The Quest For .400 - Manually Controlled

[JMDurron]

MLB Historical League with Recalc (3 years, double weight on current year), 1988. Modified Red Sox, playing out every game myself. Injuries on very low.

After 161 games on an absolutely stacked team, Wade Boggs has the following stat line:

399/545/542 in 158 Games. 251 H, 206 BB, 208 R, 59 2B, 5 3B, 7 HR, 129 RBIs.

He has 848 PAs in 158 Games, with 629 ABs. That makes for an AVG of .39905...this means that he needs to go 3-for-5 or better in the final game of the season. Or...he could go 1-for-1 then walk a bunch.

I generally play out all of my games, in this league's case I have do so since 1974. Even on a modified historical roster in a hitter's haven ballpark (Fenway), I've never come close to having a .400 hitter before. None of my other leagues have done so either, and it's bigger to me since I'm manually managing every game and am so invested in the players.

One game left to play, the kid's asleep, the wife's out with her friends, and it's just me (and Boggs) against Cleveland Indians starter Richard Dotson, in Cleveland to end the season. This is as nervous as I've ever been heading into a final regular season game, with the AL East title long since decided.

[Déjà Bru]

Holy smokes, this is suspenseful. And I'm a Yankees fan! (Although Boggsy did play for us for a few seasons after that time . . .) Good luck to "him" and you!

[NYYANKS98]

850 PA? How?

[JMDurron]

So...I just completed game 162. I did a running diary of each PA, including the result, and any notable historical stats related to them.

Boggs went 3-for-5, so I came to my draft post to write the following sentence.

"BOGGS DID IT! .401!"

....

As I hit enter after the exclamation point, Windows Update for Windows 7 popped up. It jumped to the front. "Restart now" is highlighted by default. I had forgotten that I had started installing a bunch of patches earlier tonight.

It was literally the worst time possible. I hadn't exited out of the box score/recap yet. I hadn't saved my game yet. In my excitement, I went back to this thread BEFORE ensuring I had saved my progress.

I am not amused right now.

[JMDurron]

Originally Posted by NYYANKS98

850 PA? How?

A supremely stacked lineup, with me enforcing my preferred approach to hitting upon them.

3B Boggs
LF Evans
DH Greenwell
2B Sandberg
CF Burks
RF Gwynn
1B Mattingly
C Fisk
SS O. Smith

I take lots of pitches, and until rosters expand in September, this leads to periodic 4-game road series where the opposing team runs out of relievers and trots out a bunch of position players...who proceed to walk more guys, and give up some hard hits.

It's based on a scripted history from an old message board thread that has since been lost to history (not ported over during a recent board upgrade), so I'm manually playing out an altered history of the 1974-2010 Red Sox, game by game.

[JMDurron]

For the record, I don't particularly care how many times I have to replay this game at this point. I don't need .401, I don't even need to win the stinking game, but I'm not letting one poorly timed keystroke take this away.

It's my own fault, not OOTP's or Windows Update's, but that's hardly the point at this stage...I'm angry.

[JMDurron]

Well, after 6 re-tries, Boggs managed to go 3-for-4 with 1 BB. The good news is that the .401 AVG and the 254 hits (2nd all time, 3 behind the MLB record) are identical to my *real* Game 162. The bad news is that the emotional high I felt from that first game is dead, buried, dug up from the grave, shot, burned, drowned, frozen, shattered, then melted into a badge of shame that I get to wear.

Next time, I'm probably just going to post screenshots AFTER the accomplishment, or at least until after I've saved it!

[BigRed75]

I would say it is Windows Update's fault. Microsoft is the worst.

Congratulations on your accomplishment. You did do it, after all.

[JMDurron]

Originally Posted by BigRed75

I would say it is Windows Update's fault. Microsoft is the worst.

Congratulations on your accomplishment. You did do it, after all.

Well, I have it set to only download/install upon my command. I instructed it to do so around 5pm, and had forgotten all about it 3.5 hours later. Since I do it manually, they tend to build up before I get around to it. That's entirely on me.

It literally only happened this way because I told it to update when I did AND decided to post about it beforehand AND decided to keep a running in-game log as a draft post AND decided to update that post before exiting out of the game summary and saving my game.

The classic case of an ID10T error.

[Déjà Bru]

Nice going. Don't feel bad about the necessary "re-creations" which were not your fault. You and "he" had earned this accomplishment and it was a fact in your mind and on the record. The only problem was, the record was not recorded properly.

I've done the same thing in the past when my game crashed at certain points, seeming to negate something that I felt I had "earned." So, the program was merely re-run until it turned in the proper results, that's all.

EDIT: Heh, you must have had your Boggs on quite a chicken diet!

[JMDurron]

At least there's a story for it.

[Magus978]

On my Mets save, I had Reggie Pruitt hit .403, but he only played 82 games due to several injuries. Then I lost the progress due to random outage

Haven't come close since.

[JMDurron]

Meanwhile, Boggs didn't even finish in the Top 3 in MVP voting! Jose Canseco still won in 1988, although he might have earned it with his 338/410/644 line, complete with 52 HRs, 163 RBIs, and Gold Glove Defense in RF. He also stole 44 bases.

[Déjà Bru]

Boggs with 132 RBI's to go with a .401 batting average was not too shabby, but I'd go with Canseco as well for MVP. I've often seen in my leagues that the highest BA does not always win MVP. Often it's the guy with the highest RBI's or OPS.

[JMDurron]

Originally Posted by Déjà Bru

Boggs with 132 RBI's to go with a .401 batting average was not too shabby, but I'd go with Canseco as well for MVP. I've often seen in my leagues that the highest BA does not always win MVP. Often it's the guy with the highest RBI's or OPS.

Boggs had the league lead in PAs, R, H, 2B, BB, AVG, OBP, OPS, and WAR. Canseco led in HR (by a huge margin) and SLG. The WAR difference was 9.8 for Canseco compared to 12.6 for Boggs.