Hardball Retro Replays – APBA Baseball for Windows -1985-1989 Actuals Season

Derek Bain

11 months 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 season disks for the Earl Weaver Baseball and Tony La Russa Baseball games along with APBA Baseball for Windows 5.5. I hope to expand this effort to other games in the near future. 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 players from the Bill James Baseball Encyclopedia (1995 edition) using APBA Baseball for Windows 5.5 running on a Windows 98 SE virtual machine. I configured the starting lineups vs. RHP and LHP, starting rotations, and the adjustments outlined below before migrating the organization files into version 5.75.

DH is used for all teams
25-man active roster, 15 players in the “farm” organization per team
must have 2 active catchers
active rosters consist of 15 batters/10 pitchers or 14 batters/11 pitchers
vsRHP, vsLHP and starting rotations are generally based on the highest Win Shares single-season totals for each position
schedules generated using the format utilized during that timeframe
Season Factor and Max. Batters Faced are adjusted in strike-shortened seasons

Why is this organization called the “Actuals”? When I wrote my first book, “Hardball Retrospective”, I placed every player on the first team which they signed a professional MLB contract with. I called those teams the “Originals” while calling their real-life counterparts the “Actuals”. I sometimes refer to the “Actuals” as the “Franchise Best Players”. There will be instances where the same player appears on multiple teams, such as Jack Clark ’87 (Cardinals), Jack Clark ’88 (Yankees) and Jack Clark ’89 (Padres). However, you will only find one player-season for a given team on a half-decade roster (i.e. Alan Trammell’s best season from 1985 through 1989 based on Win Shares is his 1987 campaign, so that is the version of Trammell that appears on the 1985-1989 Tigers roster.)

The following videos include a recap of the regular season standings and league leaders, American and National League playoff recap, and individual World Series game videos with Ernie Harwell narrating the play-by-play!

Regular Season Recap