Fixing a ‘Hoeft’-y mistake

I’m only a week and a half into my 1966 replay and I’ve already noticed a mistake.  It’s not a huge mistake and nothing I’ll lose sleep over but I had to come up with a solution for it. 

To put it simply, pitcher Billy Hoeft appeared in a game for a team he wasn’t playing for yet.

To recap, these are some of the parameters of my 1966 NL replay.  I use:

• actual lineups and rotations
• actual schedule
• mid-season transactions

In real life, Billy Hoeft started out with the Cubs but was released by July 26th.  On Sept 1, he was signed by the Giants.  It was right there in my transaction spreadsheet I prepared but I had never transferred his actual card to the Cubs envelope.  So he made an appearance for the Giants in April in my replay.

I don’t have this issue with starters since I use the lineups directly from the actual box score.  Would I see an inconsistency, I could correct it (so far haven’t).  But with substitutes, pinch hitters, and relievers, I have free reign.  And that’s what got me in trouble.  Billy Hoeft got signed too early. 

What do you do when you find a mistake like this?  I guess it depends on a few things:

• the severity of the mistake
• the ease of the solution
• how much it means to you that an inconsistency exists in your replay and stats
• how you approach your replay (are you trying to be as accurate as possible or do you approach the replay with a what-if mentality?)

Obviously, this is not a monumental mistake in the grand scheme of things.  One errant relief appearance by a D pitcher will not make or break my replay.  However, it does make things difficult from a stat-keeping end.  More importantly, it will bug me and that’s why I “fixed” it.  I simply replaced Hoeft’s name in the box score with another similarly graded San Francisco reliever (yes, one who was currently on the team) and updated his stats. 

As they go, worse things could have happened.  I could have tabulated stats twice and not caught it till later (fortunately, I date my stats as I enter them so hopefully that won’t be an issue).  I could have two “winners” in a game, throwing off my win-loss totals.  A lot could go wrong.  I’ve decided to take my buddy Brando’s advice and play one game at a time instead of a series before doing stats.  That’s always thrown me off when making sure everything equals out in the end. 

Hoeft is now in the Chicago Cubs envelope where he belongs and his SF stats for April are expunged from the record.  He’ll have to wait till September to wow the Candlestick Park fans. 

[photo credit]