[Westheim]

Playing out games is a considerable time investment, but it's so worth it on so many levels. Simming seasons at a fingers' click de-humanizes the players and reduces them to a set of more or less pretty numbers, regardless of the league, be it real MLB or fictional or whatever.

Everything becomes the same, nothing stands out. Oh that guy Stanton Martin won the MVP again. Okay. (sims next season, too) Nah.

Playing my fictional league day by day, which I have done for the last 4+ years (37 seasons now), I get an actual, living league rather than glorified spreadsheet animation (it's also the only league I play these days). That Stanton Martin guy, brutal rightfielder on the Crusaders, but always hurt, constantly hurt.

When my Raccoons go into a series with the Crusaders - six times a year - the first thing to check is whether Stanton Martin keeled over since being Player of the Week a fortnight ago, swatting .480 with five dingers, which is what he does for a living. Nestled in the cleanup slot between Martin Ortíz and B.J. Manfull, each of them a cleanup hitter in his own right (and this also gives the Crusaders a left-right-left middle of the order that is insanely hard to get through with mediocre pitching), he professionally kills pitching for a living. He didn't even get good until he was 26, just at the right time for the Crusaders to break out of a decades-long slumber. Oh, the times; around 2000, when both these teams were so bad and total dorks on either team spun no-hitters against the hapless opposition. Bob Joly, more of a nuisance than a pitcher, threw the one for the Raccoons. Bob Joly! Almost 15 years later, and I still can't fathom it. I guess there was a conjunction of six planets that day.

I can't even imagine what I'd do right now when simming. None of these would have mattered to me, simming it in late (actual) 2012. By now I'd be in the 2077 season of my 32nd league. Nothing matters. Bad result there? Oh well, sim another season. Sim until it gets good. But then, not even the good stuff matters.

Playing day by day, everything lives forever. I'm still revelling in picking Daniel Hall over Andres Ramirez with the #2 pick in the first ever amateur draft in my league. True, Ramirez is the all-time saves leader and went to the Hall of Fame, while Hall spent about as much time on a stretcher as on the field, but he was still Dan The Man, and while retired for 20 years now he's still one of my favorites and I've taken on his name for my Steam account, among other things.

Having played out every one of his agonizing injuries, Daniel Hall lives forever. The good stuff lives forever. Basically stealing Tetsu Osanai from the dumb Canadiens and having him start about 1,100 consecutive games before he broke apart, the odd and miraculous career path of 2-pitch wonder Scott Wade, or - Raccoons aside - the mind-boggling 1994 playoffs when sophomore Sonny Reece belted game-winning home runs for the Thunder in game 7 of both the CLCS and the World Series. Sonny Reece had a wonderful career, never was a Raccoon, but I still got to follow him amass almost 3,300 career hits and five World Series rings, a few of them even by destroying the Raccoons.

The good stuff lives forever - infamy lives forever, too. The stuff that makes you wish you could just shotgun that bozo off the mound, like when Juan Diaz threw three wild pitches in a single at-bat during the Raccoons' lowest lows. Trades that made sense at the time, but then resulted in gaining three games of outfielder Raúl Castillo in a deadline deal in '90 (before he shed a limb and spent the rest of his days on the DL) while sending future Hall of Fame starting pitcher Dennis Fried to the Blue Sox after just a cup of coffee in '89. Oh, '89, that agonizing World Series the Raccoons lost to the Wolves, when Glenn Johnston dropped Ed Parrell's soft fly in game 6, and the Wolves won in extra innings for the third time. The Raccoons needing to win to force game 163 against Stanton Martin's Crusaders in 2009, with Keith Ayers carrying the winning run, but being thrown out at home in the 14th inning, and the Racccons go on to lose in the 16th. "... and Keith Ayers was out at home" is a running gag for me now.

That's all the same league, which is the only one I've played for more than half a season since 2012. Even then I don't know everything, but I know enough to never hit that sim button ever again. In my opinion, less is more with this game. Play less, but actually play it, don't just whack the sim season button. It takes a time investment to build a meaningful amount of history, but the gains to be made are tremendous.