by Cubit » Fri Apr 22, 2011 5:02 pm
[quote:09f103ec02="sandlotshrink"]I'm glad you mentioned this Smoke because that's become an ever increasing frustration for me. The more I've invested myself into SOM the more detached I've become from being fan. I'm currently wrestling with myself on the issue and can't say I'm entirely certain how it will turn out. I do know that I have an online subscription to both the NY Post and The New York Daily News and that has helped as has my subscription to ML At Bat 11 and being able to listen to games as a fan. But like when I was addicted to Fantasy Football, I find myself cringing when one of my own players gets hurt, hammered or goes hitless as opposed to how my Mets do. Or that I am happy if Halladay gets hammered whn in actuality I want to embrace the quality of his pitching. I didn't like that during the football season and I'm starting to not like it in baseball as well. I miss being a fan. :cry:[/quote:09f103ec02]
Sandy and Smokey, too, I understand your feelings here. For me, baseball is the beautiful game-- though I love world class football in Europe just to see the skill and 'space awareness' of the greatest players-- but there are definitely moments when SOMO aka Strat can cause me to cringe when I should cheer. I am still a Boston fan, and have been one for so long that I've been through all the bad years as well as the recent good ones-- I even remember Frank Malzone and Pete Runnels' Batting crowns, while for a time Dick Stuart was my favorite player before Dick Radatz came up.
Naturally I grimaced this year and watched all the pitchers, including Buchholtz blow up at the beginning of the year and all the hitters seem to have decided to forget their trade, but I believed then, that things would turn around, and seeing the evidence of that now, I'm actually cautiously optimistic that over what Jim Brosnan once called "The Long Season," they'll be there at the end, so I still feel like a fan.
BUT Strat, and any statistically based game, introduces a bizarre element with a kind of time travel, since we have Past performance in front of us on the card, while we are playing a new season against teams composed of players who earned their stats in the past, while we are looking ahead to the future, and watching "our" players play out the current season just to get us to the next "Set". I feel like a chrononaut at times...
Thank you guys for getting me thinking. :? I feel a little like Lucy in "Peanuts" when after Charlie Brown told her he had "become aware of" his tongue and we have several frames of her poking her tongue into the corners of her mouth she declares, "I HATE YOU CHARLIE BROWN!"
:roll: