Strat-O-Matic Baseball 365

Being the conspiracy theorist that I am, I, along with many others believe that there exists a 100 win curse. And let's be honest, the number may not be 100, but it's far more noticeable when you win 100 games and crap down your pants leg in the playoff as so many people do.

So, do you believe in a 100 Win Curse?

I don't play much and only have one 100 win team and it lost in the semis. However, I think it is human nature to expect a high performing team all season to win the championship. When they don't it sticks out. In a game of dice rolls, anything can happen in a short series and gets noticed more than a small losing streak over the course of a 162 game season. I know there are a couple veterans on here who have some really strange poor results in the playoffs with 100 win teams, but I don't find it odd, in general, that high caliber regular season teams can stumble in a short series.

It does exist, you don't have a bunch of owners with records of 1-28 with 100+ win teams if it didn't.
what has everyone snookered is that it is not applied by HAL universally, only to teams/owners that fit a particular
criteria.

MtheB wrote:It does exist, you don't have a bunch of owners with records of 1-28 with 100+ win teams if it didn't.
what has everyone snookered is that it is not applied by HAL universally, only to teams/owners that fit a particular
criteria.

Does anyone know how many managers have a record that awful in the playoffs with 100+ win teams? Are we talking one or two or a whole lot more? What is the profile that is being targeted?

Of my last 7 100 win teams 3 have won championships. I feel that is a good percentage. If I can win the finals 25% of the time or better that I make the playoffs then I am pretty happy no matter how many wins I had. I go on hot streaks and cold streaks in the playoffs but for the most part feel like it evens out eventually.

According to "The Drunkards Walk," a popular science book about probability, teams that has a 55/45 advantage over their opponents would need to play best-of 269 games series for the results of those series to have a statistically significant results. A 7-game series tells you literally nothing. There is no curse!

https://mlb.nbcsports.com/2014/10/15/wh ... ne-anyone/

Exactly Matt

Interesting in real life baseball this year that the 100 win achievement in regular season might have some of the curse some posters on here talk about for strat.

Three teams won 100 or more games in the regular season in 2023. The first round records (first round they play in at least) in a best 3/5 format are:

Baltimore 0-3 OUT of playoffs
Atlanta 1-3 OUT of playoffs with the one win being a 5-4 game that ended on a fly ball double play.
Dodgers 0-3 OUT of playoffs

Should be called a playoff curse.

All the owners that I know that have ridiculously bad records with 100+ win teams, and/or have experienced a significant drop in winning percentage in the past two years, despite a positive increase in run differential, combined with a ever increasing poor performance of wins vs projected Pythag — all meet the following criteria:

1) they have played STRAT since the early days
2) they have had over 1500 teams minimum
3) they have a on overall winning percentage of over .525
4) they have a playoff winning percentage of over .520
5) they normally have 8-10 teams going at any given time

Outside of 2 or 3 exceptions, Of the owners that I know, they have all either left the game or are
In the process of doing so. Which calls to mind the line in Goldfinger about happenstance….

So is it possible that the results these particular set of owners have experienced is just a fluke of probability?
Of course.

Is it possible, that in order to keep new owners involved in the game, and buying new teams,— that programming modifiers are being used to give newbies an edge? ( at the expense of long term owners that have thousands of teams and a good many rings )
That is also possible.

There is talk about how that in the game engine, given each players card has a huge variable of dice results, that it would be very difficult to program modifiers.
Undeniably. However, there are a number of results that are calculated on top of the game engine— things that in the board game were a split card result——- BP home runs, fielding results, injuries etc— these kind of results would be far easier to modify. Possible but unlikely.

But there will never be a way to know that for sure, so in the scheme of things my thought is to play the game as long as you enjoy it.