Monday, March 31, 2014

#PackADailyCircus - Opening Day!

Hey everyone! Welcome to Opening Day for the 2014 Pack-A-Day Giveaway!

Before I bust open a pack of cards, let it be known that I am STILL working through the inaugural draft. Note for next season: Find another way to do the first draft! Turns out 20+ rounds of drafting by hand is a bit of a chore. I'm not whining about it. I just want you to know what the hold-up is - manual labor.

Our first pack of the season is 2014 Topps Series One - 10 cards per pack. As of right now, I might be able to tell you who owns what cards, I might not. We'll just have to see.

Jurickson Profar - Rangers Future Stars - RJBreezes
Max Scherzer - Tigers - Chonks
Chris Tillman - Orioles - FREE AGENT (No one claimed him)
 Jayson Werth - Nationals - Chonks
Jonathan Lucroy - Brewers - FREE AGENT (No one claimed him)
Cesar Cedeno - Astros Topps 75th - FREE AGENT (No one claimed him)
David Holmberg - DBacks - FREE AGENT (Unclaimed)
Coco Crisp - A's - Wilsons
Brandon League - Dodgers - FREE AGENT (Unclaimed)
Rex Brothers - Rockies - FREE AGENT (Unclaimed)

Congratulations to the Chonks for grabbing two cards! Congrats to the other managers that scored cards on opening day, too!

How did I know if cards were unclaimed? As I am working through the draft, I have open the spreadsheet everyone picked players. I searched for the names. If no one claimed the player, I knew it was a free agent. As for current owners, I pulled the draft to this point from OOTP and searched for each player. Had a player been in the spreadsheet but not drafted yet, I would mark that player as "Claimed but Undrafted."


Sunday, March 30, 2014

#PackADailyCircus - Still drafting

At the time of this post, it is about 11:35pm CST. I am still working the draft for the OOTP and for figuring out who gets what players' cards.

The first thing I have discovered is that here are LOT of players with the same name. How lovely. Oh well, I will post all my "issues" after everything is complete.

For the folks that did not submit lists or who ran out of names during the draft, I am assigning random players based on positions that need to be filled on your OOTP roster. Don't worry, you'll be allowed to make trades, etc to get folks on your team that you actually want (or just leave them, haha!).

I had hoped to rip open a pack on Opening Night, but I have work in the morning. So, the first pack will be opened on Opening Day!

Thanks for hanging out! See you on Monday evening!

Thursday, March 27, 2014

#PackADailyCircus - Gearing up for season breaks! #ootp

Hey everyone!
  I am getting things in order for the first draft of the 2014 season. Everyone who signed up was notified about the draft by email. Please note that most communication will be done by email since there is a weird delay between the time I post something here and the time some of you get notified that a new post was added.

Be sure to check your email if you don't think you have received anything from me and you are signed up.

We have 44 managers participating this season! That is awesome!!  Thanks so much!

Now, before I roll out the draft this weekend, I want to share a couple of game-related items with you and the folks who are watching this crazy thing unfold!

First up, I created teams for each participant. Look over the list, and you should be able to figure out who you are and where you are within the league. I think I can still change team names if you don't like yours. Drop me a line and I will see what I can do. Otherwise, that will be something I fix next season:



The divisions get their names from places associated with Piccadilly Square, since that is the play-on-words title of this year's giveaway. The teams were assign to their divisions based on the order in which they were received during sign-up. We have two (2) SubLeagues (Think, American/National but without actual names). Because we have 44 teams, some divisions have 5 teams and some have 6 teams. Which have which was randomly determined.

For those interested in the OOTP rules chosen for this game:


To be perfectly frank, I don't have a clue what some of these rules do. I am NOT doing anything with financials this season. I hope that allows for any manager to own any player they wish. I won't know that until I start rolling things out. If I hit any snags, we'll monitor and adjust. As you can see, we will have a 25-man roster to start things off and then that will be expanded to a 40-man. This has NOTHING to do with cards you get during pack breaks. I will hold drafts or trades or something during the season so you can, if you want, expand your picks for the cards you get.

The draft order will be a serpentine format (what I called "snaking" last year), and OOTP has set the order. Since the database is outdated, I will create fictional players to fill in (ex: Yasiel Puig). There is probably a better way to handle that, but I want to get things rolling and don't want to take the time to learn. Haha! Here is the draft order:


I plan to simulate games each weekend for the previous week.
Packs will be opened each day.
Unclaimed players will be put into a pool for selection via draft.

I will be out of town until Sunday night, so I will run the draft then and should be able to kick out everyone's rosters.  OOTP lets me export things to HTML files, so hopefully I can post ongoing information and provide links to it. If not, I will figure out how to get things posted here and we will see how it goes!



Thursday, March 20, 2014

OOTP has OOTW support! #ootp


If you've been following along, you might know that this season's giveaway will be tied to the baseball simulator OOTP (Out of the Park). What you may not know is that I have never used OOTP before. As I set out to merge the world of PackADay with the world of OOTP, I emailed Brad at OOTP and let him know what I was trying to do. As with any venture where the primary purpose of a program gets stretched beyond the intended limits, I hit a few snags. They weren't going to stop the show, but I will have to combine some of the things I do manually with some of the cool features of OOTP.

As I set out to create leagues and teams, I was having a hard time pulling in actual players. Brad and I emailed back and forth as we tried working through the problem. Finally, he asked me to upload my files so he could take a look. When he let me know that he could not only duplicate the problem (no players would show up in the draft, even though the program said they were imported) but that he had never seen anything like it before, I know I had something special on my hands.

Turns out, I managed to corrupt my game. I am pretty sure that happened during the creation of my custom league. I am not a "read the manual" kind of person. I am not sure reading the manual would have helped for what I am trying to do, but messing everything up the first time certainly helped.

Mind you, this support took place over the course of more than a week, over a ton of email exchanges. I would also like to note here that as a member of the BBA, I received my copy for free in exchange for posting about the program. My original plan was to (and still is to) incorporate OOTP as part of this season's breaks.

What I did not anticipate was the incredible level of patient support I would get from OOTP just getting things off the ground. Thanks to Brad and the great folks at OOTP who are providing OOTW service! OOTW!? Yeap! Out of This World!

The window for joining the break has closed, and we have 44 managers this season! Follow along as I get things ramped up for the initial draft, daily pack breaks and a baseball simulation that ties it all together!

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

With fronds like these... #tribecards #baseballdad

I am playing a bit of catch-up. I have several mailers that I have received but have not yet posted!

I recently got one from BaseballDad that included an "Arky Boy," "A few odd Tribe cards, and a plain 'Just Odd' card!" Plus, a bonus...

D.J. Baxendale lives right up the road from my house. In fact, he is from the same town my wife and I graduated college and where my son now attends! You ready? Arkadelphia, Arkansas. Yeap, that's the name of the place. And, when you are bored and have nothing to occupy your time there, it is affectionately known as "Arkadonothing." Check out the other cards in this stack as well!


Next, we have a couple more cards and the bonus item...


No, no. Not the Village People card. That is the "plain odd" item. I don't know why he put that in there. I don't even have words. The bonus is on the right! Yes, that is bacon-flavored hot chocolate mix. Some time ago, I was on a kick, posting bacon-related jokes, videos, etc. on Facebook, in email groups... What followed was a barrage of bacon-related items to my front door and a constant influx of bacon-related posts, comments, you name it. Thus, my gift.

Thanks to Baseball Dad for ALL the cool things in this package!

Sunday, March 16, 2014

A quick PackADaily Update

I am putting together the rules for this season's pack breaks. In the meantime, I am the world's worst mailer. Well, life circumstances have helped in that regard, but still... Last season's winnings are still to be mailed. They will be, that I promise. I just can't promise when. Yes, there is an easy fix: charge for the break. But, I don't want to and don't feel the need to. So, we all get to practice patience, I suppose.

I am combining the pack breaks with a fantasy league scenario. Nope, not sure how it all works just yet, but I am working with the folks at OOTP to help me figure out some of the logistics. More details this week!

Thanks all!
--David (Tribecards)

Sunday, March 2, 2014

PackADaily Circus Update #packaday #tribecards

PackADaily Circus Update #packaday #tribecards


Hey all!  Yes, I have decided to go with "PackADaily Circus" as the theme for this season's pack-a-day break because things have been very circus-like since last season!

One of the things I am doing right now is shopping around for a fantasy sports site that will let us run this little shin-dig more like a fantasy league with less reliance on my own time to make it run. Besides, if we can get it into a fantasy-game arrangement, we're talking about the possibility of trades, etc during the season!

My initial goal was to record each individual CARD so that you could trade if you got duplicates. Let's be honest, that would create a fulltime job in itself. Maybe at some point down the road, but i don't see that happening this coming season. Heck, I'm not even sure right now that the whole online fantasy league scenario will play out.

If it does NOT play out, then we will run the show like we did last year: an initial draft followed by weekly drafts all moderated by hand.

So facr, we have 40 people signed up! That seems to be part of the "problem" with creating a fantasy environment because most fantasy sites limit the league to 16 managers. We'll have none of that in these parts! We're going big or going home! Er, well, not home so much as going... umm.. to do it by hand! Sure, it loses a little something there, but most of the people that know me realize a little "something" was lost a long, long time ago.

Okay, talented members of the Tribecards community: We need a new "poster" for the upcoming season. Start creating a graphic that you think encompasses the "PackADaily Circus" theme and email it to me at davidinark via yahoo.  I'll either pick the winning entry or we'll hold a contest!


(image from http://www.arkansasdailydeal.com/engine/SplashDetails.aspx?contestid=28531&productid=4953564)