Introduction

 Welcome to the Baseball Classic Replays, where anyone can follow along while I navigate the completely unfamiliar world of card and dice baseball simulations.  While I did dabble with OOTP during COVID, I am essentially new to all of this, trying to discover a number of different games at the same time and figure out which ones I like best.  It seems like there are a plethora of outstanding sims out there, so at times there are almost too many choices for the uninitiated to wade through.  Fortunately, there are a number of outstanding YouTube channels dedicated to this hobby that can be quite helpful in making these decisions, some of which I hope to eventually highlight here.  

As some general background about myself, I am a lover of history and baseball and thus, unsurprisingly, enjoy delving into baseball history.  This is the aspect that appeals to me most about baseball sims - recreating some of the greatest individuals seasons, pennant races, etc., throughout the long history of the game.  That will be my goal here, choosing projects that strike my fancy - typically choosing one or two teams in each league for a particular year and then replaying the seasons of those teams, often using Digital Diamond Baseball to simulate other games. For the 1929 replay, I am playing every game in NPIII/Skeetersoft.

As to why I decided to start the blog?  I wanted somewhere to share results, boxscores, highlights, recreated news headlines, and other fun stuff from my replays.  I joined a number of awesome Facebook groups dedicated to particular games or to baseball sims in general, but posting results there ultimately seemed like too much clogging of traffic on those forums.  So I decided to create this space, which will be nothing fancy, to post particular boxscores, daily or weekly updates of replays, recaps of standings, statistics, hot players, whatever pops into my head.

Whether anyone will care enough to follow along with my replays, or if anyone other than me will read any of my posts, I don’t know.  But I think I’ll have fun documenting my seasons all the same.

And so with that short introduction, it begins…I actually have two projects going right now - I am into June of a 1961 replay of the New York Yankees and the Cincinnati Reds using Statis Pro Advanced.  I started that one for a few different reasons.  First, the system is different from some of the first games I tried, being entirely FAC driven, and it is awesome.  Derrick, who creates the cards, does an amazing job.  Why the Yankees and Reds?  For the Yankees, the 1961 season fascinates me - the chase of the Babe’s record, Mickey Mantle having an absolutely monstrous season (he should have won the MVP) but ultimately falling short as Maris hit 61.  As for the Reds, I’m a Cincinnati native and a lifelong Reds fan.  Since I was a child, my father would bring up at least every year or two that he cannot get over the Reds trading Frank Ronbinson for Milt Pappas.  So, this seemed like a great season to play with the Reds too, as Robinson won his first MVP in ‘61.

As for my second project, I have to give credit to Daniel Evensen and his awesome Substack and YouTube channel The Baseball Replay Journal, where he is working through a complete 1908 season replay using National Pastime III (NPIII)/Skeetersoft and documenting it all, as well as dropping daily videos on various topics related to baseball sims, National Pastime, and other historical curiosities.  It’s a great channel and Substack follow that I highly recommend.  It was through watching his videos, and learning about some of the background of National Pastime and APBA, that I became intrigued with the NPIII system.  After dabbling with it a bit and finding that I did really like it, I decided to go ahead and purchase the 1929 season and commence a full season replay of my own.  Why 1929?  Put simply - Jimmie Foxx.  I don’t know what it is, but I’m endlessly fascinated by him as a player and a person.  I know that 1929 was not his greatest season, but he still had an outstanding campaign, and this was the year that commenced a true dynasty for the Philadelphia Athletics.  So we are going to try and go all the way with 1929 and see if the A’s can win the World Series again this time, while also encountering other absolutely titans of the game along the way.

I am still trying to think/work through precisely how I am going to document things - at the moment, I’m thinking I’ll make “weekly” (in game terms) update posts for each replay, going through standings, a game of the week review of any outstanding games, and highlighting outstanding performers.  Like I said, some of this will be a work in progress as I go.

The other thing that I will also likely do, even though it is not baseball related, is occasionally dabble with some posts related to Glory Days Boxing, an outstanding boxing sim that I also highly recommend.  I might do something like replaying classic fights that might have occurred on the dates of some of the replays

At any rate, this is long enough as a first post.  I’m excited to try and get this started.  Hopefully, some will enjoy the trip along with me into baseball’s past.

-David