Here in Illinois, it’s 20 degrees outside but that doesn’t mean baseball isn’t on the schedule. I think most APBA baseball leagues have finished their 2011 schedules but not the Illowa APBA League. In a few hours, my buddy Brando and I are playing our cross-town rival series which is traditionally the last series of the IAL season for both of our teams. Today’s series will be a nine game series.
My Twin City Thunderchickens are languishing in last place but we have a chance to play spoilers. With a few wins against us, Brando’s Rising Bamm Beanos have a chance to enter the playoffs. As his friend, it’s my job as opposing manager to prevent that.
As always in the IAL, the last series is almost as much about keeping within our player usage limits as winning. Fortunately for the Thunderchickens, our limits are pretty good and we only have to rest Nick Markakis who only has 15 at-bats for the year. I didn’t plan out Chris Perez usage very well. He has over 20 innings left for the nine games and most likely won’t get all his A&C innings in. Bad manager!
Update: I managed to take four of nine from the Beanos today. Not bad I suppose for a last place team with a 68-94 record. It usually came down to who managed to score first. Early on in the series, that was Beanos.
Kudos to my starter Jonathan Niese who went 2-0 for me. His first start was quite exciting, though. He had a 10-1 lead going into the 7th inning and managed to give up nine runs in three innings before I called in Chris Perez to close the game for the save.
After the final game of the season, the Twin City Thunderchickens announced the retirement of the following players: Hideki Okajima, Manny Parra, Scott Podsednik, Mark Hendrickson, Scott Olsen.
I had my last series of the year as well today. Went 4-5 versus Todd to finish 73-89. Todd still has a series left so we don’t know yet who will be the #2 pick. Odd occurence in this series – both Jeff Fulchino (DY) and Scott Kazmir (DW) picked up their first wins.
Heh, speaking of injury systems. I’ve completely re-done mine from scratch because I didn’t think players got injured near enough randomly. I have a brand new table to roll on, and instead of using the current season’s injury ranking, I wanted to focus more on how injury prone the player is in general. So I use a weighted average from the current, prior, and following season.
I’m still working on a 1981 replay (full season as opposed to with strike). Think I’m about halfway, and the Brewers just lost Robin Yount with a career-ending injury. Yep, my jaw dropped when I rolled that result. They quickly traded some lower roster players for Fred Stanley (though they thought about just going with Ed Romero for the rest of the season).