***1938 AA and IL Available for Download!!***

For those of you interested in minor league ball, I've gone ahead and rated two leagues from 1938- the
American Association and the International League. Both leagues had eight teams and played out a 154
game schedule. Oddly enough, Baseball Reference did not have complete stats, especially for the IL.
Consequently, the rosters are small, but enough to get you through a season if you overuse some of the
players by 10% or so. I did the ratings for selfish reasons: I've never played a season from the 1930's,
though I'm familiar with some of the big names when I began playing EI years ago with teams made up
from their Top 400, which was included with the game. Also, I recognize many of the players who went
on to the bigs and stayed there for at least ten years or more from my Retro 5Y League, which covered
the years 1948 to 1952. But the overriding reason I rated these leagues was my intention to use these
players in a draft league. I'll draft from this pool of sixteen teams, and see how it goes!

The ratings are available as an excel file. If you don't like a rating for any player, feel free to change it. I
kept the defensive ratings simple; outfielders with ten or more assists got a T1 rating. Anyone with a
fielding percentage above .990 was rated SD, and anyone with a fielding percentage lower than .900 got
hit with an LD rating. 20 SB and up got AAR ratings for steals. I went ahead and gave SUP ratings if they
had 40 swipes. I included total steals for each player in the ratings, so if you have a guy with no steals on
the year, just consider him a SLO runner. I also gave players with around 60 or more runs scored with a
base advance rating of AAR.

These files, like all downloads on this site, are free. You'll find them in the download section below. Let me
know what you think!

All 1-1-1's!!

January 16, 2025

The Veet’s Rare Event Card Deck – pt 2

I was looking back at some old newsletters of mine that I had written for a
very small audience back in the 80s, and stumbled across a game report from
around ’86 or ‘87 that described a fight breaking out between two teams in an
exhibition game. Since no other Rare Event chart of my creation had provisions
concerning a fight interrupting a game, I am forced to deduce that The Veet’s
Rare Event card deck was in use at the time. According to the writeup, Cleveland
pitcher Early Wynn “was given a warning for throwing too close to (George)
Sisler’s head. Wynn left the game, but in the seventh his replacement Mike Garcia
drilled Paul Blair in the shoulder. Blair charged the mound, both benches
emptied, and fifteen minutes later, Blair, Garcia, Nap Lajoie and Al Rosen were
tossed out of the game.”

Hit batters are handled in Extra Innings thusly: when a 2-1-1 comes up on the
first roll, the batter is hit if both he and the pitcher are right or left handed,
and there are less than two out (with two out, it doesn’t matter which side of the
plate you hit from). So, if both Wynn and Sisler are right handed, then Sisler
would be plunked if there was less than two out. But we know that Sisler is a lefty,
and it so happens that the situation above occurred with less than two out. In this
case there is no hit batter. In my imagination however, this goes down as a case of
chin music; the batter gets knocked down. This is not enough to ignite a fight. I’ll
eject a pitcher if he hits two batters in a game, but this also does not instigate a
fight. In order for there to be a fight, here’s what has to happen: First, a rare event
has to be triggered on the first roll; anything from 2-3-6 to 2-5-6. Next, the rare
event card that is drawn has to be the one that says “BENCH CLEARING BRAWL.” This
card reads, “Roll first roll again- if it is a hit batter, fight ensues.” So you can
see, a fight is contingent on a couple of things, triggered first by a rare event roll,
followed by a roll of 2-1-1, which has a 1 in 216 chance of happening. The amazing
thing about this rare event fight occurring way back then is that nearly forty years
have passed before it happened again!

In 2021 or 22, The Veet and I were playing a game in our Negro Leagues King of the
Hill tournament. We played by phone as he was in Atlanta while I am in California.
My other EI buddy Eddie Ballgame was present, flipping the rare event cards as they
came up, while providing sarcastic commentary on the game being played. In the top half
of the fifth inning in a game between the visiting Hilldale Daisies and the home
Atlantic City Bacharach Giants, Hilldale shortstop Jake Stevens was up with two out and
a runner on second and Atlantic City pitcher Red Grier on the hill, when the Bench
Clearing Brawl rare event card was drawn. The Veet put his phone on FaceTime and we
saw him roll a 2-1-1! Grier had hit Stevens!! The benches cleared, and we had a good old
fashioned donnybrook going on! These are the instructions on the rare event card that
explain what to do next:

Roll to determine each player’s possibility of ejection, including the bench…

We had to roll for each player! It was hilarious! Just the fact that after decades of use,
having a batter get hit by a pitch after drawing this particular card amazed us and we
just went into fits of laughter as we rolled for each player. By the way, the possibility
of ejection differs among pitchers, bench players, fielders, etc. In all, three Hilldales
and five Giants were sent to the showers.

Most recently, there were a couple of key games rolled in my Top 8 1990 league where the
rare event deck loomed large…

The final days of the regular season were as nail-biting as you can get, and in the second
game of a four game set to end the season, the top two teams were going at it in a slugfest
of a duel…The visiting A’s entered the game three back of the Mets, and they saw an early
3-1 lead disappear in the bottom of the third when the Mets put up a five spot to give them
a 6-3 lead. Each club put up a run after that, and with the score 7-4 in the top of the ninth,
the Mets had their closer John Franco on the mound, and he ran into trouble. Cutting to the
chase, with two out and one run in thanks to Rickey Henderson’s third homer of the game, the
A’s had two runners on base with switch hitting shortstop Walt Weiss at the plate. The first
roll triggered a rare event card, which read: “Homer or triple for any player not rated for
these hits.” It so happens that Weiss is rated for home runs, but not for triples, so he got the
rare event triple to tie the game at three, in a game that the A’s eventually won in extra
innings to put them two out with two to go! I’ve got plenty of stories like this that have
happened through the years. Since I do have a penchant for rambling incessantly, let’s stick
to this recently completed project in the interest of time…

There was a rare event card that triggered a rain delay in game two of the Top 8 1990
Championship series between the Mets and the Pirates. The rare event card came up in the top
of the fifth, and it called for a rain delay (rainouts have been forever banned from all my
leagues…) with the duration to be determined by a roll of all three dice. My roll resulted in
a one hour rain delay. The card further instructs that when play resumes, deduct one point
from pitcher’s effectiveness for each half-hour of delay. In this case, Pirates pitcher Neal
Heaton was reduced to -1 on the hits, and Mets starter David Cone went from -5 2 1 1 to -3 2 – 1.
For Heaton, the delay mattered little, as he went on to pitch six innings, allowing three earned
runs. For Cone, the effect was immediate. He gave up three singles and a walk and was removed
without recording an out in the bottom of the sixth. The Pirates wound up scoring five runs in
the inning, three of them belonging to Cone. The Pirates won 5-3 and would go on to lose the
series in five to the Mets. Now, I admit I have no recollection of whether any of those hits came
as a direct result of the reduction of effectiveness in Cone’s ERA adjustment. It could be that
one or more of the hits would have been an out if he continued to take away five lines on singles.
I just don’t recall.

At any rate, using The Veet’s rare event card deck adds the element of surprise, which can
sometimes have a say in the outcome of a game. And this, in my mind, takes the entertainment
value of Extra Innings up a notch over other tabletop baseball games.

November 30, 2024

"The Veet’s" EI Rare Event Deck, Part One

The fifth edition of Extra Innings reserves 12 numbers on the first roll chart for the gamer to use for Rare Events. EI uses three
dice of different color, mine are red-white-green, and when the dice are rolled, you read them in that order, giving you 216 possible
results. The twelve numbers that trigger a rare event are in the range 2-3-6 to 2-5-6. This means that anytime on the first roll that
the dice fall into that range, you would refer to the Rare Event chart. This is an optional rule, and if you so choose, you would
simply ignore a dice roll in this range, and move on to the second roll. Me? I like to use it.

But wait a minute! EI does not provide you with rare events. The game leaves it up to the gamer to decide what can happen. As
it says in the fifth edition rulebook, “We leave it to your choice whether you want to run the risk, for the sake of realism, of having
a power failure, torrential down pour or a player’s strike stop the game. Also, you might have other rare events you’d like to include.
If you want to stop the game for ten minutes to chase a stray dog off the field…or anything you find gives the game as you play it
added zest, you can introduce it in this range of First Roll numbers.” Well, after reading that, I went to work! Below is an early rare
event chart I typed up and still have in my EI chart binder, though it's one I no longer use. Note that I used eight of the twelve dice
rolls set aside for rare Events.

I used this chart for years. Then sometime in the mid-late 80’s, my good friend “The Veet” introduced something new for use in
an all-time franchise league we were in that was entering its fourth or fifth season. It was a small deck of thirty cards on which he had
written a different rare event on both sides of each one. At the top of each card he wrote either “Even” or “Odd.” The idea being that
if on the first roll you triggered a rare event, you would refer to the third die, and this would tell you how many cards to draw from
the deck. Depending on whether this number was odd or even, you would read the card that corresponded to this. On some cards,
both sides were either odd or even. If the third die was even, let’s say a 4, and you drew four cards from the deck and both sides of
the fourth card were “Odd,” you ignored the chance of a rare event, and moved along to the second roll. If the third die was even
and the top of the card said “Even,” you then read the rare event and applied it if the situation called for it.

When “The Veet” brought this idea up for discussion at one of our league meetings, I was against it. “Too many extra rolls to get a
final result!” I stammered. “Takes away from the rhythm of the game!” I continued. I used every excuse in the book. Then “The Veet”
said, “The situation in play more than likely won’t apply to what the card says. You’ll rarely use it. You’ll just move along to the next
roll!” So I gave that a little thought, then went through the deck. It had plenty of variety, much more than my original chart, and because
you draw a number of cards based on the number on the third die, the randomness of the whole thing made sense. Unlike the chart I
had created and had been using up to that time, where every first roll of 2-4-4 was a possible ground rule double, these would truly be
“rare” events. I adopted the rare event deck of cards and used that thing until it almost fell apart. In 2002, I created a word document
and transferred "The Veet’s" hand written card information in a way that duplicated both sides of the cards. I set it up to print both sides
on 4 x 6 index cards, and using a pair of scissors, cut them into the deck I use to this day. Well, just about. I’ll get to that in a minute. Anyway, on the home page of my website you can see one of these cards on a score sheet where the rare event came into play (right
handed pitcher homers…Nolan Ryan was in luck that day! Notice the star drawn next to HR on that score sheet. I put a star on every
play that came as a result of a rare event. I also put a star if a player made a nice play, such as an SD fielder taking away a base hit). As
I mentioned earlier, not everyone uses rare events. It’s an optional rule, and one that wasn’t discussed in any of the articles written by
the game’s designer Jack Kavanagh in various newsletters. Ironically, even "The Veet" stopped using it! What a rat! Just kidding!!

Hopefully I didn’t scare anyone off with how the rare event deck of cards works. Personally, I love the thing. It gives me just enough
added zest and to me injects those instances that happen that make baseball the greatest game on earth! You can bet I’ll continue to use
"The Veet’s" Rare Event card deck. Which brings me to what I brought up in the previous paragraph. Twenty two years is a long time to
use the deck of cards I printed in 2002. I have played EI all over the place. Indoors and out. In dry weather and in humid. I have played
with an ice cold brewskie in one hand, and the dice in the other. These cards have had it! Early this year I printed out a new deck,
changing a couple of "The Veet’s" original events to omit rainouts (I do not allow them in my universe…rain delays? Yeah. Rainouts? No).
I plan to use them in my next EI project. I’ll put the word file up in the downloads section if anyone is interested.

In part two, I’ll present some rare event occurrences that had an impact on games played.

Clockwise from bottom left: original hand written cards created by The Veet, ca 1985, printed version of card set first used in 2002, new set printed and ready to be cut.