There haven’t been too many questions asked of me yet, but I’ll try to head some off here:
Check out the Contact page here.
I just haven’t gotten there yet! I’m attempting to keep available a diverse array of seasons and teams for each of the games, but sometimes I simply make them as I get to them or as they strike my fancy. If you have a request, just email me!
“RPG” stands for “role-playing game”…think Dungeons and Dragons. A standard set of RPG dice contains seven dice: a d4, d6, d8, 2d10, d12, and d20. (The numbers represent how many sides each die has. The notation “2d10” means “two 10-sided dice.”) I like to use these because (1) they’re becoming more common among people who like games, and (2) they provide different statistical odds than a simple 2d6.
If you don’t have a set, no problem. There are plenty of apps you can download on your phone (many for free) that provide you with a virtual set. You can also just google “dice roller;” Google has its own good one. If you want a physical set, they’re available from your local game store, Amazon, or a number of other places.
Thank you! Drop me an email; I’ll fix it and send you a corrected copy.
That’s a great question, and one that’s been on my mind since I decided to use color in my card design. If you find yourself in this situation, email me. Just be sure to include your name, your order number, and which documents you’d like in black and white, and I’ll get them to you as quick as I can.
The idea behind this is if you’re from a city like Cleveland, you can click the attribute and will be directed to a list of all seasons from all sports where a team from Cleveland made the playoffs. I’m basing this on the theory that, like me, most people will want to play seasons that saw their favorite teams challenge for a championship.
Of course, that does cause issues for cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. On second thought, it causes issues for *only* those cities. So when both teams from a city make the playoffs, you’ll see it listed as “Los Angeles (2).”
I try to give as much credit as I can on the final page of each game’s instructions, and I’ve created a sources/footnotes page here. But I definitely want to mention my main sources:
– The various sites associated with Sports Reference are absolutely priceless and remind me of the days so many years ago when I’d comb through Total Baseball for hours.
– Team colors typically come from TruColor, which has gone by several names in the past.
– I get design ideas based on logos from Chris Creamer’s SportsLogos.net, which belongs in the Internet Hall of Fame, were such a thing to exist.
– And, honestly, Wikipedia answers so many basic questions for me (like playoff formats, team locations, etc).
I’m still trying to answer this myself. The Shaughnessy playoff system (ranking the top 4/8/etc teams and pitting them in a knockout tournament) rose to prominence in the ’20s and ’30s, and based on one quote I found, was set up that way to make it more likely that the championship matchup was 1-2. The best I can figure is that the 1-3/2-4 setup made it (in theory) more difficult for a 3 seed to advance and easier for a 2 seed to advance. That’s all I can come with, though.
I wanted something specific to where I live, but all the obvious names were taken. I finally settled on Short Season in honor of the NY-Penn League, a short-season A-level minor league (which featured a number of teams in Upstate NY communities) that was around for about 80 years before MLB decided to blow it up.
Plus, the goal of most of these games is to represent a sports season…but shorter. So it just made sense.
