The Blue Jays middling season make me think about running a middling franchise and what that experience must be like.
I'm not especially good at it. My other idea was to write a storyline around a fan and do a whole dynasty based on the fan perspective watching stuff play out and swearing when I see stuff happen that doesn't make sense to me or to have to follow a team and see them make dizzying decisions or just get really close to a title and miss out.
But I'm not sure I could keep that ruse going long enough to sustain an entirely storyline.
Here's the start of what I wrote over the weekend, but I haven't gotten any further. Mostly saving it here so I don't lose it entirely in a saved file somewhere. I'll revisit eventually, maybe.
I've been thinking about the ways I engage with teams even when I play in fantasy sports leagues. The way I play OOTP is a bit more active since I orchestrate moves, but it's not like you can control what happens, only influence it. I find this distance sort of interesting.
In playing with one of my fictional cities today, I was thinking about neighborhoods and how I don't typically spend a lot of time focusing on neighborhoods or even the more mundane workings of the city because it's hard to account for a lot of it. Still, I'm interested in a working story around a fan who lives in a city and keeps a diary of his life living in the city.
The types of things that interest me are what sorts of bus lines he takes to work or what subway lines he takes. Where he lives, where he eventually moves to and also, how he feels about his favorite team over time based on the decisions they make. If it works, it'll be because I'm able to get out of the binary of just posting stat dumps or telling you mundane facts about the city and what I did to "create it" but focusing on these simulations as abstractions of real-life experiences.
The challenge I face now is deciding what city I'm going to build this storyline around. I'm going to prefer to use a league and a city that I've already built because the tedium of building everything or adding on is where I tend to get lost and while it can be fun, it doesn't allow me to really tell an immersive story of what's happening on the ground.
Quote:
I'm a huge history buff, so when I discovered the treasure trove that is baseball. With a 36-team league, dozens of teams that have come and gone, thousands of players who had interesting careers and more, I decided after I finished graduate school (finally) that I'd become a baseball fan.
You're probably wondering who I am? My name is Duncan Clarke. My parents moved me to Heart River, on the edge of New Helsinki when I was a kid. I didn't care much about baseball in those days, mostly because we were too far from the stadium for it to matter much. There's still no rapid transit link from Heart River to downtown, just a slow ass bus.
There isn't a team anywhere near where I grew up, so I have to pick a team from the 36 dotted all over the place. I didn't just want to pick a team as a fan, I wanted to get immersed. I wanted to know the history, understand who the past players were and be able to win bar trivia all about the factoids of my favorite team and maybe even the whole league.
It's been difficult to pick a team, because none of them are especially close to where we live.
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That's as far as I got so far. I also can't help but intervene at times, so keeping myself honest and just writing about what I see might be the biggest exercise in doing something like this, especially since that's a challenge I have with topics even outside of fake baseball. Sitting down and telling a story, exploring the details, talking about the process in a step-by-step way.
So if I do, it'll mostly be an exercise in improving my storytelling skills and to come up with a structure and format for doing so. There are SO many good stories in this league not just now, but across history and since I've witnessed all of it, I have a lot of context for older stories, for the really really old players and how they performed in the past, etc., as well as more modern guys.