Hello! I’m Bob Jecmen. I am 68 and have been semi retired for 17 years. I say semi retired, because after retiring from Intel Corp in 2000, I spent 15 years serving on 6 different boards of directors of various startup tech companies. I even was chairman of the board of one which failed to survive. It was a fuel cell company trying to provide an alternative to batteries in laptops and cars. Never made it in laptops, but we are seeing some fuel cells in autos now ( Honda Clarity).  I spent 24 years at Intel and worked my way upon to VP of Technology and Manufacturing where I ran a 24/7 cleanroom in Santa Clara CA where we developed new chip mfg processes and ramped them into production before transferring the processes to larger mfg plants around the world. I moved to a business VP position in my last 3 years at Intel where I was GM of their mobile products group mostly developing new chip products and technologies for the laptop PC business. I believe they were grooming me for higher management by rounding out my experience with business management on top of my 20 + years of technology and mfg, but after 25 years of 60 hour workweeks, I decided to slow down and go smell the roses, enjoy my family ( two children both married this last summer, and my Japanese artist wife of 40+ years), and play a little sim baseball.

I was born and raised in the Chicago metro area and went to the U of Illinois for my BS in Materials Science engineering and then went to UC Berkeley for a Masters.  My 20 years in the Chicago area formed a strong love of baseball and I became a lifelong fan of the Cubs. My father was a Cub fan and took me to numerous games in Wrigley where I followed Ernie Banks in my youth and the long suffering losing years until the miracle of 2016. He would tell me stories of seeing Babe Ruth play against the Cubs in the World Series and Gabby Hartnetts walk off homer in the “gloamin.” I now reside in Alamo California, about 30 miles east of San Francisco.

I started playing Strat- O- Matic with dice and cards in the mid sixties with school friends. I think the 1964 season was the first one we played. We would love the drafts of our super teams and also loved creating stats for our players. Its was before calculators, so I remember doing long division by hand to calc ERAs and batting averages.  Before my teams became the Parallel Universe in DMO, my Strat-O-Matic teams were called the Indianapolis Immortals.  I believe I started playing on line SIM baseball about 20 years ago starting with the STATS version of DMO and then playing the ESPN version as well. I won the final two grand open tournaments at ESPN, run by John Cox before they shut down, but I have never been able to repeat that at IS in 10 attempts now. I met Dayne during those STATS/ ESPN days and we discussed his startup of Simnasium/ Imagine Sports. I gave him whatever business and general baseball advice I had to help get it off the ground.

I love sports, but baseball has always been my favorite. I loved reading about the history of baseball. I remember my dad giving me a book titled “The History of Baseball” which has stats and stories about the all time greats. I memorized many of the stats like Cobb hitting .420 one year and how Ted Williams finished his .406 season by playing the final day double header and going 5 for 7 raising his average from .3996 to .406. The book was published in 1956, so the stats and stories stopped there, but I was hooked. I also was a math wiz getting perfect scores on the math SATs and ACTs and straight A’s in every math class I ever took through advanced calculus and differential equations. SIM baseball was the perfect marriage for my passions. Even in high School, I was calculating the probabilities of getting a dice roll of 7 vs a roll of 4 and why that made Willlie McCoveys Start card HRs on 1-6, 1-7 and 1-8 better than Mays 3-4, 3-5, and 3-6. I would create new accurate Strat cards from MLB data for missing players. I remember making the Tommy Helms card when he hit .383 because it wasn’t in the Strat set. I also love the interaction with other baseball fanatics. We are a community.

DMO is the best SIM baseball game I have ever played and I played most of them on line or as table games.  I still remember spinning the dial on All Star Baseball. and hoping for that 1 which represented a HR. But there is nothing like DMO for the detail, the accuracy the constant improvements, the flexibility of team and league creation and management, and the rich statistical database. The message boards and community add to my enjoyment.

I love the challenge and love to compete. I also continuously learn things about the history of baseball and the players either through my research for a new team or from other baseball experts on the MBs.  I also like to win.

As of today I am 19909 – 15421 for a 56.4 winning % and rank #4 in overall MaxScore. I believe my first team was at Stats. John Cox had an owner ranking system and the #1 ranked owner was a fellow named Ryan Innis. I ended up in a league with him and he was very helpful answering my questions and giving me advice. I ended up winning 95 games, best in the league topping even Ryan, but lost in the playoffs.  I seem to remember I went through my first 17 playoff teams before finally winning a World Series.