The Brewster

I thought I'd start here (since we may have lost the original version over in the GBC) how Matt and I started doing this baseball stuff. It's not meant to illustrate anything other than how our friendship revolved for a long time around this stuff (and how "this stuff" sometimes even impeded the friendship). it's really also meant as a vehicle to show how long Matt has been doing this and how things have refined over time. I'm posting this here as a start and perhaps over time Matt can help me flesh this out. THis is a work in progress...

The Early Years: Part 1

In 1988, I was sitting in the band room and a buddy came in after lunch, Matt Rectenwald. he saw me pouring over some rosters and asked what was up. Started talking to him about how I ran simulation baseball leagues using this program called Earl Weaver baseball (at this point 1.0). Matt showed interest and we started spending a LOT of time on this during school, weekends, summers, etc. Matt even walked away from a solid "A" in one algebra2 class to mine, where we both subsequently spent most of the hour doing baseball stuff and failing the quarter. We ran this for years, even after Matt went to school and I went and lived in FL. We used to print yearbooks by "borrowing" the copy machine at the nursing home we worked at (borrowing = just photocopying 20-30 yearbooks of 40-50 pages) for each owner. We had end-of-season parties at owners homes and did free agency and drafts that way.

We ran Weaver-based local baseball leagues in one for or another for years. Matt even ran them when he lived in Fond du Lac, where he introduced a number of folks there to our leagues, individuals who would become involved more heavily a we moved to a new phase...

In this time we went from being the OCBA (Oconomowoc Computer Baseball Asociation) to the WCBA (Wisconsin CBA) to the PCBA (Prof. Comp. BA) to the next step...

Going Global: Part 2

In '96 Matt was living in Fond du Lac and I was in Milwaukee. When we'd run Sims Matt would send the stats printouts in email, and we wondered if we could post them as HTML pages and provide others the ability to view them without printing using "modern" web browsers such as Mosaic or Netscape. We then had a lightbulb and wondered about bringing in people from other parts of the country. If people could email us lineup changes and do trades on email, or even using new "instant" chat mediums like ICQ, we wouldn't be limited to recruiting local owners. Using Fastball.com and by me spamming baseball usenet groups (for which my school account was suspended), we found a number of owners and friendships that lsat to this day. In fact, we just had dinner (december 2010) with an owner we found in '96 and still chat with to this day.

At this point we named the league the NACBA, for North American Comp. Baseball Assoc. We had owners in Canada, and at the time some international ones as well.

Going FPS: Part 3

In '95 we found FPS Baseball and started using that (and subsequyent versions). We decided that we needed to move to a more modern engine. We decided to go with FPS98, and renamed the league teh GLobal Baseball Consortium (GBC).

Going OOTP, Matt moves ahead: Part 4

By this point I was out of it. Marriage, school, etc. all took up time and I just didn't have the "lust" for baseball. Football was my sport. Matt though was still obsessed. I had showed him OOTP way back in an early version when we lived together and he finally started playing with it as a means to perhaps move the GBC ahead. He can fill in the story here how the MBBA came around.

Matt cn fill in most of the information going forward here, I really wasn't involved....

The modern Era: Part 5


((EDITS COMING))

I didn't know prior to this that you guys had been running local leagues for that long before you went on the interwebs. I think I found you on Fastball in the fall of '96 and knew you had run leagues with some friends for a while but had no idea it had been since the late 80's. Cool stuff.

This was an exercise more for our fun. Yea We had been doing it locally for years in HS. I even had a Carolina Coastals baseball hat done - Was able to find Iron-on patches and printed an iron-on logo on my old printer, then put it on a blank white hat with blue brim that I found at the local hat store.

LambeauLeap wrote:This was an exercise more for our fun. Yea We had been doing it locally for years in HS. I even had a Carolina Coastals baseball hat done - Was able to find Iron-on patches and printed an iron-on logo on my old printer, then put it on a blank white hat with blue brim that I found at the local hat store.

You know how I know Brad's cool ... um ... yeah.

lynchy34 wrote:

LambeauLeap wrote:This was an exercise more for our fun. Yea We had been doing it locally for years in HS. I even had a Carolina Coastals baseball hat done - Was able to find Iron-on patches and printed an iron-on logo on my old printer, then put it on a blank white hat with blue brim that I found at the local hat store.

You know how I know Brad's cool ... um ... yeah.

?? If your'e ripping on me I'm missing it, probably just too tired to get it.

You were a GBC2er weren't you before coming over to OOTP?

I was referring to making your own fake baseball team hat. We're all a little dorky for partcipating in online suiumulation leagues, but that takes it to a new level!

lynchy34 wrote:I was referring to making your own fake baseball team hat. We're all a little dorky for partcipating in online suiumulation leagues, but that takes it to a new level!

Well I was 15 when I did it, which is almost 17 years ago, so while I am a dork now, I definitely was a dork then.

EDIT: Forget my age these days, that was 22 years ago.

wow...you're old.

Actually, I'm about the same age.

We're old...

LambeauLeap wrote:

lynchy34 wrote:I was referring to making your own fake baseball team hat. We're all a little dorky for partcipating in online suiumulation leagues, but that takes it to a new level!

Well I was 15 when I did it, which is almost 17 years ago, so while I am a dork now, I definitely was a dork then.

EDIT: Forget my age these days, that was 22 years ago.

Screw that man, I think it's awesome you made a hat *raises dork flag as well*

felipe wrote:wow...you're old.

Actually, I'm about the same age.

We're old...

37 next month, Recte turned 37 in October. Not sure who's older in this league. Lee had us beat for awhile, but he looks like George Hamilton so he gets a pass

I believe Joe has you both beat. Combined.

This is great. When we open our permanent Online Baseball Hall of Fame in Wisconsin, we'll have to put this on the wall, give it some yellowing around the edges, and frame it.

aaronweiner wrote:I believe Joe has you both beat. Combined.

Eeek, not quite combined.
But I'm definitely old - I'm 68.
Interestingly (to me), I was playing simulated baseball in high school back in the late 1950's.
A bunch of us in HS got interested APBA baseball and started playing it.
(We just had our 50th reunion and one guy brought the player cards from his team - memories!)
We held drafts of the major league players and had an eight team league playing 80 game seasons.
No computers back then. It was a dice game but really pretty sophisticated.
We could hardly wait for the new player cards to come out every year.
It took a look of work to play the games and even more to keep the statistics by hand.
We kept box scores on paper.
Amazingly the league lasted until 1977 with five of the original owners still in.
For awhile three of us were in the Army (Viet Nam and Germany), and we still kept going, using the mail to keep in touch.
Computers would have made it so much easier.

Computers have been my life since 1970 when I was a computer programmer trainee.
I worked in IT from that day forward until I retired.
I first worked on the Univac I which was the first successful commercial computer.
It took up about as much room as a small house.
It was all vacuum tubes and incredible amounts of wiring.
Programming was all done via punch cards and all results were visible only via printouts.
And it was much LESS powerful than a $499 notebook computer is today.
Programming was grand fun and I missed in when I moved into IT management.
My first personal computer was an Osborne in 1980, a brilliant little machine was a four inch screen.
And I was delighted to have an Amiga game machine almost a full year before they were released to the general public.
I became a self taught CP/M operating system expert.
And I still have Excel spreadsheets for budgeting that I developed using SuperCalc (sort of like VisiCalc only better) and a fine predecessor to Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel.

Enough reminiscing.

Great posts about the origins of the MBBA and its predecessor leagues.


Byw, I apologize for not being active on the boards the last few weeks.
My wife has been pretty sick and that's kept me preoccupied.
It's all getting better and we are starting to plan our 2011 trips which will be:
1) A month long trip centered around Victoria, Vancouver, and Banff (unrelated to running the Mounties), and
2) 4-5 weeks in London, Scotland and Wales, centered around living on and self navigating (just the two of us) a narrowboat for two weeks on the canals in Wales.

Great post Joe - and good to hear your wife is feeling better!

MAtt was a STrat-o-matic guy (and so was Jason Russell as well). I played APBA as well, still have some of the game boards and more recent cards sets in the back. Had a bunch more I bought in the early 90s but sold them back when APBA was in real trouble and made some good dough off of them.

I used to make my own Strat-O-Matic cards for fictional guys before I discovered computer sim games....Hardball was ok, but once I found Earl Weaver Baseball it was all over. Then Baseball Pro, then OOTP.

Once I got on the beta team with OOTP I was able to incorporate a lot of the ideas we'd been doing manually over the years into the game. It makes me happy to be able to continue to participate in making this game better and better each year. The naysayers can say what they want, OOTP is the best computer simulation there is.

recte44 wrote:I used to make my own Strat-O-Matic cards for fictional guys before I discovered computer sim games....Hardball was ok, but once I found Earl Weaver Baseball it was all over. Then Baseball Pro, then OOTP.

Once I got on the beta team with OOTP I was able to incorporate a lot of the ideas we'd been doing manually over the years into the game. It makes me happy to be able to continue to participate in making this game better and better each year. The naysayers can say what they want, OOTP is the best computer simulation there is.

Even the naysayers I think would have to agree that there is nothing really even close. Constructive criticism is a good thing to make a product better like this, and let's be honest, we've got a guy over in Europe that build a pretty decent game simulating a sport that is really more American than anywhere else (although one could argue for Japan or the Dominican Republic, etc).

I only wish there was a football game as realistic. Honestly I'd be out of here in a second and in 45 football leagues if I could find something like this for that would simulate an NFL-type environment.

LambeauLeap wrote:I only wish there was a football game as realistic. Honestly I'd be out of here in a second and in 45 football leagues if I could find something like this for that would simulate an NFL-type environment.

I have seen this football game around, but never played. Please don't leave

cramsey51 wrote:

LambeauLeap wrote:I only wish there was a football game as realistic. Honestly I'd be out of here in a second and in 45 football leagues if I could find something like this for that would simulate an NFL-type environment.

I have seen this football game around, but never played. Please don't leave

I believe I've seen this one, can't hold a candle to OOTP. THere are good sim products out there, i.e. Action!PC Football, etc. None though allow for the fictional aspect like FPS Football Pro did.

LambeauLeap wrote:I only wish there was a football game as realistic.

Like this?

Oh, you meant NFL...

lchronister wrote:

LambeauLeap wrote:I only wish there was a football game as realistic.

Like this?

Oh, you meant NFL...

LOL no not girls football

I am still a Strat-o-matic guy. Have been playing in a league with college friends since '97. I created a free agency system that gives us what I consider to be a pretty realistic financial model as well. Includes arbitration and everything. Never played it on cardboard much though.

My cardboard background was with the old Statis Pro Baseball game. LOVED that game when I was 12!