Simulating the Angels “Actuals” All-Time Half-Decade League using Earl Weaver Baseball

Derek Bain

7 months ago

Methodology

Based on the research for my book “Hardball Retrospective“, I assigned every Major League ballplayer to the first team that signed them to a professional MLB contract. Each player remains on their assigned “Original” team for the duration of their careers. For comparison purposes, I also compiled “Actual” teams using the individuals that actually played for each franchise. In both cases, I created half-decade leagues for the “Originals” and “Actuals”.

To determine the rosters for my “Actual” half-decade leagues, I utilized the following criteria:

Half-decades were designated as 1900-1904, 1905-1909, 1910-1914, 1915-1919, etc. up to 2015-2019. For the older National League franchises, I am not including any 19th Century player-seasons.
I take the top 40 players for each roster based on Win Shares using each player’s best season in the five-year period. For example, Mike Trout registered 42, 36, 30, 38 and 34 Win Shares from 2015 to 2019. On the Angels 2015-2019 “Actuals” roster, Mike Trout’s 2015 season will be represented.
I manually entered the team information into Earl Weaver Baseball 1.5 for the IBM PC. I selected this version of EWB for several reasons – personal preference (I’ve a huge fan of EWB since the game was released!), challenge (I had the Amiga and Apple ][ versions back in the day, but only recently acquired the IBM PC version), aesthetics (the physics modeling, animations, sounds were all top-notch for a game produced in the late 1980’s). Another determining factor – the IBM PC edition allows the user to ‘fast-play’ a series of games without any user intervention. For example, I created the schedule and saved it to disk. Then I can reference the schedule after I launch the game using the command, “WEAVER p d %” and enter the first game number along with the number of days to play. I usually play ten days at a time then back up the EWB files. I can also increase the amount of CPU cycles in the DOSbox emulator to speed things up a bit. Here is an excellent FAQ for EWB by Demystifier which explains the various command-line parameters and other interesting information about the game.
Earl Weaver Baseball has a roster limitation of 25 players, so each roster will consist of either 14 batters / 11 pitchers or 15 batters / 10 pitchers.
One of the few omissions in the original Earl Weaver Baseball computer game is the inability to save lineups and designate pitching roles for a computer-managed team. The teams that are managed by “Earl” use algorithms to generate lineups before every game, substituting players as needed based on injuries and fatigue.
Another minor flaw is the lack of “reserves” so the user is limited to a 25-man roster for each team.
Playoffs / World Series – I will manage a series of games between the top two teams in the simulation and livestream the results to my Twitch and YouTube channels.