Larry MacdonaldHello, fellow Imagine Sports Owner.  I am glad you stopped for a moment to read because I know we have a lot in common:

  • We both love baseball.
  • We both like numbers.
  • We both like history.

It’s easy to love baseball.  You can love baseball in many more ways than you can love any other sport.  First of all, almost everyone grows up playing baseball.  There’s such satisfaction in swinging the bat, feeling it whack the ball and seeing the ball fly far away.  There’s a peace in putting on a glove and throwing a ball back and forth with a friend, brother, or Dad.  There’s a joy in being part of a team, and challenging for a league title.

People enjoy watching baseball.  The strategy of a hit and run.  The artistry of an agile shortstop.  The majesty of a long, long, LONG home run.  The power of a fastball at 100 mph at the batter’s knees.

Baseball books are the best.  There’s never been a Ball Four in any other sport.  No one has ever captured the days of the past like Lawrence Ritter in The Glory of Their Times.  The statistical revolution was so well captured by Moneyball.  Even the fictional If I Never Get Back combines baseball and time travel in an exceptional tale.  And then there are movies like Field of Dreams, Bull Durham, and The Natural.

Numbers are an important part of baseball.  Pouring over last night’s box scores, seeing if your favorite player got any hits, or how many strike-outs for your favorite pitcher, and then checking the league leaders and the standings… who doesn’t remember doing this?  Flipping over baseball cards and memorizing that George Brett hit .324 last year.  Then Rotisserie/fantasy baseball games started, bringing number crunching to a whole new level.

And then there’s history.  Whether or not you grew up interested in the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, or the Civil War, or not, you are fascinated by Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, and Jackie Robinson.  When I say Merkle’s Boner or Snodgrass’s Muff, you know I’m not talking pornography, especially if you’re a Giant’s fan.  I say Black Sox and you think Shoeless Joe.  I sat the pitch that killed and you think Ray Chapman.

I’m Larry Macdonald.  I played my first baseball simulation game with 1979 APBA cards – I drafted an all-star team against a family friend and we played a World Series.  I played in my first Strat-O-Matic league with the 1984 season.  I had a computer game on my Commodore-64.

So when the Internet happened, and baseball games started up…

I’m very good at math.  I was always a top student, won scholarships, won math contests, and I earned a Master’s Degree in Statistics.  I have spent my career with job titles with the word “Analyst” or “Statistician” in them until recently when they decided to call me a Manager and have other people follow my ideas, and now I get to build stuff using math – analytics, products, databases, that kind of stuff.

I discovered The 1982 Bill James Baseball Abstract when I was in high school.  I may have learned a lot in school about how to think and analyze numbers, but I got a boost from reading Bill James.  Don’t start with a database filled with numbers and combine them and see what you get; start with a problem and see what story the data says.  And then when you get results, write them up clearly and with a little entertainment.

I started competing in Internet baseball games with the predecessor of Imagine Sports, the now defunct Diamond Legends.  It used an earlier version of the same game engine that is in use here, and the Imagine Sports founder and management team (Dayne Myers, Charles Wolfson) got started over there as well.  I played a lot of teams, usually 6-8 at a time.  I wrote an article about the game.  I organized tournaments.  And then when Dayne started up with his game, I contributed some helpful ideas.

I was asked to come up with an owner rating system.  I did.  They said it was Larry Mac’s score, so they called it the Max Score.  On the Message Board, there’s a whole board called “Progression” and that was my idea, too – get a draft a team of players from the earliest days in baseball history, play a league, and then advance the period.  Some of your players retire on you, but a new crop of rookies and free agents are available for the next league and keep on going until you catch up to the present day.

In the early days, putting together combinations of players was fun.  Building teams with various themes and restrictions, using favorite players in different combinations, and competing against people who had completely different ideas about building teams (no bullpen, all defense, stars, and scrubs, etc.) was fun, not knowing how it would turn out until you played the games, and then after that, trying the concept for the combination myself with different players to see if it worked the same way.

I have slowed down playing.  I had tried all of the combinations I could think of.  I came back when the Single Season Game started because there are so many new things that you can try there.  I ran a tournament where 72 owners picked a season and played an all-star team with the players of that season against each other.  I’m now gathering owners to pick single season teams to do another tournament, and I’ll be running the 1948 Cleveland Indians.

A side benefit of playing started to become more important than playing itself.  There is a baseball community here.  You’re not playing a game in isolation, but against real people, who live all around the world.  You have conversations, debates, arguments, and laughs with people who become your friends.  Sometimes you never meet them, but I have met people in Toronto (where I live), and in Boston, and in Chicago, occasionally a few other places.  Hopefully, you learn something from them and become better people.  Because baseball is all about people, and dreams.

Can you watch Field of Dreams with dry eyes?  When Doc Graham crosses over the line to save Ray’s boy from choking and can’t come back, and then the bankers wonder where all these ballplayers came from, and then Ray had a catch with his Dad…  Well, that’s why baseball is the greatest game.  Maybe ten years ago, I watched Field of Dreams, and then that Christmas, I gave my Dad a baseball glove and a new baseball, and we went out to have a catch.  A few years after that, I invited him to come up to Cooperstown so we could walk around the Hall of Fame.  I asked him what he liked best about the place, and he said, “It gave me a chance to connect to the heroes of my youth.”  He was walking around and seeing the exhibits of Stan Musial and Ted Williams and Mickey Mantle, while I was seeing Mike Schmidt and Johnny Bench and Tom Seaver.

And with Imagine Sports, you can bring these dream teams to life.