Prospecting for Gold Series Comes to an End:
In the last episode published, I was at the beginning of Year 4 in the project. The original hypothesis was that the Rays organization and their crop of prospects would be ready to dominate in Years 4 and 5 of the project. Things were looking great at the All-Star break of Year 4, the club was 15 games over .500 and 1 1/2 games up in the AL East. There was an absolute collapse in the second half, however, and Year 4 finished at 78-84, missing the playoffs. Year 5 was all that was left and once again the year ended with a whimper, 79-83. This sim highlighted a few things for me both about MLB The Show and real life baseball.
- Championship level pitching is very hard to find, develop, and predict. The lineup was productive and strong but the pitchers never really developed, and guys I banked on being studs kind of fizzled out.
- While it’s fun to fantasize about the next Juan Soto or Ronald Acuna, the fact is those guys are outliers and your best production comes from those guys entering the prime years of their career between the ages of around 26-30. My most productive position players by far were guys like Austin Meadows and Brandon Lowe, who were in that upper 20’s range by the end of the simulation.
New Streaming Series to Begin: The Multiverse
I was searching my brain with a lot of trial and error and false starts for a second franchise that I would be interested in moving through many years into the future and carry the save file over to future versions of the game. I believe I have finally settled upon a concept, but not without a ton of man hours. I enjoy the fictional roster concept, the current players, and the idea of legends in Franchise mode. So, I set out to create something that had a balance of all three. Here are the basics of the multiverse I’ve created.
- Bacon’s fictional roster is the base roster, about 1/3 of the MLB roster and a much larger percentage of the minors are made up of Bacon’s fantastic roster.
- About 1/3 of the roster are current players. I used the DD Live Series card attributes for ratings. There were only a small percentage of CAPS in the vault so many of the current players, while the ratings, ages, etc. are accurate, the likenesses of the player model are not something I put a ton of time in. So, for example. Jack Flaherty on my squad doesn’t exactly resemble Flaherty but it’s in the ballpark, let’s say.
- About 1/3 of the roster are players selected from the excellent “Longballs and Legends” rosters put out by Ridin Rosters. CAPS were available in the vault for a large percentage of these players, but ratings had to be adjusted to fit the Longballs and Legends ages, ratings, etc.
This league is admittedly slightly overpowered but I did take steps to minimize that. For legends, I often used their breakout, rookie, or veteran card when available for their attributes. So I have Stan Musial on my roster, but it is the 20 year old, 80 overall rated version of Musial. From the Longballs and Legends rosters, I borrowed from them and have guys like Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez at the very beginning of their careers, with the attributes to match.
I will be streaming Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 7PM ET. Please subscribe to the
SSG Youtube channel and come hang out, we may have some real baseball to discuss as well. I’d love for this to be a place SSG folks can stop by and talk real baseball, OOTP league for those in that, state of franchise across all sports games, recent Madden controversy, etc. The first few games will be Spring Training games because I actually have about ten teams I am still in the process of finalizing, but all of my Spring Training opponents are complete. I may be mixing in some FIFA streams as well.
