Happy Friday! (But really, what is time anymore?) I’ve been working on a much longer post lately, but I wanted to share this quickly.

Without baseball these days, I find myself turning to simulations. I’ve been running my own through Out of the Park Baseball 20, a baseball sim game that really lets you get into the minutiae of the sport (highly recommended). Fortunately, there are also a few happening in the wilds of the internet, so if there’s a result you don’t like in one, you can turn to another.

The estimable Baseball Reference has been running a sim using OOTP 21, the newest edition of the game that came out last month. What I like about that is they’ve been adding players’ simulated stats to their real stats pages (set apart from the real ones, of course) to give the whole thing an air of reality.

Meanwhile, Strat-O-Matic, which started as a board game in the ’60s, has been running their own simulation using their software. The nice feature of their coverage is the daily recaps they include at the top of the page; it’s like reading a newsletter or something for a league I can’t watch. And they run it everyday at 2pm, so it’s nice to see everything all at once.

Both are really great diversions, and I’m super glad they’re happening. The Mets are 2-5 on SOM and 3-4 on BR, so it’s good to know the sims are accurate. But these are two sites I’ll be checking every afternoon until this whole thing is over and baseball finally comes back.