SimYard will define the Baseball Management Simulation genre

I’m calling SimYard a “baseball management simulator”, but it’s more like a “baseball owner /manager simulator”.  There are some elements of managing involved, like setting lineups, pitching rotations, and choosing the closers, but there’s also team management and ownership elements as well.

When you sign up and get a team, you own that team.  You can cut players from it, and if someone wants to play for you, you can add them to your roster.  You start with a 25-man roster, but you can have up to 40 men if you find more guys to join your team.  You choose which teams to play and when.  You can choose exactly which pitcher to start, and you can adjust your lineup before the game begins.

Once you get a stadium and join a league, your team will play 162 games per season, and each season is 26 days long.  If you do the math, that’s about 6-7 games per day, and they’re at least two hours apart.  It would be unrealistic to think that you could be present for each of them, but there’s a computer manager that takes care of the on-field decisions.  He decides when to pull a pitcher, who to pinch hit with, and when to intentionally walk a player.  When a player is trying to steal, it’s the player on the field that decides exactly which pitch he’s going to go on.  If you’re watching the game, you can also provide some instructions to the dugout, such as to pull a pitcher, or to put a certain player into the game.

You can see the current status of SimYard on the website, simyard.com, until the end of the month when the beta test starts.  SimYard plays a season every month, and it uses real year numbers.  So the site will start testing with the 1898 season.  I am hoping that there won’t be any need for a wipe of the data on the website, and this data will become the historical data for the game.  It will be a unique opportunity to make history, and I hope you’ll join us for it.