You know my love of OOTP 14, but now, another version of Out of the Park Baseball is coming. And this time, it’ll have 3D ballparks, 3D balls-in-play, international leagues with REAL players for Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Mexico, Cuba, Netherlands and Italy, a new ratings system, the ability for teams to retire numbers and even more!
How much am I looking forward to this?
Perhaps this will give an indication:
YEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!
It’s the Continuum Baseball Rankings! Thanks to good performances in basically every tournament that wasn’t the WBC, the United States went to number one in the IBAF’s world rankings, and that helped them also move to the top in the Continuum Rankings. Japan and Cuba also benefited from international play results that the IBAF rankings follow (but I don’t always follow), and Japan further benefited from a 3-game sweep over Taipei in November. This caused the Dominican to fall to fourth, mainly because they didn’t play much after the WBC and weren’t in the best of positions in the IBAF ratings.
Similar things happened to other Latin American teams, and that leads to another issue I’ll have to figure out: due to those country’s baseball systems, which often have financial problems outside of the WBC as far as going overseas. I’m going to try and figure out a way to try and counter this without bringing back in the number of MLB players and MLB Win Shares.
Anyway, these ratings include the 2013 end-of-year IBAF World Rankings, the three games “Samurai Japan” and the Chinese Taipei national team played, games between “professional or equivalent” teams in the East Asian Games and the entirety (since all teams in it were “professional or equivalent”… which is to say, they were all each country’s best players, in this case amateurs) of the West Asian Baseball Cup.
The next update will be after the Caribbean World Series in February.
Go below the jump to see it:
New Baseball Continuum Rankings will be up on Friday!
(This was just an aside, since I hadn’t posted anything yet today.)
The word “apocalypse” does not, technically, mean the end of the world. It instead means “uncovering” or the revelation of something. In that truest sense, the New York Yankees have set themselves up for an apocalyptic year in 2014. Because with the signing of Masahiro Tanaka, they have turned their back on any semblance of the financial restraint they showed last year in a quest to possibly get under the luxury tax and are going with the good old fashion weapon of the Yankees of old: money. Lots and lots of money.
Problem is, with the team that that money has bought, it has yet to be uncovered whether that’s going to do it anymore… at least the way the Yankees did it this offseason.
What do I mean by the way the “Yankees did it” this offseason? Well, what I mean is that the Yankees have, for a lack of a better word, assembled a team that recalls the “Jurassic Park at Camden Yards” Orioles of 1998. Having fallen in the ALCS the past two years, Orioles ownership threw a bunch of money at the problem, signing past All-Stars and award-winners… leading to a team that actually had a higher total salary figure than the Yankees. Problem was, these are the past All-Stars and award-winners who they got (not counting re-signings of players like Harold Baines and Brady Anderson):
The 1998 Orioles average age was 33.3 years old, their most common batting orders had no players that were younger than 30 at the end of the season, and of the eight pitchers that would start 10 or more games that year, only two of them were under 30. The “Jurassic Park at Camden Yards” Orioles underachieved greatly, finishing 79-83, 4th in the AL East, and beginning the long string of under-.500 years that would last until 2012. Carter, Charlton and Guillen were all gone from the team by the end of the year (although Guillen, admittedly, had mainly been gotten as a backup infielder), while Drabek retired at year’s end.
Now, look at what the Yankees did this off-season:
Other than Tanaka, the list looks shockingly like what the Orioles did- getting old all-stars. And, like the Orioles of 1998, the Yankees will likely have their line-up made up entirely of players older than 30-years old. Although, to be fair, the Yankees rotation is younger and I’d definitely take a 30-year-old McCann over a 33-year-old Lenny Webster or Chris Hoiles and a 30-year-old Ellsbury over a 34-year-old Brady Anderson. But still, you can’t help get this sinking feeling that maybe, just maybe, the Yankees money-hammer isn’t going to work this time, that the players they have acquired are too old and too injury prone to bring them to the promised land.
Still, It’s not hard to see why the Yankees are doing this. After all, they missed the playoffs last year and were lucky to end up tied for third with the Orioles in the AL East. And, as that happened, their ratings and attendance plummeted, and probably would have been even lower if not for the attention the grand Mariano Rivera farewell tour got. So, what were they going to do? Just spend money on some younger and cheaper players? Let Tanaka go to the Cubs or Dodgers? Pfft. They wouldn’t let that happen, they are the Yankees. And, hey, the money approach has worked before, and it may well work again. And they better hope it does, because if it doesn’t, it could turn into a baseball apocalypse in the Bronx of a somewhat more dire kind.
As I mentioned yesterday, the latest installment of the Continuum Baseball Rankings is coming up.
However, there will be one major difference: I will not be taking into account the number of MLB players and Win Shares for each country, instead using only the input of the IBAF World Rankings and results from international tournaments in which a country’s “professional or equivalent” team took part.
There are a few reasons for this.
For one, using MLB players and MLB win shares in it heavily skews it towards the USA, Dominican Republic, etc.
For another, it skews away from countries that have their own leagues, such as Japan and Korea, as well as an isolated nation like Cuba.
Finally, they are at times incomplete, as the site I use to find the numbers for it goes by place of birth, not necessarily nationality, leading to, for example, Donald Lutz being listed as an American and not a German.
So, when the next Rankings update comes up, it’ll have used a different method for things that happened after July of this past year.
So, we all know Alex Rodriguez isn’t very popular in the MLB office, but how unpopular he was amongst his fellow players hasn’t been very clear until now. Oh, there had been “sources” about how disgusted they were, and some players have outright talked about their feelings on A-Rod. But now, Jeff Passan and Tim Brown have written an article over at YAHOO! in which they reveal that other players are so sick of Rodriguez that they would have him kicked out of the union completely.
This is unprecedented. While he can’t be kicked out of the union due to legal matters, this is, to the best of my knowledge, the first time something like this has actually been bandied about at all. Even the replacement players like Kevin Millar, Shane Spencer and Brendan Donnelly were merely cut out from the MLBPA’s marketing deals (making them, for example, not available in video games), not kicked out of the union.
Of course, this won’t end with Rodriguez getting kicked out of the union, and he’s not being cut from any marketing deals either, but it does show something: while the union itself may have said it wasn’t happy with suspension of Rodriguez, the union members seem to wish the union could just leave him out to dry.
Okay, so, this coming week:
So, see you later!
Well, guess there won’t be a book review today. But, guess what? You still have stuff of mine to read, as my entry to the Blogathon at Old Time Family Baseball is now up! Be sure to check out the whole thing (there are some great pieces in it), and look at my piece, in which I look at what would happen to various baseball players, fans, announcers and reporters in a It’s a Wonderful Life-style dystopia where baseball didn’t exist.
But, of course, there is a real reason for the blogathon: to raise money for Doctors Without Borders, one of the world’s most respected organizations. They work to bring medical treatment to war zones and developing nations where it may not be available. You can donate to DWB over at OTFB, and even a dollar donation will put you into a raffle for some cool prizes.
Just a heads up that Old Time Family Baseball‘s yearly blogathon to raise money for Doctors Without Borders has begun. If you don’t know about it, what happens is that Michael Clair, for 24 hours starting at 11 AM Eastern this morning, writes at least one blog entry every half hour. All day long. And then, starting tomorrow, the rest of the baseball internet takes over, as writers great and small contribute stuff to show support and fill the rest of the time as Clair recovers from his 24-hour baseball blogging binge.
I contributed a piece, and it’ll be up on Sunday. But don’t wait, head on over to OTFB now to see what crazy things are going on.
Well, here are my predictions for tomorrow’s NFL games. Who will go to the Super Bowl?
So, there you go, the Seahawks and Broncos will meet in the Super Bowl.
Unless I’m wrong.
Which I probably am.
The Baseball Continuum 