Vol. III,
Issue #2 - July 2015
**
What happened during the
Bruce Foster Challenge?
Read this Four Part Report
**
(When our newsletter began to explore the so-called "Whole
Scene" happening with the on-line version
of the SOM
Baseball Game
last year, we discovered there were hundreds if not thousands of
people involved
and even some very demanding
and elaborate designed tournaments that
required great skill to win.
As
we asked about who were some of the most
successful players,
one name kept resurfacing: "Bruce Foster", who was
this person and did he have a system?)
WOLFMAN's
COMMENTS / INTRODUCTION
I
am going to apologize for reprinting in this section of this
long report essentially the same article we shared in our March, 2015
Issue as an SOM Baseball News story that discussed the early
aspects of this challenge to "Mr. Bruce Foster". Since
it has been 4 months since our last issue, I think its easier to
read the circumstance surrounding this special report here, then
to go back to a page in our previous issue. So, please find
below a
refresher of how this Challenge was setup followed by a very elaborate
3-part report
of what took place. So sit back in your favorite chair,
get your favorite beverage and
be ready for an amazing story to follow!
As some of our readers might recall, last year (2014) we covered
another version of SOM Baseball that is played completely on-line
and has been around for a number of years. In order to
participate in the leagues and tournaments using this gaming
system, you can do your whole job of the managing of your team
through your web browser only. The Game company called this
system, "Strat-o-matic Baseball Online".
For those not familiar with this style of
play, it is based upon two key criterias, a) playing a 162 game league
and which players you will draft from to create this new league which is called a
set. This set can be one of the most recent seasons released or
it can be many seasons (like a certain era of teams) or also what is
known as the "All Time Greats (ATG)" which are the very best
players who have ever received a strat card (printed or a computer
image) in American baseball since the 1870's up till today as
well as including the Negro League players. Each card is
based upon a single season. You play three games a
night (54 days to complete a season) and the top teams qualify
for the playoffs till a champion is discovered. The
tournaments held on SOM's Baseball Online System use a version
of multiple leagues played over time (since the season is so
short) to find their champions.
In an interview we did in May of last year
(2014), we
spoke directly to "Bruce Foster" who had just won the
popular on-line tournament know as "The Barnstormers Tournament"
that sees about 200 participants go through possibly up to 7
distinct leagues
over a
year's time to at first qualify for the playoffs and then have a chance
to win the tournament title.
Really this tournament is one of the most grueling and testing
that has every been devised linked to any version of SOM
Baseball I know including face-to-face tournaments over a full weekend.
Now,
I actually played in one
of the leagues that was a part of the Barnstormers tournament
last year and our team (the Skokie Wolfmen) didn't do so well using the
set I mentioned called the "All Time Greats". The
challenge in using this set is to find the right combination of the finest players
who have ever played baseball of all time at your finger tips to
make your team.
But Geez, if you don't know what you doing with the thousands of
choices of players you have to choose from, you can easily
get lost.
At the
end of this introduction for this report, please find the page
link to the interview we did in May of 2014
with Bruce Foster. In his interview he discussed his strategy
how he followed to win Barnstormers which now, about a year
later, would be the same strategy I was about to
us to test his system if it could work for someone else. Further, in the October 2014 issue,
I reported about my experiences from the 2014 Barnstormer's
Tournament, League #1 which I joined. Thus, you can read what happened to me when I
tried to make my first plunge, with a little help and advice
from a few other
experienced gamers but basically learning the ropes myself. I will discuss
in this report, a comparison between the 2014 Skokie Wolfmen I
led and what happened to me this spring with the new and
reformed 2015 Skokie Wolfmen with the guidance I received from Bruce. But first lets get back to our story in
chronological order ...
After I
did the interview with Bruce last year, I asked him a very simple
question at that time. This was a question that any good
interviewer would ask, or really any gamer would ask if you
were to meet an individual who has been having consistent success in
virtually almost every league he joins -- So my question was,
"Bruce, if I used your system, could I duplicate your success?"
I promised
Bruce that I would not reveal any of his key or secret strategies (or what
one calls using a non-disclosure) so that anyone who would read my
report, wouldn't know fully what these so-called private
aspects of his strategies were. Plus, this might also
put Bruce on the spot, if he agreed to allowing me to play with
such a similar team in an ATG league and I didn't do well.
Now, I knew about Bruce's frequent success during the "Barrnstomers
Tournament" that had been held before in the past as their commissioner keeps a
detailed history of each tournament. This gives an observer or
possible future participant an opportunity to research and see which type of teams were
put together by different
gamers who had won this
tournament. One could easily see Bruce's name appearing
frequently as being one of the final participants into the playoffs
since he begun to use his system.
In any
case, Bruce eventually agreed to my proposal knowing I would be
writing this report for our newsletter about how my team
performed after we joined a new league based on the ATG set with
100 million dollars to spend and using a DH and following his system to the letter
or as best as I could. However, once we made this agreement it took quite a few months before both Bruce
and I had time to re-connect and for him to explain his system
to me more fully. Basically, what his system does, is he
utilizes some special spreedsheets which rate all the key players
by a numerical value
which tells him which hitters and pitchers are going to be the
most effective in Petco Park 2005 (the Padres Park) that is
ranked the best as a pitchers park with a rating only 1 for a
single to both left and right handed hitters and rated only 1 for homers
to both sides as well. This means, that you can't
count on getting virtually any ball park singles or homeruns off
the cards.
Thus at the end of February
(2015), following the instructions I
received from Bruce about which type of players I should draft
that would work with his system, I went through the drafting process in the
Great Salt Lake League requesting and bidding on 25 players
while using the 100 million dollars allocated. After the
first phase was done and all the league members did their bids,
we acquired most of
the players recommend by the Foster system. The second phase of
this process is a waiver system, where we can do a bid and
exchange on players not picked by anyone, and I used the waver
system to replace two of our key starting pitchers (Pete
Alexander and Johann Santana) plus I took a more favorable
version of Nap Lajoie card at 2B and there were a few more
players we took in the platoon positions that Bruce recommended,
about seven more players we did an exchange. Then the last
face of building your team we had about two or three days where
we could drop any players we wished and pick up new players at
will, as long as we had funds to do so which involved another
three or four players we exchanged. All in all we needed to have a team of at
least 24 players which for the 2015 Wolfman then comprised 9 pitchers and 15
hitters. This was our final team we played for the entire
season.
Basically Bruce was giving to me his recommendations of which
players I should bid on, having done his system many times, he
already knew which was the best combination of players to
select. I followed his recommendations faithfully so I could
follow the same system he had used which had worked.
Bruce told me once we had our team roster in place, we won't be making any
trades during the season or dropping and exchanging other
players (which result in financial penalties after the season
had began). In effect,
I was trusting his guidance completely in building our team.
Once
again, here is
our final roster we selected for the Great Salt Lake League (numbers shown are from their performance in
the year indicated):
Starting Pitchers:
Greg Maddux (1995) 19-2 1.63 ERA
Dutch Leonard (1914) 19-5 0.96 ERA
Pete Alexander (1915) 31-10 1.22 ERA
Johan Santana (2004) 20-6 2.61 ERAa
Our
other pitchers were not so important as we hardly use them in relief but
by the rules of the league we needed one other possible starter
with four other pitchers for relief, these pitchers were:
Mike McCormick (1962, R - only because we needed this fifth
starter, he also relieved which he did)
Frank Linzy (1972) (RHP 9R); Mark Clear (1979) (RHP
7R); Joe Klink (1990) (LHP 5R) and;
Bob Shirley (1986) (LHP 8L)
Catchers: Alan Ashby
(1987,S) .288 with 14 HRs; Willard Hershberger
(1940, R) .309 (in a platoon)
1st Base:
Wes Parker (1965, S)
.238 1b-1e5; George Burns (1929, R) .224 (in a platoon)
2nd Base:
Nap Lajoie (1901, R)
.426, .463 OB, 2b-1e17
3rd
Base: Ed Delahanty
(1894, R) .407, .478 OB, 3B-3e29, LF-2(-2)e11
Shortstop: Bob Wallace
(1901, R) .283, SS-1e21
Leftfield: Ty Gainey
(1986, L) .300 LF-2(+2)e16; Tony Phillips (1988,
S), .203 LF-4 (in a platoon)
Centerfield: Earle
Combs (1927, L) .356 CF-1(+3)e10; Mike Kreevich
(1941, R), .232 CF-2 (platoon)
Rightfield: Cristobal
Torriente (Neg, L) .354, .434 OB, OF-1(-4)e7; Terry
Harper (1982,R) .287 RF-2 (platn)
DH:
Gates Brown (1968, L)
.370 .442 OB; Jose Cardinal (1980, R) .263
Ball
Park: Petco Field (2005),
Singles L -1 R -1; Homeruns L-1 R-1
Note:
Tony Phillips in 1988 played every non-pitching position, Only
Lajoie, Delahanty and Wallace would play against all types of pitchers
unless they were injured.)
When we
had reported the results of the season during our news story
with our challenge to Mr. Foster in the March
issue - the Great Salt Lake League had already started and we had played
about 50 games. At that time our team was over .500 but was
struggling a bit.
If you
would prefer to view all of the stats of the Skokie Wolfmen that
happened during the Great Salt Lake League instead of following
the breakdown of our season through the next three parts to
follow our report, you can visit our team page on the Strat-o-matic website
at:
http://onlinegames.strat-o-matic.com/team/sim/1395025
To read
the Interview with Bruce Foster from last year, where he
discusses to some degree the strategy he has used to have
consistent success in the online gaming environment visit:
http://www.ultimatestratbaseball.com/USBN-5-2014/BruceFoster-May2014.htm
So dear readers,
time to review how the Skokie Wolfmen performed in this league.
Would the "Bruce Foster System" take the Wolfmen to a higher level
of play? Would the Wolfmen make the Great Salt Lake League
Playoffs? The only way to find out is to click on the next part of this report
shown below :-)
Click Here to Read Part 1 of the Bruce
Foster Challenge
enjoy dear readers .....
The Skokie
Wolfman
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Contained inside this exciting issue of
Ultimate Strat
Baseball Newsletter:
(to view the various interviews, articles, columns and special sections click on
the links {underlined}
and this will take you to the appropriate
webpage)
♦
RETURN TO NEWSLETTER MAIN PAGE
♦
INTERVIEW with DICK BREMER,
Play by Play announcer for the Minnesota Twins for over 30 years
tells us about his interest and playing days with SOM Baseball.
♦
VIDEO INTERVIEW with HAL RICHMAN,
The creator of Strat-o-matic Baseball, speaks to our "Johnny on
the Spot" earlier this year during "Opening Day" as we finally we
are granted permission to share this unique and special interview with
our members. This is one of several interesting videos that we have on our Youtube
Channel, click on the Bright Blue Link above or the Youtube Link
below to view this interview (18+ minutes):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rN06fLgM_U
♦
REPORT with TOM
NAHIGIAN (1961 cards),
Personal friend of the Wolfman, known in Guzzo's book as "The
Collector", returns and we take a peak at some of the early
strat cards printed.
♦
COLUMN: "STRAT THOUGHTS" with BRUCE BUNDY,
BB as we affectionately call him returns with another special
column sharing strategies to win with your draft Strat Team.
♦
REPORT: FUNNY & AMAZING STRAT/MLB
STORIES (various - new column), Various friends linked
with SOM Baseball sharing some of their most funny and amazing
stories linked to the game or Major League Baseball, start of a
new column.
♦
REPORT: GREATEST GAMES EVER PLAYED
(various - new column, replays),
Two members of the Strat-o-matic.net forum, share with us the
greatest baseball games they have ever played during a replay
season start of a new column.
♦
COLUMN: "COMMISSIONER's CORNER" with MARC WASSERMAN
-- The return of the "Commish" with another insightful article
for his column as he focuses upon how to build a team that will
compete for your league's championship.
♦
RECOMMEND
ON-LINE SOM & MLB RESOURCES -- On-line Strat-o-matic and Baseball related websites
that offer amazing information, special tools and products to improve
your game play
that we strongly recommend. In most cases, we have had personal contact with
these sources who agree with the principle to work together and help promote each other.
♦
BOOKS TO
DIE FOR and Become a BASEBALL GURU -- This page
is specifically about special books we are finding that either will
expand your insights about the game of Baseball, help you in the
creation of your current league teams or with your replays and
learn more about the Strat-o-matic
Baseball Game and Game Company's
history. We
have a special arrangement with Acta Sports, who is a publisher
of a number of great baseball books (including Bill James
Handbooks) to offer for our members
a 10% discount. We will continue to add more books to this page in the future
as we uncover other gems our members should know about.
Contact Us for Questions or Submissions:
Wolfman Shapiro
Founder/Editor, the
Ultimate Strat Baseball Newsletter
email:
wolfman@ultimatestratbaseball.com
facebook:
www.facebook.com/wolfman.shapiro
twitter:
@StratBaseball4U
