Sunday, January 27, 2008

Good News And Bad News


Well, the 1887 Browns were down three games to two to those pesky 1996 Cardinals in VEB's All-Time Sim Tournament and forced to pitch Nat Hudson in game six because the darn program thinks Dave Foutz and Bob Caruthers are outfielders. Silver King can only pitch so much.

Hudson, of course, got pounded, giving up three runs in three innings. Comiskey had no choice but to bring in Silver King, who stabilized the situation. So the Browns come back and were up 4-3 going into the seventh when the John freakin' Mabry rips a two run single to center, scoring Ron Gant and Brian Jordan. The Browns tied it up in their half of the seventh on an rbi single by Bill Gleason that scored Yank Robinson. The score stayed 5-5 through nine and the teams headed to extra frames.

The game headed to the eleventh inning still knotted at five. At that point, King is about to pitch his eighth inning of the game. He already had a complete game victory in game one, pitched 7 2/3 innings in relief of Nat Hudson in game two, pitched a complete game victory in game three, pitched 6 1/3 innings in relief of Nat Hudson in game four, and pitched 7 1/3 innings in a tough start in game five. If I did the math correctly, Silver King, going into the eleventh inning of game six, has pitched 40 1/3 innings, throwing in every game in the series.

One man can only do so much. In the eleventh, the Cards shellacked King, scoring six runs on two doubles and four walks. What can you do? That's a winner for the 1996 Cards and one of the Four Time Champions are now out.

Do I even need to talk about the errors the glove-less Browns committed or how this would have been a different series if Caruthers and Foutz had pitched. For the love of Pete, Silver King had to pitch 41 1/3 innings. They only played 56 innings in the whole series. King threw 74% of all the Browns innings in the darn series. It's ridiculous. The 1887 Browns lost to the freakin' 1996 Cards. They lost to John freakin' Mabry and Ronnie Gant and Todd Stottlemyre and Royce Clayton and Danny Jackson and Tom Pagnozzi and Tony freakin' Fossas. Ridiculous.

Well, things went a little better for the 1888 Browns in game seven against the 1987 Cards. Behind a complete game victory by (who else) Silver King, the Browns cruised to a 7-0 win to clinch their series and advance to round two where (holy cow) the 2004 Cards are waiting.

Also in round two, we'll have the 1885 Browns taking on the Rick Ankiel meltdown Cards of 2000. That should be interesting.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Does the program assume modern rules? The ones I have seen that purport to repoduce historical teams usually seem to do this. My impression is that the programmers are really interested in stuff like Ty Cobb or the '27 Yankees, and the 19th century stuff is just tacked on using the standard databases with no interpretation.

Jeffrey Kittel said...

They are using modern rules and have made some statistical adjustments to the 19th century teams because of that. Essentially, the adjustment is to lower the expected offensive output of the Browns. However, the sim (which is the Sim Matchup program at WhatIf Sports) is not normalizing defense or stolen bases. So the Browns, under this sim, are playing under three different handicaps (fewer runs scored, more errors, more caught stealing). Add to that the fact that the sim is unable to recognize Caruthers or Foutz as pitchers and that's too much for the teams to overcome.