Negro League Barnstorming Tour

[CHARLESBELL]

I'm sure Bernie is planning to incorporate the Negro League Player set into Strat online, most probably into some type of All Time Greats league.

Until then, though, I'd like to find out if there is any interest in running our own offline league using the computer game.

Here is a summary of what I have in mind.

Rather than a regular league, what I would like to try is the equivalent of a Barnstorming Tour that back in the 1920s-1940s both white and black players participated in between the regular seasons. The key difference between this and a regular league is that teams would not have a "home stadium." Instead, all teams would be travelling around the country, playing in different stadiums designated as home or away according to the schedule. Teams would have to be built which took that into account.

The Player list would consist of all of the Negro League Set, and all of the Hall of Fame set. Both of those sets were created around the same idea of a composite card averaging the best 5-7 year period in the player's career. There are 103 Negro League cards and 192 HOF cards, totalling 295 players (although there is some overlap in the two sets). In addition, each manager will be able to submit additional players and suggested year, up to a set maximum, that would go into the pool. The year picked should attempt to represent a season that is something of an average of his best years, to stay consistent with the HOF and NL cards. Obviously we would have to ensure a good distribution among field positions and pitching roles to pick from.

I have nearly every season SOM has created, so I believe I can build a pool including any player from any year we decide to use.

Rosters would be set at 25 players. There would be an open draft with all players eligible and no restrictions on who you can pick, as long as the roster meets Strat requirements for fielding a team.

There are a lot of options available in the computer game that are not available in Strat online that would work well in a barnstorming league.

How would the games be played? The Commissioner of the league (who would not own a team) handles all of that. Managers would submit their roster, lineups, pitching rotation, etc, just as we do in the online game, using a feature of the computer game. Managers would have the option of updating that information between every game, giving managers much greater control over the team than we do in the online version. The Commissioner would use the most current input from the managers, run the games on the computer, and report the results.

We could use the Individual League forums to report the results; if for some reason TSN has an issue with that, I can set up an independent blog to make the reports.

I don't have the negro League set yet, but SOM has the complete list of players in the set. If there is enough interest we could actually get our pool of players determined once we know how many are interested.

Questions? Interested? Please comment!