So when I started to create this game after testing the waters on the greatest fan site ever Athletics Nation I turned my attention towards the user interface. That is pretty much designed and locked in now and we will reveal it once we get closer to beta. My next quest was to figure out how the scoring would go. This required me to find some statistical information about Baseball in general. This sounds like it would be a very easy task, since Baseball at times seems to be all about stats and not much else, well other than steroids of course. There are guys who can tell you with a fair amount of certainty where someone is going to hit the ball and how you should adjust your fielders accordingly for example. With the rise of such stats as on base percentage and the decline of oh say batting average; the world of traditional Baseball statistics has really been dumped on it’s head.

So with this dumping, I figured it would be relatively easily to find comprehensive statistics on entire game stats, such as how many hits are there per game on average, how many doubles, strike outs, etc etc. I spent a little bit searching around on the web for some of this information and I could only find individual or team statistics. Nothing that represented the entire game. So I took it upon myself to come up with some of these statistics myself.

What I did was take a random sample of games from the 2007 season and add up all of the outcomes that I could think of for an at bat. The totals weren’t all that shocking I guess for the average Baseball fan, but interesting nonetheless.

As you can see batters get out a lot in Baseball. Some of the shocking things to me was that I figured there were more triples. It shows up as 0% of the time but it was actually .41% of the time and I was far to lazy to make excel do what I wanted it to do. I am not saying I thought that triples happened a lot of the time but I just figured it would have been more than .41%. How does this relate to the game I am building. Simple. These statistics will be the basis on which scores will be given for correct predictions. You should all be glad that I didn’t just wing it because I would have under valued triples by thinking that they happened more frequently then they did.

I kicked around the idea of having the scoring be adaptive and I still might implement it this way. What this would mean is that you would get a bonus during the game for basically picking the FIRST double play, or the first home run that was hit and then as it was more common through the game it would lose it’s luster. I still may do something with that later on but it was too much to wrap my feeble brain around at this time.

I used to play…

Yeah yeah that is what they all say. I don’t remember really when the obsession started of hitting things with a bat and chasing after said things, I just know that as I get older that obsession is only heightened. I am sure the man to blame for this obsession is my father, and I thank him for that. He is also partially responsible for the game that I know baseball fans and sports fans everywhere will know about in the coming years.

One afternoon we were having lunch and we were reminiscing about how cool of a park the Oakland Coliseum was to watch a game. I apologize to those of you who are not in the California Bay Area and cannot relate to that, just imagine a girl or guy you are extremely attracted too and now imagine they are ninety five years old. If you’re still attracted to them and you aren’t ninety five then you’ve got issues.

Anyways, the Coliseum had something a long time ago where you could rent a device and play along with the game. My father and I were talking about how fun it was. You could predict what you thought was going to happen next. You would earn points for that and they would show the leaders up on the big screen during the game. At 12 years old I thought that was just about the height of technology and it just wasn’t going to get better than that. What I didn’t remember was you had to shell out like $15 and a deposit of $100 and leave your credit card with them just to get the device, so it faded away.

And then… along came the internet. I since then have been searching for that feeling, the fun that I had as a kid playing along with baseball and my friends and family. I can’t to this day believe that something like this doesn’t exist in the capacity that I think about it. Sure there are other sites that you pay for, you can predict scores and such and even fewer for Baseball. What I want is to create a site where you the fan can play for free and have a better experience doing it.  I am talking leagues, leader boards, live smack talking. All perfectly accessible so that you can play along while watching TV or at the game on a mobile device.

This blog is just the beginning. The site will expand. With my goal of taking over the fantasy sports world as we know it, why pick what players are going to be good, when you can actually play the game like a manger does. I chose Baseball because it is my first love when it comes to sports, but I plan on eventually branching out to other sports.

So for now this blog is here to allow me to rant during development and to keep people who are anxiously awaiting this type of game like I am informed on how the development is going and when they can get into beta. So stay tuned.