BWB Primer #1 - MLB Game to BWB Game

The BWB Primer is a series of commentaries to provide rule interpretations and hints - something a bit more than you get out of the rules. See the Primer Index for the entire series.

What games count in BWB?

First, the very basic idea (that I'll contradict in a few moments) is that a single game in major league baseball corresponds to a single game in BWB. And by this, we don't mean a given date - when some teams might be playing and others do not. To synchronize everything, we determine the game number that a major league team is playing.

Thus, when a major league team plays their first game - well, all the stats for those players now count in BWB Game #1. Whenever it might be that MLB teams play their game #45, then those stats count for BWB Game #45.

Here's the contradiction, however - how do we deal with pitchers?

It would be nearly impossible to line up pitching performances so that your starting pitcher performs in real life exactly when you needed him in your rotation. So, we allow a pitcher to queue up starting performances so that they can be used in BWB whenever they are needed. A member of your five-man rotation can queue up three starting performances (when teams use a 4-man rotation or at times like the All-Star game, it's possible for your top pitchers to pitch more frequently than once every five games).

So what happens on the first game of the season, when only one pitcher for each major league team gets a chance to start? Do you need to have an Opening Day starter on your roster and then must you pitch him in your first game?

No - instead, what we do is start the pitching queue in MLB Game 1 and allow the queue to build for 5 more games before we use any hitting stats. MLB Games 1-5 are for pitching only. Then, with MLB Game 6, we start off the BWB Season. That game is the final game that your #1 pitcher has to appear in order to have a qualifying start. With MLB Game #6, we check the pitching performances from games 1-6, and the first one in which your first starter pitches provides the stats for your opening game. For BWB Game #2, we check the the queued starts from MLB Games 1-7, and the first one in which your second starter pitched is used for that game. And so on...

That takes care of starting pitchers...what about the bullpen?

Relievers have a similar "problem" - they don't usually appear on an everyday basis, so it's tough to make a performance in a Major League game correspond to a BWB game. So instead of queuing up their appearances, we accumulate their stats over a sliding 6-game period. This accumulation is then used to build averages for your entire bullpen, which is later used in the scoring formula (and too complicated to divert to in this chapter).

So bullpen stats for MLB Games 1-6 are used for BWB Game 1. MLB Games 2-7 used for BWB Game 2. MLB Games 56-61 used for BWB Game 56. And so on.

What about hitters?

Now, we could make hitters games just correspond exactly from MLB performance to BWB performance (MLB Game 1 = BWB Game 1, etc.). However, since the pitching stats for BWB Game #1 are cutting off at ML Game #6, it then becomes more consistent (and believe me, easier to administrate) to use that same "cut off" game for the hitters. Thus, we end up with BWB Game #1 using stats from MLB Game #6. BWB Game #78 uses MLB Game #83.

We lose some stats from the first week of the season (let's hope your slugger waits until Game 6 to have that 4-homer game), but we're also losing some at the end since we only have a 150-game season, so don't lose any sleep over it.

Because we play a full 150 games in the regular season, the playoffs need to get handled with a random selection of games from the last half of the season. More on that to come at another time (and the 5-game gap isn't handled the same way in the playoffs).

If you lose track, check out the Transaction Schedule/Deadlines links found on the main transaction page and on your league's home page. There's a chart that indicates which MLB games are used for hitters in any given BWB week.