Two wildly unrelated topics

There are a number of things I’ve been thinking of posting about, enough of them that I’m not going to fit them all into this post. Let’s start things off with some more about Baseball. I’ve got a few things to say on the subject so I’m just going to take it in roughly chronological order.

Round one of the post season has ended. I didn’t really have any strong feelings on the NL side. I do have a soft spot for the Cardinals so I’m happy to see them advance, but I’m as happy to see the Mets in the next round as I would have been to see the Dodgers. I’ve got a few more feelings about the AL side of the equation. I got half of what I wanted out of round one. Things didn’t go very well at all for the Twins, but I can take solace in the Yankees defeat. Round two got underway on Tuesday. The Tigers have looked very impressive against the A’s thus far. And the weather has relented and allowed the Mets and Cardinals to finally get underway tonight.

I was happy to see the Twins picked up the option for Torii Hunter. I hold out hope that they will be able to workout a multi-year deal with him. However I suspect it will be more likely that Torii will be dealt to another team probably around the trade deadline. Even if he isn’t traded I imagine there will be a great deal of speculation and rumor about his future with the Twins throughout next season.

I was saddened to learn of the death of Buck O’Neil on the sixth. I will always remember him for the classy way he handled missing being elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame by one vote, and then going on and speaking at the induction service for his fellow Negro League players who were elected.

The other baseball related death of course garnered a lot more media coverage. You would pretty much have to be completely oblivious to the outside world, or live under a rock, not watch TV, not listen to the radio, not read the newspaper, not surf the Internet, and not interact with people to have missed the fact that an airplane crashed into a building in New York City yesterday. While it was pretty quickly determined to be an accident and not an act of terror, I imagine most people in general and New Yorkers in particular couldn’t help but reflect on the events of September 11, 2001. This tragedy relates to baseball because the plane was owned and presumably piloted by pitcher Cory Lidle (most recently of the Yankees, but he played for a number of different during his career). He along with his flight instructor Tyler Stranger where the only two people killed during the crash (21 people were injured during or as a result of the crash). I like many baseball fans cannot help but remember Thurmon Munson and Roberto Clemente.

Okay enough about baseball and death. I turn now to a much lighter subject: City of Heroes, and now for the first time City of Villains. One week ago today I purchased City of Villains and I am enjoying it, but haven’t really played it enough to form too many opinions. I will say it looks a little better (graphically) then City of Heroes. The archetypes have been changed up a bit. Brutes basically equal tankers, but deal more damage while soaking up less. Corruptors are basically defenders in reverse (or blasters that can heal as well as controllers) their primary powers are ranged attacks and their secondary powers are buffs and heals. Dominators are more or less controllers they just trade some versatility for more offensive capabilities. In a weird sort of way a dominator is a bit like a reverse blaster, in CoH blasters have the primary powers of ranged attacks, and their secondary powers come from a catch all category called support. Support borrows a number of powers from control, and buff (but no heals), and adds a few melee and other offensive powers. The dominators of course have control for their primary powers, and have an odd catch all category called assault for their secondary powers. Assault basically uses a mix of ranged and melee powers along with a few different single target buffs (and debuffs). I haven’t played a stalker yet to see how they differ from scrappers. I do know they have fewer hit points, and regardless of which secondary power set is chosen all grant some access to stealth abilities. The final villain archetype has no real equivalent in City of Heroes, and may be my favorite it is the mastermind. The mastermind concentrates on summoning “pets” to fight for you. These pets while computer controlled have a fairly sophisticated set of controls the player can use to direct their actions.

Sticking with City of Heroes one of my characters (pictured above) took second place in a costume contest yesterday. The award for 2nd place was 500,000 influence (which is basically the money used in the game). So that character is pretty set for influence until probably sometime around 20th level or so. The Blueshifted Hero is a defender and currently is level six. His primary power is called kinetics (he controls speed and movement) and his secondary power is sonic assault (he screams really loud). I leave you with a close-up of my influence winning character The Blueshifted Hero.

This is not the post I wanted to make today

I am not normally a superstitious person. I have no problem with black cats, my only concern about broken mirrors and walking under ladders have to do with safety, and I have never ever felt a pressing need to throw salt over my shoulder. I am also however a baseball fan, and baseball is known for its superstitions. So I find myself wanting to talk baseball, but fearing to do so because this is post number 13. This same fear and superstition is the main reason I haven’t posted anything about baseball yet in this blog. I’ve been wanting to, but it seemed like every time I’d start thinking seriously about making a baseball post in general, and a post in particular about a certain local professional baseball team, something bad would happen to that local professional baseball team. Nor can I discount my irrational fear that should I mention how good this local professional baseball team was doing, especially given their rather dismal start to the season, that they would instantly stop performing in such an excellent and unexpected manner.

So I remained quiet on the matter. Now Sunday the regular season ended, an event which I view with mixed feelings every year, on the one hand in means baseball will soon be over for the year, and on the other it means post-season goodness. I was prepared to risk angering the baseball gods, and actually make a post giving my thoughts on the coming post-season especially about that aforementioned local professional baseball team, but as I sat down to start composing this I noticed this is post number 13 so now you are getting. . . I don’t even know what to call this, but here it is.

I was first introduced to the greatness that is the game of baseball not from the game itself, but from the history of the game. I can thank a board game of all things for this. I unfortunately don’t even remember the proper name for this game. It is something like S.I. All-Time Superstar Baseball. I played it in high school, and it was owned by a classmate of mine, who obtained it from his father, who was likely the original purchaser of the game some time in the mid 1970s. The game was designed to simulate the game of baseball featuring rosters of the all-time greats for each team in the Major Leagues (as of the mid 1970s). Each player would take the role of a manager and select a roster from each teams available all stars. Some teams clearly had a better selection of talent available then others, just think of the guy “unlucky” enough to be managing the New York Yankees. His thought process has to go something like this: “Let’s see I need three outfielders, who do I have that can play outfield? Why I have Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Joe DiMaggio. Hmmmm. Oh I know Mantle can also play first base, but wait Lou Gehrig plays first base. Okay I’ll come back to this and select a catcher. Let’s see well this one is easy, Yogi Berra, oh but wait who is this Bill Dickey guy. Well damn. This is harder then I thought.”

I first encountered the game in the early 1990s. Since then I have been (mainly unsuccessfully) trying to find out more information about the game. I believe it was originally published by Sports Illustrated in the mid 1970s as a competitor of baseball simulation games like Strat-o-matic Baseball. It may have been published in conjunction with Avalon Hill, but I suspect it initially was solely a Sports Illustrated undertaking. However in 1978 Avalon Hill did publish a game called Superstar Baseball (pictured above) that used the exact same rules, but instead of featuring complete rosters for each team (the original game I played used a double sided 8" x 11" sheet of paper with the position players on one side, and the pitchers on the other) it contained 96 cards (half American League, and half National League) each representing an individual player from baseball (Avalon Hill also produced a 48 player expansion pack).

The game itself (either version) was played using three nonstandard six sided dice used to generate numbers 10-39. One die determined the tens digit and was numbered 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, and 3; this of course means numbers in the 30s would be rolled 1 in 2 times, while numbers in the teens would only be rolled 1 in 6 times. The other two dice were added together to generate the ones digit. One of those dice was numbered 0, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, while the other die was numbered 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. This creates an interesting bell curve where 4 and 5 are tied as the most common number being generated, 3 is the next most common, 2 and 6 are tied for the third most common numbers, 1 and 7 are the forth most common, 0 and 8 are the fifth most common, and 9 is the least common number generated. Combine the two sets of dice together and you get numbers between 10 - 39 where 19 is the least common number, 34/35 are the most common numbers, and there is some interesting overlap (24/25 has an equal probability of occurring as 32/36). Each player (as in the members of the team) has a chart using these numbers that is based on their lifetime statistics. The “manager” roles the dice and compares the result to his chosen pitcher’s chart with possible results include a strike out, fly out, ground out, walk, wild pitch, passed ball, or most likely swing away. If the swing away result is reached the other “manager” roles the dice and compares the result to the batter’s chart. The results include the above outs plus home runs, doubles, singles, double play balls, and so on. This is the bare bones of the game; I could go on about how it resolved things like bunting, and stealing bases, but I think you get the picture.

I may never have been able to find a copy of that original game, but I was able to obtain the Avalon Hill version (and the expansion pack). While my version didn’t contain as many players as my classmates, since each player in the game was represented by a card, the game was able to include a brief bio for each of the 96 players it did feature. And from these bios I learned to appreciate the rich history of the game, and from there it wasn’t much of a leap to appreciate the current game. That Ken Burns documentary didn’t hurt either.

I leave you with two pictures of characters from City of Heroes. The first is of a guy I like to call Captain France, but since that name was taken I was forced to name him The Foreign Legionnaire. I am still very happy with how he turned out looking, and if I ever get him to level 20 he will look awesome with a cape. He is a tanker with the primary power of invulnerability, and the secondary power of super strength.

This second picture is an "action" shot of my first ever character Shashu (which is Japanese for Archer). She is a blaster with the primary power of archery. She recently made 14th level and I selected fly as her power. As cool as super speed is, flight just might be even cooler.