I’ve been quietly replaying the 1961 season using APBA Baseball 5.75 Baseball for Windows. It all started with a question Scott Fennessy had about setting up leagues in BBW and I quickly set up a “test” league using the 1961 season to test my scenario. Since I had it all set up, I decided to continue to play it out.
A Cub fans hell: the Cardinals AND the White Sox are both in first place.
I’m not putting a lot of prep or even a lot of thought into it. I’m not using actual lineups or rotations and transactions are thrown out the window (once I realized that Vic Wertz was on the Detroit Tigers, however, I used the Advanced Draft program to Boston where he spent most of the season).
The concept is simple for my 1961 replay. For the National League, I’ll manage the Cubs for the whole year. For the American League though, I’ll occasionally switch teams that I will manage. I’m already on the third team already having gone through the Yankees and the Tigers. I’ll be honest, the Tigers were a lot of fun. I may go back to them at some point.
The season disks that are used with APBA Baseball 5.75 do come with a stock lineup and a rotation which will suffice. However, sometimes they’re not perfectly accurate and I also like to add some random variety. As I take over a team, I add some appropriate lineups. The best place to go for that is Baseball Reference. I found a feature on that site I didn’t know existed (maybe it’s new) called “Batting Orders”.
Batting Orders on Baseball Reference is exactly what it sounds like. It lists the starting batting order for the entire season for the team in question. Each lineup spot is sortable so it’s easy to establish a count for how often a player batted in that spot. Essentially, it can give replayers a good idea of the most used lineups for any team. B-R also delineates which games were pitched by a left-hander if you want to come up with a left-handed lineup too.
Here’s an example of the first two weeks of the Detroit Tigers Batting Order (click to enlarge)
Where can you find Batting Orders? It’s on the right side of any team page in Baseball-Reference under “Other”.
Here is the direct link to the 1961 Detroit Tigers Batting Orders page as an example.
It’s definitely a good tool for replayers whether you’re a dice or computer player. I remember as a college student (cough) before the Internet and I had to go to the library to search 1970 boxscores on microfiche.
