Spring Tryouts for History Maker Baseball
Here's a fun way to create your own minor league "casting call," courtesy of PLAAY gamer/innovator Jule Sigall! Jule's been around PLAAY games for many, many years (I first met him at our Seattle Fall Classic Pre-PLAAY event in 2017) and is well-known in the community for his add-ons like the "Out-of-Town Scoreboards" for football and baseball, and home-brewed card sets like last year's amazing college hoops "March Madness" set. Jule sent this "spring tryout" idea to me a couple of weeks ago and asked me to look it over to let him know what I thought about it. I told him that I knew him well enough to know that I didn't even HAVE to look it over, I was sure it would be great. (I did look it over, and I was right--it IS great, haha!)
Since this is Jule's idea, let's let him explain the concept: "This is a system that lets you hold a tryout session for History Maker Baseball to create fictional players for use in the game. It imagines that the coaches have a gathered a group of players, divided them up into two squads for a scrimmage to figure out the talent on their team. This helps you 'get to know' these players better and watch them develop from the ground up."
"As the game is played, the players’ performance on the field is being graded by coaches and scouts as they assign the ratings to create the players HMB cards. When you are finished one regular nine-inning game, you should have fully rated cards for eighteen position players, two starting pitchers, and six relief pitchers."
Files for all of the necessary printed Spring Tryouts materials are included here. There are general rules, a few basic charts and a file containing “generic” player cards that show all of the HMB qualities. Using a pen/pencil and/or highlighter, you'll be highlighting and crossing-off qualities on these cards during the game. (We're including these as a help--feel free to create your own if you'd like larger cards or a different layout.)
Jule's laid out the instructions in his usual clear, business-like presentation and we'll run through this process on tonight's (03.13.25) PLAAY Space YouTube stream. So I won't consume a lot of screen time in this blog post explaining how everything works. However, I would like to make a few points in anticipation of tonight's stream...
• Player ratings will be generated by game book outcomes NOT by qualities called for in the game book! This is something that threw me off when I first ran through the process. Basically, (especially as you begin) you will be using the game's "default" result to determine qualities for both batter and pitcher, unless you happen to hit a half-quality that the player was assigned in the bullpen warm-up or batting cage segments of the process. As the game unfolds, players will gain/lose potential qualities and their cards will gradually develop. It's a cool process, a lot like a scouting session.
• Your finished cards will have a "minor league" feel to them. This tool is not intended to generate a pseudo-big league. There will be lots of half-qualities for pitching, and few "double" qualities. The process will generate a somewhat different distribution of qualities than what you'd see in a major league card set. You will get some "Good Eye" batters and some "Wild" pitchers. There will be fewer "slugger" and "whiffer" qualities.
• Some players will be given contrasting/conflicting qualities. It's important to note that the game works perfectly well under this scenario, it's a depiction of players who are streaky or erratic. For example, a batter might be given both the UTILITY and HERO qualities, or EAGER and PATIENT. Again, this is by design.
• While Jule has spent a good amount of time experimenting and tweaking this system, I think it's safe to say that this is not a "finished" product at this point. There'll be some gray areas, and you should feel free to improvise as desired/needed. For example, you might wish to dispense with conflicting qualities as outlined above, and have them cancel each other out. Or, have some sort of a final determinant that decides which quality they end up with. We'll talk about this more on our stream as we go through the process. Jule's also offered to run a session on this during PLAAY-Dot-CON, which could be really fun (especially if you get to play your prospects against someone else's!)
See you tonight! NOTE that we will stream an hour earlier than usual, 5pm MDT (7pm EDT). Thanks!
Photo by Keith Johnston on unsplash.com