observations….

SOM rosters, like the game itself, are an abstraction. While every effort is made to have them be 100 percent accurate what I see on the internet is not always the best interpretation. To me nothing beats film, or contemporary accounts from newspapers of the time; there’s less of a filter there. 

Even in the case of data I have, I still have been known to flip defenders or receivers  on occasion when I know they did this to promote positional balance across a season. You don’t need to do this for 1980 with all those teams, but sometimes you need to make a split end a flanker to balance the position across only twelve teams.  I’ve made TEs TE/SEs where it made sense to card as such, and I’ve made HBs SE/FLKR as well to fill out positions. I try to be consistent, and it helps to have worked surrounding seasons.

In short SOM Football rosters are not intended nor were they ever intended to be archival repositories of NFL History, they were intended to support our gameplay. And as such some hard decisions need to be made to make that work.  

Same with schedules.  One of the quirks of the league utility is the play next week feature. On occasion (although it is thankfully rare) some games need to be moved a day one way or the other in the schedule to make this feature work.  I would say this happens once or twice in a season when it happens at all, and maybe in every other season or so in the Seventies. People post on these all the time, and the answer usually is we tried the historical schedule and the autoplay threw an error. So we had to adjust this timeline somewhat. The SOM schedule is not meant to be the NFL historical record, it is meant to ensure teams play the right opponents and the right games, hopefully in the right order. (That I don’t think I ever changed.)

Same with QB schedules. Now I get into a lot of trouble when I mention I don’t go with the starter as the starter in our file 100 pct of the time. In the case where attempts are split I might look at the season and the fraction of attempts the QBs had. We can’t rotate QBs by drive so my goal would be to realistically split the work by the right opponents for each QB on the roster.  I make QBs versus their opponents and vice versa, so the QB schedule is absolutely critical especially in a smaller season. 

A good example might be the late Fifties Giants where they used Don Heinrich as a “starter” in 10 games but he would usually play part of the first quarter to give Charley Conerly a better look at the defense from the sidelines. Heinrich usually only had a small fraction of attempts, so I might give him starts in the games where he has the most attempts. This scheduling of a QB “starter” is not reflective of NFL history, but it’s reflective that Conerly actually played the most in most of these games. In order for the results of seasons to work you have to give Conerly the starts he needs to get attempts against the defenses he faced. Thankfully gamers can change the Quarterback schedule, but it still causes some angst. 

Hope this helps.  Fred