Breaking Blue: Toronto Blue Jays Blog is live

[TwistedLogic]

Now what about 60 total active people?

[TwistedLogic]

By active I mean they actually have time to log in multiple times a day, not just people who log in once a week to check what's new.

[Angrioter]

I played Milly's Math-house on the first iMac when I was 2, everyday. I could use the computer better than my parents, and by the time I was in Kindergarden I was already past a Grade 3 math level. As far as becoming a saberist, I started on the old Jays forum and learned from everyone, finally venturing to FanGraphs and Tom Tango's blog. It's only been a year and a half since I learned what FIP was.

 

Do you like the derivatives, integrals and differential equations?

 

I love it!

[Angrioter]

Yes, I've finished my undergrad calculus.

 

Will you study engineering?

[Angrioter]

I'm currently in my 3rd year of it.

 

Chemical, Civil, electrical or systems?

[TwistedLogic]

There seems to be "First Time Poster" threads everyday. And this place is a lot more active now than it was during August/September, which is odd.

 

Well then I've got an idea that'll give us all something fun to do and raise activity on the forum. It requires at least 30+ active posters to join though.

[admin]

There seems to be "First Time Poster" threads everyday. And this place is a lot more active now than it was during August/September, which is odd.

 

Because there was an error in the board and new people couldn't sign up lol.

[GD]

Well then I've got an idea that'll give us all something fun to do and raise activity on the forum. It requires at least 30+ active posters to join though.

 

Mind sharing?

[Angrioter]

Because there was an error in the board and new people couldn't sign up lol.

 

Hitler would never allow a failure of this magnitude, He would send you to the gallows.

[Angrioter]

Civil

 

Electrical-power engineer and measurements.

[TwistedLogic]

Mind sharing?

 

A Mock Offseason.

 

Basically what you do is you get a few posters that would be the commissioners of the league (2 or 3 commissioners, including me). Then you make a sign up thread and have posters post the name of their first, second and third priority teams. On a first come, first serve basis, you assign one team to each player. That player is free to hire one co-general manager that has the exact same amount of power as he does, and one assistant. It really helps for each player to have at least one co-GM, just because two players managing a team is a lot more efficient based on how often they can log in (but of course, you'd need more than 30 original players then).

 

From there, once each team has 1-3 players assigned as General Managers and AGM, they basically can trade players among each other, and sign free agents, etc. The commissioners decide the rules, and act as the free agents (I'm Robinson Cano and you have to make your offer to me), etc. By the end of the Mock (a fixed date, let's say January 30 as completely hyopthetical), when each team is done trading and signing free agents, you have a voting tournament in the main forum to see what team won the "Mock Offseason World Series".

 

I've done a piss-poor job of explaining this very quickly, but you can sort of catch the drift. It is incredibly fun, and the other forum I was on before this one, where mocks like this were played, they were extremely popular with the posters. It would increase activity a lot because people would log in to the forum to manage their mock and it would give us all something to do in our own form of an offseason while our teams run the real thing.

 

As I said, you would need active players, players that volunteer to be commissioners, and you would probably need the cooperation of the administrator, to give us a place to play the game (could be done in the offtopic forum, but a separate forum dedicated to mocks/other games helps a ton because then you can give limited moderator powers to the commissioners in just that one forum).

[GD]

A Mock Offseason.

 

Ooh I like this idea. It's usually pretty fun.

[TwistedLogic]

A complete hypothetical scenario:

 

Commissioners: King, GordieDougie, TwistedLogic

 

New York Yankees: Angrioter, Co-GM: BTS

Boston Red Sox: JFaS

Tampa Bay Rays: admin

Toronto Blue Jays: King, Co-GM: TwistedLogic, Assistant: Gsnarls

Balitmore Orioles: GordieDougie

etc...

 

Teams can have Co-GMs, assistants, or they can run solo. An assistant can't do anything without permission of one of the GMs, but co-GMs have equal powers. Commissioners can run teams, but they can't abuse their powers for their own team. For example, in this case, if me and King want to send in a trade, we can't approve it ourselves, Gordie would have to approve the trade. Trades must go through approvals in an effort to negate trade-rapes or cheating by means of putting all assets from two teams into one super-team.

 

Teams can also petition to the commissioners for raises in salary.

 

You use real-life rosters, real-life salary figures, real life prospects.

 

It's a lot of work (and a LOT of stress for commissioners) but it is really worthwhile and once you get the hang of it, running 1 or 2 games like this a year becomes really fun and gives the entire forum community something to do together.

[TwistedLogic]

I would need people to tell me if they're interested though. I might make a thread to gauge interest. How many of you would be down to play? And would anyone want to be a commissioner?

[Abomination]

I would need people to tell me if they're interested though. I might make a thread to gauge interest. How many of you would be down to play? And would anyone want to be a commissioner?

 

I'm not really interested in this, but you can find out how many are online at http://www.bluejaysmessageboard.com/online.php . As of writing, there were 109 people currently online (which is pretty awesome), and our peak from earlier in the year had 377.

[TwistedLogic]

The problem with those numbers is that the total number of people online is usually inaccurate, as anywhere from 70-90% of them can be offline guests, which include people that are away from keyboard, people who are viewing a specific thread for news, or even search engine bots.

[TwistedLogic]

North would you be interested in being an actual commissioner? We could definitely think about the agents thing, but I think on the first go of this game, since it would be a lot of water-treading, as many players that can jump onto an actual team, whether through being co-GMs or assistants, the better.

[admin]

Too be honest, you're going to have an extremely hard time getting 30 people to remain interested in this for more than a week. Too many will probably lose interest rather quick.

That being said there are well over 30 active members as North pointed out. As offseason gets going activiity will increase more and more.

That being said, let's not post this in this thread. Start a new one if you want to discuss it and see who is interested.

[TwistedLogic]

If there are multiple commissioners, then I may be interested. I suppose the agents idea is just another way of saying there should be a lot of commissioners, each with specific tasks.

 

Is each team going to be given a budget? I suppose that would make sense, not everyone should be able to spend like the Dodgers lol.

 

Yeah I made a thread for it, let's talk about it there. Would be good to start getting some posts in the thread and begin brainstorming a little bit. Would love to get some ideas.

 

And yeah I can see why people might think it'll drop in activity, but as I said, I've had experience playing these games before and not only does activity not usually drop off, you get more people that want to join in because they see that it's actually really fun, so you usually start a thread that serves as a waiting list to place new players that missed out on the signups or were previously not interested.

[Angrioter]

There are definitely enough posters to support this. The forum has been around for ~200 days, and in that time we have 31 posters with 1000+ posts (over five per day each) and 70 posters with 400+ posts (over two per day each).

 

I may be interested, and have another idea (may or may not be a good one): introduce agents. Divvy up all free agents among 10 or so posters (perhaps randomly, or in groups by real agency [i.e., someone gets to be Scott Boras]). This could add an extra element of intrigue and take some weight off the commissioner.

 

Undoubtedly Boxy should be Dayton Moore.

[admin]

Story time. I hope jfas doesn't mind me telling it.

It may just be a huge coincidence, but here goes.

I've been really excited for jfas with the quality of jfas' articles and the attention he has received from the community.

Well without telling him, I sent an email out to AA this morning, telling him about jfas, and saying this is the type of kid they need in the organization, dont let this kid slip by. etc etc.

Well jfas just posted amoung(sp?) the writers that he was contacted by the Jays, asking him to apply for a position! May be a crazy coincidence, but it's pretty cool nonethless.

However, jfas is determined to finish his degree, so he is going to pass, which you have to respect.

 

So now I'm emailing AA about JPA! jk lol

[P2F]

Holy f***!

[theblujay]

I actually doubt it was due to the email, I was contacted through Tom Tango, so it was likely from his blog. But nonetheless it is exciting.

 

Please take the job and save us from this misery.

 

Seriously, that's awesome.

[GD]

Congratulations JFaS! You're f***ing great, you deserve it.

 

 

 

Can someone recommend who they think the best most reliable sources are on twitter? It's relevant, I promise.

[GD]

Anyone who is a real journalist (not a writer or media personality). Rosenthal, Davidi, Olney, etc.

 

I went with Rosenthal, Davidi, Olney, Heyman, Morosi, Slusser, Speier, MLBTR, Passan, etc. Thanks.

[ace3113]

Please take the job and save us from this misery.

 

Seriously, that's awesome.

 

We'll now have a mole in the front office to give us some realtime trade rumors. Excellent.

 

http://recluse.me/uploaded_images/mr-burns-wallpaper-790221.gif

[P2F]

I went with Rosenthal, Davidi, Olney, Heyman, Morosi, Slusser, Speier, MLBTR, Passan, etc. Thanks.

 

Lol did you tweet at them all on behalf of JFaS?

[P2F]

Smart analytics guy who writes reports that end up in the special file cabinet in the trash.

 

Or the refrigerator: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68edB_Q1e4g

[z3r0s]

I'm actually interested if a front office has every used a forum for 'crowd sourcing' ideas. Even if the majority of ideas a s*** (which I don't think its the case on this forum), you'd think to occasional idea that you never thought of would be worth the time of a front office having some intern scan a board. It would be literal hours of free labour that could be skimmed through rather easily.

[P2F]

I'm actually interested if a front office has every used a forum for 'crowd sourcing' ideas. Even if the majority of ideas a s*** (which I don't think its the case on this forum), you'd think to occasional idea that you never thought of would be worth the time of a front office having some intern scan a board. It would be literal hours of free labour that could be skimmed through rather easily.

 

For our fanbase, that idea would actually be beneficial for the team - knowledgeable bunch. Unfortunately, I'd have to say that most fanbases are dumber than bricks, on the whole.