Opening Post
[Posted by Ted H]
I love baseball.
I have thousands of baseball cards. I've followed baseball since 1995. You'd be hard pressed to find a picture of me as a kid without a Yankees shirt or a baseball hat on. I have dozens of autographs in a little book from the years of minor league games my dad would bring me to. Minor League Baseball isn't much, until you look back and find out you got the autographs of Roy Hallday and Alfonso Soriano.
Anyway, in 2000, Wizards of the Coast came out with MLB Showdown. A baseball card game played with a 20 sided die. I was hooked day one. My dad and I would play night after night and I'd accumulate the collection and craft my ideal lineups, even making new teams to test out different strategies. This game became crack cocaine for a baseball card addict like myself.
The game would update with new sets for 5 years before it was discontinued. Over the years I'd revisit my teams and collections but the real world became more prevalent and the cards fell by the wayside. Then one day a Showdown facebook group I was in started going on about a site called Showdown Bot. There, you can create a Showdown card for any player in history. Ever. Even if they had just one plate appearance, it can generate a card for him.
Sure, previous official sets would have one off cards for baseball greats like Willie Stargell or Harmon Killebrew, or a "super season" for Tom Glavine in the 90s, but now every player who ever played baseball is game. And while people have their own custom cards, showdown bot has an algorithm that isn't just gonna hand Mike Trout ungodly numbers just because of his name. Sure, there will be the occasional card generated like Shane Spencer 1998, who only played 1 month and hit a bunch of homers, so it gives him insane numbers, but there's fun in that.
After I lost an entire day of my life recreating the 1998 Yankees in Showdown form, I decided to create this blog so I may chronicle my obsessive insanity. Stay tuned for more.
Credit goes where it's due:
Matt Gula, creator of Showdown Bot
Wizards of the Coast
All I post here is in good fun and not for profit, don't print or otherwise try to monetize the cards.
