PureSim Baseball 3 Smacks a Hard Double to the Gap
July 31, 2010 by Mike Lynch · Leave a Comment
I was recently contacted by the folks at Wolverine Studios
and asked if I wanted to take a look at PureSim Baseball 3
, the latest version of the PureSim Baseball franchise. I’ve been playing baseball simulations since 1985 when I stumbled across MicroLeague Baseball in my Street & Smith’s
season preview magazine, so I was anxious to see how PureSim compares to the others.
When I launched the game, I immediately went into “Sandbox” mode, which may have been a mistake, not because of anything PureSim did but because it took me forever and a day to set up my league. But most of that was my fault; whenever you create a custom league that requires importation of close to 50 teams from baseball’s past and present, delays can and should be expected.
I appreciated the interface, which isn’t the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen, but does a very good job of walking you through the steps it takes to set up a league, or “association” as PureSim calls it. You can play “PureSim Classic”; “PureSim Classic – Quick Start,” which gives multiple options for league structure (for example, 2 leagues, 30 teams, 6 divisions like MLB); “Real Major League Players – Career Mode,” which allows you to start in any season from 1900-2009 and progress from there (there’s also an option called “TRU-Life Transactions” that will make transactions exactly as they were made so you won’t have to; seasons from 1946-2009 are supported); and there’s the previously mentioned “Sandbox Mode.” Regardless of which mode you choose, you also have the option to use “Finances/Salaries/Free Agency,” “era appropriate player salaries” and a ratings scale that gives six different options, starting at 1-5 and ending with 1-100.
Once you’ve decided which mode and options you want, the game takes you through the steps needed to build your association. There are options for finances (if you have them on) and rosters and rules (DH or no DH, for example), and you can input your own team nicknames or allow the AI to randomly select them for you. If you’re in Sandbox mode and chose to start from scratch as I did, you’ll soon realize that you can’t start playing ball without any players, and that’s where the import function comes in. Again, the interface is plain and simple and extremely easy to navigate, and it includes the Lahman Database already built in, which makes importing even easier.
You can import individual players at a time, which would be incredibly time-consuming but gives the most control over your association; you can import a whole team with the option of choosing only certain players from each team (for example, you can import the entire roster of the 2009 Yankees or just Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez and Jorge Posada if you prefer); or you can import every team from an entire season, the quickest way to do it, but with the least amount of control. You can also choose whether or not to import those players into one large free agent pool or onto a team’s roster. For a fantasy draft, the pool is obviously the way to go. If you want to build a league of specific All-Time great teams, however, then you’ll want to import your players onto the appropriate roster (the 1912 Red Sox, for example, would be imported onto “Boston’s” roster).
The importing can be time-consuming, as I already mentioned, but that’s just the nature of the beast. And if you don’t have enough real players to fill out the rosters, PureSim will give you the option of allowing fictional players to be created to fill the void. I’m not really into the fictional aspects of the game, but those guys can come in handy if you’re tired of importing and need to fill rosters slots. In fact, you can opt to have the AI (artificial intelligence) create “scrubs” whose sole purpose is to ride the pine. Once you have enough players, your fantasy draft will begin (assuming you chose to import into the free agent pool). I picked a team before the draft as my own, then allowed PureSim’s AI to draft all the players. Again, it was time-consuming, but I enjoyed watching the first few rounds to see who would get picked and when. On the other hand, I wasn’t thrilled when the AI chose southpaw starter Jimmy Key for my team, only to see guys like Mickey Mantle, Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio get taken later. But I digress.
Once the draft is over and Spring Training has been run, you can go in and fiddle with your roster, set your lineups vs. left and right, set your rotation and assign relievers. The zoom feature comes in handy when you want to take a look at your players’ stats and ratings without opening their card, but for a more comprehensive view, opening their card is best. There you’ll find bio information, stats, and ratings for Contact, Power, Eye, Potential, Range, Arm, Hands and Speed. There are also tabs on the page that have all kinds of goodies, like stat splits and game logs. And, of course, you can adjust your AI Manager’s tendencies so he’ll call the shots the way you want them called.
As far as game play goes, the interface really isn’t much different than any other simulation game I’ve played. The layout is nice as is the background photo, which can be changed to your liking, but the graphics aren’t great, the audio is kind of blah, and after a while I found myself bored to tears reading descriptions of each play. But that’s not PureSim’s fault, all text-based sims are like that. When I want great graphics and sound, I pull out my Xbox 360. But games like PureSim do a much better job with statistical accuracy and that’s what I’m into.
Speaking of statistical accuracy, let’s take a look at how PureSim did, but rather than stay in Sandbox Mode, I’m going to shift into my second replay in which I used Real Major League Players – Career Mode, starting in 1920. As a baseball historian, the years from 1900-1930 are my favorites and 1920 featured one of the best pennant races in history and boasted a behemoth named George Herman “Babe” Ruth who pounded out 54 home runs, an obscene total for the time. Rather than get involved, I allowed PureSim to set everything up and play all of the games in Unattended Auto Play mode, which took a few hours. When it was done, I was happy to see some of the results, but dismayed by a handful of others.
First of all, the Cleveland Indians won the World Series, defeating the St. Louis Cardinals in five games. Cleveland actually did win the 1920 championship, although in a best-of-nine Series, so I was happy about that. They defeated the Brooklyn Robins (Dodgers), however, who finished two games behind St. Louis in the simulation. Meanwhile, the Cards won 14 more games in the sim than in real life, but sometimes those things happen in a one-time simulation. It’s just as likely that they’d play closer to expectations if I ran it again. For the most part, the rest of the teams performed as expected.
The league statistics were also impressively accurate. Batting average in the American League was off by only four points, triples were off by three and doubles missed by only one. The rest of the numbers were similarly close.
As far as individual accomplishments go, PureSim nailed some of them and fell short on others. Eight of the 10 top hitters in the A.L. were also among the top 10 in PureSim, with George Sisler leading the way at .399 (he actually hit .407, which is pretty damn close). Babe Ruth led in slugging and OPS, although with lower numbers than he should have had (I’ll get to that in a minute); and the players who led the league in hits, total bases, doubles, triples, home runs, walks and strikeouts in real life also led in those categories in PureSim, many of them accurately so.
My main beef with the hitting stats from 1920 is that Ruth belted “only” 24 homers in a year when he actually belted 54. Considering the accuracy of the remaining players on the HR list, I’m not sure what to make of that. Sure it can be chalked up to just one of those aberrations that happens during a simulation, but he hit only 25 in the 1921 sim in a year when he actually blasted 59, so I have to wonder if something might need to be tweaked. The other major discrepancy was with Sam Rice who stole only 28 bases in the sim in a year in which he led the A.L. with 63. I thought maybe he didn’t reach base as often but he actually reached base at an even better clip in PureSim than in real life, so I’m not sure what happened there either, other than to say perhaps the Senators’ AI manager’s stolen base setting wasn’t high enough.
The pitching stats weren’t bad and most of the lists matched up well except appearances, which were way out of whack for the era. In 1920 Cleveland’s Jim Bagby led the league with 48 appearances, but in the simulation Boston’s Allen Russell paced the league with 70 appearances even though he made only 16 during the actual season due to a brain aneurysm he suffered while pitching to the Yankees . Of course PureSim has no idea that Russell missed most of the season because the TRU-Life transactions don’t go back that far. I’ll have to double check to see how I had the pitching set up because all but two of the top 10 had more appearances than Bagby did in real life and the list looked more like something you’d see today than in 1920.
PureSim includes a handful of typical reports that are clean and easy to read and also features a short list of Sabermetric style reports that are interesting to look at, such as “Stolen Base Runs” and “Power Index.” There’s also a nice feature that allows you to create a set of reports for each season that can be found in the Almanac section. The almanac also compiles stats and creates a league history so you can see what teams and players have done over time. Again, the reports aren’t the prettiest I’ve ever seen, but they do the job they’re intended for and they’re easy to navigate.
Another fun feature, to a certain extent, is the export feature, which allows you to create a spreadsheet and/or HTML reports of statistics and ratings. The spreadsheet is great, mostly for the sort function. It’s fun to see which players rank the highest/lowest in the different ratings—most power, worst hands, best control, etc.—but the HTML reports are unsightly at best and ugly at worst.
I’m not sure why the same format wasn’t used for the exported HTML pages as was used for the almanac’s HTML reports, which are much nicer looking. In fact, I’d be reluctant to run an on-line league with PureSim based on the exported HTML reports alone. Granted, anyone with minimal knowledge of HTML can go in and edit the parameters to add some color and sharpen up the reports, but who wants to spend the extra time on that when other simulation programs do such a fantastic job with their reports?
PureSim 3 is easy to use, fun to play, relatively accurate and has enough options to keep things interesting, whether you’re into historical replays, fictional universes or a combination of both. It’s not so complex and convoluted that you feel like you’re wading through a sea of choices and getting bogged down before you even begin, but it’ll need more bells and whistles and a better HTML export before I give it more than a double.
Let’s call PureSim 3 a hard shot to the gap for a stand-up two-bagger with the potential to be a triple or circuit blast in future editions.
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Disclaimer: I was provided with a free copy of the computer program being reviewed, but received no payment or other consideration for this review.
