Monday (1 Apr) - San Diego Padres Season Opener

Monday (1 Apr) - San Diego Padres Season Opener

Ok, so I'm already a day behind on my day to day tracking of the 2013 baseball season. Or am I? I'm a little confused, but bear with me and we'll get there.

The Padres opened their season against the Mets in New York on 1 Apr. It shouldn't be hard for the simulation results to improve on the Padres 11-2 loss. Unfortunately for the Padres, the score is not an April Fool's joke.

The table below will be used to manage the progress of the three leagues I will be tracking. In addition, the two results of the Auto-Play leagues already completed will provide a standard for comparison. I've also added the final results from the actual Padres 2012 season as another measure to compare with the 2013 season.

2013 Padres Season Results Summary

Comparison	W L GB	BA	Runs	ERA
Padres 2012	76 86 18.0	.247	651	4.01
Reality Autoplay	84 78 10.0	.243	667	3.69
Promise Autoplay	80 82 10.0	.249	688	3.81
2013 Season	W L GB	BA	Runs	ERA
Actual Results	0 1 1.0	.129	2	12.38
Reality Results	1 0 ---	.333	4	2.00
Promise Results	1 0 ---	.194	2	1.00

2013 Padres Day by Day Results (vs New York Mets)

Game #001	Result	Score
Actual	Loss	11-2
Reality	Win	4-2
Promise	Win	2-1

Game Summary:

Cody Ransom, who was the last player added to the Padres major league roster (replacing Forsyth, who is on the disabled list), hit a two-run homer for the Padres in the Reality league. Both simulation leagues defied the actual results. Just remember, there are still 161 games to be played. 

Summary/Issues:

My first day of having to set up more than a single game in the simulation leagues has been challenging. I'm sure I'll get into a routine after doing this for a few days. Right now, though, I have to establish that routine.

The first thing I did was get the actual results of the Padres first game of the season. Second, I posted the game schedule played yesterday for the Reality and Promise simulation leagues. Third, I set up the lineups and starting pitchers for the Padres game against the Mets in the Reality league. The Promise league lineups will all be managed by the computer manager. Another reminder is that all players were considered healthy and ready to play at the beginning of the season. During the season injuries could occur in the Reality league, but not in the Promise league. Finally, the computer managers in both leagues will be trying to give game time to players appropriate to the level of play they had in the real season in order to impose a little more reality regarding playing time. I thought about turning that off that feature in the Promise league, but that would skew things too much. These rules can be changed at any time during the season, so if odd things start to crop up I can make changes.

Setting up the game schedule manually, which is how I figured I would do it, is more time consuming than I expected. Each game has to be added to the schedule, a process that takes five steps for each game added. Then I have to double that because I have to do it for two leagues. I'm going to try to find a full season schedule that I can get into a format that SOM will accept, which would insert the entire schedule instead of one day at a time. I've only played one simulated game, which I can replay, so getting that season schedule is my first priority.

Update: My friends at the STRATFAN website had already built a text file with the 2013 MLB schedule that could be imported into the simulated leagues. Making the import work was a but kludgy, but after a few tries I finally got it set up. That is a very big time saver.