1957 Replay Preparation

Now that my 1901 replay is complete (also see 1930, 1949) it is time to start prep work for my 1957 replay. I am not in a particular hurry to get this started, but I do have a list that I work through, basically one step at a time, as part of my replay preparation:

• The 1957 3R disk and card sets were ordered from APBA earlier this year. I will be using APBA Baseball for Windows (BBW) for the replay, so I didn’t really need the cards, but I do like to flip through them, and besides, I worry about the game company and want to do my bit to help keep them in business.


Further, I like to encourage the game company to keep revising and reissuing of old sets. Many years have passed since this set was originally released and new stats have been gathered to fill in some of those historical holes plus the game company has revised some of its formulas over time as well, and the re-released sets now include every player, which I prefer. My 1949 replay used a revised set and I was very pleased with the results and I am looking forward to seeing how the 1957 3R set plays out.


Of course, the first thing I did was to rearrange all the players back to the teams they started the season with (disk and cards). It's a personal predilection, one of many.



1957 New York Yankees

• The next step was to pull the 1957 batting, pitching, fielding, and games-by-position stats from baseball-reference.com (BBR) and dump them into a spreadsheet. I did a little bit of data manipulation here and there to get these into the format I prefer.


• I also pulled the transactions list, the debut list, and the retirements (final appearance) list for 1957 from BBR and dump them into my spreadsheet as well. I then massaged all three of these lists into one common formatted page, basically allowing me to source in debuts and finales into the larger transaction list.


I also went through the BBR player logs for every player to search for any unexplained absences. If a player that played regularly was all-of-a-sudden out of the lineup for ten or more games, I added it to my transaction list as an unknown/possible injury, benching and reinstating the player according to the dates provided. The lineups account for this already and the backups need their chance to play too, so benching these players is not a hardship.


Ten games or more was my target, which obviously meant I was not doing this for players that missed nine games.  I get it - but If I did nine games then the question would be about eight games, and so on. I just set a limit and went with it, although I have learned from past experience to be careful with catchers (don’t bench your second catcher!). The other thing about 1957 is the presence of Bonus Babies, new signees that were designated as such if they received a bonus over a certain amount. These players had to stay on the roster all season and most had limited appearances, so I just left them active on the roster all season.


I also added in other details and notes to this list as well - season opening and closing dates, manager firings, tie games, and in the case of 1957, other tidbits such as the last home games for Brooklyn and the New York Giants before they moved to the west coast.


• I downloaded the APBA Transaction Manager (ATMgr) files. For my replays, I like to use actual lineups on the as-played schedule which the ATMgr tool will automatically provide me, plus ATMgr will move players on and off the farm and between teams in the case of trades. It may require a little extra effort up front, but once the replay starts I can just move from game to game with no real delays.


The ATMgr files include the daily lineups and their own list of transactions. I added both to the spreadsheet, merged in the ATMgr transactions into the BBR transactions I had already previously captured, and then cull out/merge all of the duplicates and ensure there is a text entry for every transaction with a sentence or two of explanatory detail. I use this information during the season as part of my weekly recaps and summaries plus it provides me a quick reference as to what is coming up.



1957 Milwaukee Braves



• The card sets no longer come with the cardboard fold-up that listed all the Master Game (MG) symbols anymore as they are all now included on the individual player cards, plus the disk has Master Game symbols included there as well. There are a few differences - BBW doesn’t use the new swing adjustment (SA) ratings nor does it take advantage of the new pitcher strikeout letters (K and R), but everything else between the cards and the disk was identical. I created my own Master Card list in the spreadsheet to mimic that old cardboard foldout that the game company used to sell, because I like that view and because I will tweak some of these numbers as part of my replay set-up.


• I do not plan to use Weighted Average pitching grades to regrade all of my pitchers like I did for 1901 and 1930 (both non-reissue sets). The 1949 reissue set used the updated formulas for batting and pitching and I was pleased with the results, so I plan to stick with the pitching grades as provided. They are actually pretty similar to what was calculated anyway, but I went ahead and added these calculations to the spreadsheet just to be able to compare my results versus what was provided in the card set.


• The next step was to go through the player's disk and do the following: decapitalize all last names (except Hall-of-Famers), J0's stayed as J0's but all others were made J1's, Q0's stayed as Q0's but all others were made Q1's, steal letters A, B, C, and D were changed to A, all others (E, F, G, and R - but not N) were changed to B. Since I will be using actual lineups I don’t want any unnecessary injuries (even with the minimal setting) plus I will be limiting player steal attempts on my own and I don't want any unnecessary penalties when I do attempt a steal. Since I was going to redo all of the player's last names anyway, the other fields were able to be edited along the way.


I also track differences in names between BBW, BBR, and ATMgr. They don’t always square up - sometimes a name is spelled differently (Valdez or Valdes?) and sometimes a nickname is used instead of a formal name (Eldon or Rip Repulski?). There are also things like there being two Bob Smith's, two Bob Millers, and two Hal Smith's in 1957. I use BBR as my tiebreaker, but I want my BBW and ATMgr files to match and to have unique names for all.


• My usual routine is to play a week's worth of games and then at the completion of the Sunday games do my end-of-week activities, one of which is documenting team win/loss records and runs scored/allowed as to what they were versus what they are doing in the replay. To that end, I have captured all 24 weeks of the actual 1957 end-of-week standings and added them to the spreadsheet, in preparation for adding the replay numbers when it is time.


• I reviewed my stadium backdrops and poked around and came up with a set of new ones, all circa the 1950's time frame. I had been collecting artwork and photographs of stadiums from this time period and received a nice set of instructions on how to convert these pictures to a format that BBW can use. It's not onerous and I am looking forward to having these new stadium backdrops included.


• I also set-up my new blog for the upcoming replay and wanted to get something posted so I could go in and play with formatting, colors, etc., so here we are.

So what is left to do? I need to get BBW configured and ATMgr configured and load the lineups and transactions. It can be a little tricky sometimes, but it really does work well once set-up. When loading the files ATMgr does a significant amount of checking - do names match up, if a player is in a lineup on a given day is the player is actually on the roster that day, and do all of the trades line up correctly? This kind of sanity check is quite appreciated so that I don’t have to deal with it in the middle of the season.

The one disappointment is that I haven’t been able to find a PDF copy of a 1958 Sporting News Baseball Guide on-line somewhere, the one that includes a review of the 1957 season. I have seen the physical book available for purchase (not cheap) but was really looking for an on-line copy for searching and cut/paste availability. I found a copy of the 1901 and 1902 Spalding and Reach guides so I really didn’t think 1958 would be a problem, but so far I have been proven wrong.

The final question is "when to start?" I am not really in a race to get through my set-up steps. These tasks aren't particularly cumbersome for one thing and I just do a little bit every day and knock these off one-by-one (it helps that I have done this several times before). I want to do a pre-season write-up and maybe a little more pre-season investigation work - there are a couple of books out there on the 1957 season I might look into - so stay tuned.