When the Grass Was Real

When the Grass Was Real is a tabletop baseball game with a difference: it's designed to simulate a fictional baseball league, in the spirit of the game described in Robert Coover's novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc.: J. Henry Waugh, Prop. When you roll the dice, you don't find out that the hitter singled; your batter will hit a hard ground ball in the hole to the left side, and the shortstop is moving toward it. Using data from Retrosheet, we've attempted to replicate things like batted ball distribution: your hitters will tend to hit their lazy fly balls and pop ups the other way, while pulling harder hit balls. Similarly, good hitters will tend to hit the ball harder (more line drives and hard grounders and fewer pop ups), and poor hitters will do the opposite.