Several weeks of (fake baseball) iteration

Updates on O27 baseball sim

I realized that in codenaming this baseball/cricket/pesapallo hybrid "O27" that much like cricket, you could just have a more limited outs form of baseball. Historically, they didn't always use 4 balls/3 strikes/3 outs, there were lots of variations before the current format became most common. So I knew the game/sport needed a formal name and right now, I'm calling it Alternative Rules Baseball, with the recognition that it's kind of boring. The alternative was to do something like naming it after an insect or other animal, but nothing really came to mind immediately and also, it's baseball with weird rules so why not just call it what it is?

Introducing the power play / and a 10th fielder

Besides the single innings nature of the sport, the declared seconds and the general pace of it, the sport didn't really borrow much from cricket out of necessity. However, I was probably on instagram recently where I've been obsessed with 15-year old cricket sensation Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, who is breaking records with smooth bat skills. Anyway, I learned that T20 cricket has something called a power play which is actually a tool for the offense that doesn't allow defenders out of certain zones in the field. It gives hitters more opportunities to hit to places. (I probably missed a lot here...)

As a baseball fan, the only power play I know exists in hockey and it's a man-advantage as a result of penalties. But immediately, I starting thinking about how to implement this into O27.

I haven't posted many box scores in here -- I should start -- but from the outset of the game, the sport has always been deliberately aimed at making baseball "less boring" by making the sport less about three true outcomes baseball and more like a sport where base hits, advancing runners and constant action are a default.

That said, the defensive model was not well built out at all. I've emphasized hitting and even pitching, but defense was mostly cosmetic and getting outs happen but not without an almost predictable level of offense that happens through the engine in the course of a given game. I love the defensive and pitching duels of baseball tool, and wanted O27 to be able to conjure that when bats go cold and players get shutdown by top tier starters.

Power plays in O27 is a defensive advantage. Teams get one power play in an innings. How it works: A team can declare a power play at any point between the first out and the 26th out. When activated, it lasts for 4 outs and it gives the defensive team a 10th fielder called nickelfielder, who effectively is the left or right center fielder. I toyed with the slo-pitch softball rover position, but it was hard to model in my engine and I needed something a bit more predictable. Having someone with a cannon for a arm at a crucial moment would be a huge vibe shift for a team hitting well or with runners-in-scoring position (RISP) and it felt like the right move.

Nickels don't hit by default, but can be used in the hitting half of an innings to pinch hit for someone else. because they've never really "take out of the game" just made inactive, letting them hit for someone else as an offensive pinch hitter doesn't feel too radical.

It's taken some iterations in the game engine to get it to render how I want, but adding the nickel along with some other key defensive improvements and revamping the ground ball/fly ball model more (while increasing contact + hits which were too closely tied to run scoring for several iterations of the sim) has made the variation in scoring way more diverse than ever before.

Knowing baseball and how I want to see it, has really accelerated this development for me. A lot like building out oregontennis.org and its rating system, I'd already done the hard work well before I had the time/desire to build the tool to house it all. When it became relatively trivial to build it, directing what I wanted to see and adapting it was not as difficult because I knew exactly what was needed.

With a baseball sim -- decades of playing them all the way to my pen & paper simulator days -- I've been tinkering with these ideas for a really long time, so even though O27 is fundamentally a broken form of baseball to some degree, the data model gets iterated on very quickly (admittedly, token churning is real) because I quickly can look and understand what the game is supposed to look like, which then spawns other ideas about what I'd like to see modeled.

Knowing when to stop

This project has been a monster in iterative development in the last few weeks from concept to now. It's been fun rapidscaling a baseball sim, something I'd been playing for a long time, but had never really gotten super far in ever figuring out how to make my own. I suspect at some point in the future, I'll probably try my hand at a legitimately Pesäpallo sim, since now it's a lot less expensive to make one -- it'd just be OOTP for pesis, not a video game -- but I'd have to consult hard with my Finnish peeps to be able to make that, whereas a baseball game I have a really good handle on what I want it to look like, how to structure it and ultimately where to go next.

Like I've said in other posts, if i'd been making this for anyone else, I'd be moving a lot slower and there'd be far less going on. You'd also be focusing more on realism and getting particular features right, instead of building out the universe. As someone who doesn't play many games out in normal sims, I'm less concerned about anything other than show-stopping bugs, I just want a plausible RNG and an ability to analyze the data.

In a future post, I'll get into the weeds of the UI a bit, show some box scores & highlight other features that i've come up with because I've admitted gone a little off the deep end in adding things that have been long-term ideas (like a news report generator) I've wanted in sims that I built into my own.