15 April, 2002
Awards
WBL Players of the Week
Manny Ramírez takes the American League award for Memphis, Oscar Charleston the National League for Indianapolis. Charleston’s case was essentially made in a single afternoon, as he launched 3 homeruns in a 19-5 win over the New York Gothams. Those were 3 of the his 4 homeruns on the week, during which he hit .385 with 11 RBIs.
Ramírez didn’t show Charleston’s power, but he did hit .524 for the week.
MiL Players of the Week
The Minor League seasons have begun!
So they have their own Player of the Week awards: Roger Maris (New York Black Yankees) took AAA at Newark, Mike Benjamin (Birmingham Black Barons) at AA, and Bill Hallman (Homestead Grays) at A-ball. Of those, only Maris seems to be knocking on the WBL door, but he’s likely shutout unless injury hits the Black Yankees.
Behind the Curtain
I wanted to highlight some things that I’ve been doing in the OOTP engine itself, mostly as information that might be useful for other folks running their own leagues.
In the offseason, I updated the ballparks to actual precipitation rates.
Turns out that’s not great. Here’s why:
Precipitation in OOTP really impacts the game; as such, the question is not how much did it rain, the question is how often did enough rain fall that it impacted play?
The higher precipitation rates–in effect for the first two weeks of the season–were highly, highly impactful. Just under half the games saw rain, just under 10% of the games were postponed, and, in something new to OOTP 27, it seems like rain now pushes error rates up in a noticeable way.
Note that I like rain delays and rainouts–I like anything that stresses roster construction, things that force teams to make roster moves, etc. But this was ridiculous.
A quick sample of impacted games:
- Chicago threw shutouts on consecutive days and neither was 9 innings. The 4/13 win over Los Angeles was called in the 8th for bad weather (Waite Hoyt, 6 innings, 8 strikeouts); Mark Buehrle‘s 1-hitter the next afternoon was called in the 6th.
- Ottawa‘s Roy Halladay got 2 innings and 20 pitches on 4/12 before a 36-minute delay ended his night.
- The Gothams’ 1-0, 10-inning combined 3-hitter at Kansas City on 4/13 was shaped entirely by weather: a 38-minute delay in the 5th ended Pete Donohue at 55 pitches and Masahiro Tanaka piggybacked the rest.
- San Francisco‘s 11-0 on 4/14: a 33-minute delay in the 5th ended Bump Hadley at 5 innings, and Charlie Ferguson threw the last 4 without giving up another hit.
So what changed?
Essentially, if you go by real-world precipitation rates, you will see a lot of 30s in the weather table.
I just cut each number in half, rounding up. That was it–I left the driest months in LA and San Francisco alone so those summers are still bone dry, and I left Houston alone because of the roof.
We’ll be tracking these numbers and will report back at the end of the month.
The Stats
… will debut next week. Wanted to wait for 3 weeks of data.
Hardest-Hit Balls
Welcome to a new feature, enabled by Claude, who can parse through the game logs quickly and accurately!
So we can now present each week the hardest hits and the hardest outs.
This week, two men tied at the top, each launching bombs at 121 mph. Willie Stargell of Homestead got the better end of it — his solo shot off Houston’s Stephen Strasburg travelled 495 feet, which ties it for the longest home run struck in the league this season. Rogers Hornsby of the New York Black Yankees matched the exit velocity three days later, a 2-run drive off Cleveland‘s Ron Reed.
The hardest out belongs to Portland‘s Paul Molitor, who hit a 119 mph groundball out. Molitor had homered earlier in the game, on a ball hit 16 mph softer. That’s baseball.
