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The BaseballVFW Project
There aren't too many 56-year old grad students, but I happen to be one of them. I'm taking a course in the Digital Humanities, and my final project is going to be the Baseball VFW Project.
From World War I through Vietnam, Major League Baseball players left their chosen profession to serve their country. The Baseball VFW Project chronicles the lives of those players: the units they served in, their baseball careers, and what they did afterward.
The deliverable will be a prototype of a website with a searchable database, individual profiles, photo gallery, links to news stories, historical information regarding the players' units, and more.
Although the project will focus on veterans from all eras, in addition, there will be a "What If?" section, which will look at what many of us do with OotP Baseball, imagine what the game might have looked like had its stars not had to go off to WW II. I want to run a bunch of sims "pre-War to pre-expansion," which neatly fits into the career of Ted Williams. Maybe a few with the great eternal question of what if Williams and DiMaggio had played for the other team.
I'm consulting some of my statistics friends to understand best how to analyze the data, but if anyone wants to run their own and ship them to me (or contribute either data or ideas in any way), I wouldn't say no. Piling up data is rarely a bad idea.
Although I only have to turn in a prototype, this might be a project I actually take on for the long term. It seems worthwhile.
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