The Pennant Chase Newsletter

Can you believe we’re half way through 2024 already? TIME MOVES TOO FAST! PennantChase.com is now 16 ½ years old - that’s insane!

Tomorrow, I’m headed with my family on my first “real” vacation since the pandemic, so I wanted to get you an update on the latest website happenings before my trip. (As usual, I’ll be keeping tabs on the site, but I might be slower to respond to messages.)

Let’s get into the updates…

Official Japanese baseball stats are coming!

I’m in a stat-importing mood … after spending weeks getting all the Negro League data into the site, I moved onto Japan’s pro baseball leagues. As many of you know, we already offer a “Best of Japan” Auto League, but those stats were manually imported by a site user about 10 years ago, and were always imperfect.

The Japanese league stats are available from 1950 onward, and I should have them all in the database within a few weeks. I’m nearly done with the JPCL (Central League) and then I’ll be moving on to the JPPL (Pacific League).

These stats are not quite as easy to import as some of the other leagues. Especially fielding stats, which are only available on a player-by-player basis. Because of that, I need to import one player at a time. Fielding stats were not recorded until 2005, but for years before that I am still importing the positions people played at. (We’ll have to use a generic FLD% for the players before 2005 where no stats are available.)

Once the stats are in, the Japan Auto Leagues will be refreshed with the real stats and custom leagues will be able to use the stats in whatever creative way they desire.

I’m really excited to see Tuffy Rhodes and Cecil Fielder have their day in the sun.😀☀️⚾

More budget draft, Negro Leagues and Randoms

I just launched more of the popular new leagues (Fav Teams Budget, Black/MLB Baseball and added another Random Player football league). I will keep doing my best to get new ones out there as they fill up.

I have reduced the bot fills a bit, so this should help these leagues stay open and available for humans. I’m only going to check the Budget Draft leagues once a day and only if a couple spots remain. And I’m reducing the number of daily bot checks on all leagues for a bit.

I also noticed a Best of 1982 Baseball Auto League popped onto the Join Leagues list today - a rare chance to join a historic single-season league!

Check out the baseball, basketball or football Join Auto Leagues pages to jump in!

WNBA

After I finish the Japan stats, I probably need a bit of a break from importing, but my next goal is the WNBA, which has been requested by a few people. One of the minor issues here is that I need to modify the basketball engine to support games less than 48 minutes (which would also be cool for leagues that want to run a college game), but even if that takes some time, it would be fun to mix and match NBA and WNBA players.

Real-Stats Progression Leagues

Real-stats progression leagues are getting popular on PC for good reason - they are super fun, and it’s a blast drafting players who’s careers you already know about. But the site isn’t the best equipped to support it, so over the next couple months I’ve got a few enhancements planned.

I’d like to create an easier way for people to see a player’s career contribution, such as a career WAR total (or WS/AV in basketball/football). That would also allow users and the CPU to rank and draft players based on this rather than based on their rookie-season stats, which is highly problematic for the real-stats progression format.

I’d also like to implement an option to not retire players in gap years for leagues that don’t want to. And maybe some other tools to make it easier for commissioners to manage players in gap years (I’ll have to give this some thought).

Are you a custom-league commish looking to promote your league?

I’d like to use this newsletter to help custom leagues promote opening or interest in new ideas - reach out to me at [email protected] or via the website’s messaging system to let me know about a league you might want to support.

Thank you!

Thanks for signing up for this newsletter, and for continuing to be a supporter of the only free real-stats, multi-player sports sim game in the world! It would not be possible without your support!

Have a great weekend!