Hardball Retro Replays – Tony La Russa Baseball 3 – 1901 Season

Derek Bain

1 year ago

I created a Facebook group, “Old Computer Baseball Simulations”, as a place to gather people who enjoy our National Pastime from a managerial and front office perspective – primarily games that are no longer actively supported by the publisher, designer or programmer. I would like to encourage the sharing of user-created season disks. In order to facilitate that goal, I started to create seasons for the Earl Weaver Baseball and Tony La Russa Baseball games. I hope to expand this effort to other games in the near future. However there are several advantages to creating older seasons for Earl Weaver Baseball 1.5 (IBM PC edition) and Tony La Russa Baseball 3 (IBM PC) such as the SeasonTool utility by Daniel Guenther for use with Earl Weaver Baseball 1.5 and the ability to import seasons from Old Time Baseball into Tony La Russa Baseball 3. There are a number of adjustments to be considered post-import, but the overall time to complete the task is much shorter than entering the statistics by hand! If anyone is aware of similar import utilities for other baseball sims created from 1980 through 2000, please share in the Comments section.

Methodology

I imported the 1901 through 1981 seasons from Old Time Baseball into the C:\TONY3\TEAMS30 subfolder on my computer, then made the following modifications:

Old Time Baseball lists all switch-hitters as right-handed batters. I reviewed the players for each team and corrected their batting handedness.
When importing from Old Time Baseball, I’ve noticed that a number of left and center fielders are incorrectly listed as right fielders for their primary position. I corrected those entries to the best of my abilities.
I configured the pitching rotations to utilize a 4-man rotation for most teams / seasons prior to the mid-1970’s.
I used the Baseball-Reference “Other – Batting Orders” page for each team to set the lineups vs RHP and LHP.
Manager Profiles changes:
- Endurance 80% (vs ERA)
- Leave ’em In 90% (vs Yank ’em)
- Leave ’em In 90% (vs Pinch Hit)
- Sacrifice 70% (vs Hit Away)
- I did not adjust stolen base attempt frequency, but this could probably be tweaked for deadball-era teams and on a team-by-team basis in the 1980’s.

After simulating the 1901 season, I noticed one batter with an extremely high batting average over 200 plate appearances. That individual had 1 hit in 1 at-bat during the 1901 campaign, but he achieved significant playing time due to an injury in the simulated season. For future simulated seasons, I will attempt to locate players with low plate appearances and high batting averages, and adjust their real-life stats to a .250 batting average to avoid these anomalies.

Here is a video recapping the regular season standings and league leaders, followed by Game 2 of the 1901 World Series between the Brooklyn Superbas and the Boston Americans (with Mel Allen calling the play-by-play), and a game-by-game box score review of the World Series.