Some fun rule explanations to touch on in a great Statis-pro baseball game tonight in the new look Mariners 5-4 win over the Blue Jays, who then beat the Rays 4-1.
We have been looking forward to the debut of Seattle with their acquisitions (noted on new team sheets with team the player came from) because we are playing "what if" rules this year where we keep playing injured players in the game.
That means Seattle has Julio Rodriguez still leading off AND behind him is the former Tampa Bay playoff hero Randy Arozarena, then former Dodgers and this year Blue Jay Justin Turner, and we can put speed at the end of the lineup in the former Nats centerfielder Victor Robles (who is really batting first with Rodriguez injured.
Fun lineup, and while the Blue Jays are weak over all this year, their top 3 are still fun as well in Bo Bichette (who homered), George Springer then Vlad Guerrero JR.
The second fun thing about the game is we used the fun 400+ z-play chart we recently posted and added to the rules which makes for a lot of fun in explaining quarks of the rules of baseball BUT you can use the more simple chart of normal plays or with dice not use z-plays.
We had two come up in our game. One was a normal type play where Mariners Cal Raleigh hit a foul near the stands and a new number was drawn to see if 1st baseman Spencer Horwitz could reach into the stands with no help from the Mariners fans and catch it, which he could not. With new life Raleigh singled.
The other play was more in the crazy category when Vlad popped out to short and his hat broke and cork flew out leading to suspension lol. Now that would be international news if it really happened, but playing with my 8byear old it leads to a "what's cork" and my mention that once it was discovered one of Babe Ruth's old bats was corked.
Now if you are a purist you might just say Vlad pulled up hurt and had to sit out the rest of the game. But the point is these z-plays occasionally remove players to use other player cards. I would never really sub Dan Vogelbach for Vlad - he is in red on the sheet because I didn't really see him in the roster but it's the last team I had him in - so it was fun to get him in for a few at bats.
Then there was the fact that this was one of the cleanup games where I played the second game of a 2-game series after the other one was months ago, so had to track which players had to rear.
The mariners top 2 relievers were used to wrap up the earlier win - so my best option to hold a 4-2 lead was to try to get 3 innings out of a on 2-7 Bryan Woo. He got the first 8 outs, but one out away from the save Davis Schneider took him deep to tie the game 4-4.
I did decide to let the Blue Jays ace Jordan Romero pitch the 9th after a 1-2-3 8th even though the max innings of 2 really means he can pitch part of one inning then the next one.
Whether that was fair or not, Mitch Garver blasted a homer off him to lead off the 9th and end the game with a 5-4 Seattle win.
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