APBA 2K9 Project

Victor Martinez will be playing for the Boston Red Sox.

So recently, I have received the 2009, 2010 & 2011 APBA Baseball Seasons from my "Uncle Bob" Breher, which was very generous of him. I had no idea at first what to do with them for projects, I read his note, saying that some cards may be missing (It didn't appear so) and I didn't want to pick just one of those to do a season replay. Also, I had already played the 2007 & 2008 seasons in keeper's league (full season) plays...

So it dawned on me...

What if I did a project combining the three seasons, and it will be the best players' cards from one of those three seasons to represent the team they spent the most time with?

There was some tough decisions on players such as Adam LaRoche and Victor Martinez who spent time with three different teams during those stretches, so sometimes I had to sit those players to the side and afterwards see what team they fit on. I really wanted to do my best for a leveled playing field, of course some teams will be clearly better in the Philadelphia Phillies and New York Yankees, compared to the Pittsburgh Pirates, Baltimore Orioles and San Diego Padres.

Going through these cards were a blast when sorting them, the process took a good solid week to place players on rosters. At first I had to put players in alphabetical stacks, then put them in alphabetical order, and then pick out of those players' three cards, with help from Baseball Reference to help decide what team some of those players should play for.

There was some tough decisions, there was situations to keep balance; For example, I thought it would be great to add Javier Vazquez (B-XYZ, I believe) to the Atlanta Braves' rotation of Tim Hudson (B-YZ), Jair Jurrjens (A-Y) & Tommy Hanson (B-YZ)... but since they already had an outstanding bullpen of Peter Moylan (A*-YW), Jonny Venters (A&C*-XYW), Eric O'Flaherty (A&C*-XZ), Craig Kimbrel (A&C*-KXYW) & Billy Wagner (A*C-KX) -- Meanwhile, Florida was pretty short on starting pitching and Javier would balance things out, although his Marlins' APBA card is only a C-YZ.

Although, I would love to have Victor Martinez on the Detroit Tigers, I did not want to make it out to be a homer pick by being biased, so he ended up with Boston. This allowed Texas to have Jarrod Saltalamacchia, instead of Boston.

There was statistical situations as well, I really wanted to have Jose Bautista's 2010 Season (.260, 54 HR & 124 RBI) represent Bautista for Toronto, instead of his 2011 season (.302, 43 HR & 103 RBI) that I went with -- basically because of the .260 batting average which is more accurate to Bautista's career norms, but I did not go that way, because I looked at all the other Blue Jays and many of their starters' batting averages (with the exception of Adam Lind) ranged only from .255 to .286, so I felt another .300 hitter would help them battle better against clearer favorites such as the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees.

I also did this with players like Gordon Beckham; Beckham's 2009 rookie season (.808 OPS) stands alone as his best season of his career, I went with his 2010 season, due to the fact that his 2010 season is more like his career numbers and the fact is that he played second base mostly with the White Sox -- he played third, his rookie year. He never hit over .700 OPS for a season, since his rookie year as well.

Boston also won out on Jason Bay (.267, 36 HR & 119 RBI), even though he played the majority of this period with the Mets (two years), but the Mets had plenty of interesting bats, and let's face it Bay's Mets cards sucked. Boston got Victor and Bay largely due to their starting pitching being average-to-good at best, with two B starters in Josh Beckett and Jon Lester; The Red Sox also won John Lackey (from possibly pitching for Cardinals), but Cards had much more depth and better starting pitching.

It is cool to see the blasts of the pasts return in Manny Ramirez, Vernon Wells, Lance Berkman, Vladimir Guerrero & even Carlos Delgado & Gary Sheffield for the Mets (although those two are more limited) while seeing Joe Mauer and Ichiro Suzuki being hitting machines again.

Oh, and Tim Lincecum (A-XY) is dominant again... while other guys were just starting out and have yet to have big cards in Anthony Rizzo, Paul Goldschmidt and Carlos Gomez.

This will be played whenever I am not doing one of my tournaments & just killing time, it will definitely take a few years to say the least. I am using the 2016 MLB Schedule, and for another twist I will have the Houston Astros stay in the A.L. West.