Barnstorming
How do I set my lineup and pitching staff?
Why should I accept a challenge?
When do my moves and miles reset?
The tools of ignorance has long been a baseball term that referred to the catcher's equipment. From the April 4th, 1944 issue of The Sporting News:
“Players call the catcher's armor the 'tools of ignorance.' Outfielders contend that no one in their senses would clutter themselves up with a mask, a heavy chest protector and weigh down their legs with shin guards. All of this when the mercury is trying to climb out of the top of the tube, and those outfielders are on vacation, waiting for something to happen.”
Points are awarded for things you achieve on the site, such as winning a game in Barnstorming. Your points total reflects everything you have been awarded and can only increase.
Credits belong to a team rather than to you, so every team you run builds from its own equal pool of 900 credits. Nothing you do with one team can bankroll another.
A team earns credits by playing games and by discovering hidden items out in the country. There is one thing to spend them on: drafting a free agent into a development spot, or rerolling one, at 50 credits a go. So credits are the link between playing well and improving the roster.
Barnstorming is an online game based around the idea of barnstorming around the country in an effort to pick up new fans. Historically, baseball players in the first half of the 20th century would earn money in the off season by playing exhibition games around the country. These games were popular in areas without Major League Baseball and provided small town fans with a chance to see the greats play on their own turf.
This online game aims to recreate that era by allowing you to draft a team of players and sending them from town to town trying to gain new fans. If the population of a town is already fans of another team, you can challenge them to a game where the winner gets the fans.
The game is open-ended so you can set whatever objectives that you want. The goal of the game is to build up your fan base, challenge other teams for their fan base, find hidden items, and/or win games. Winning games earns credits that you can use to improve your team.
There is also an exploration element to the game. Some towns are not as they seem. Some contain hidden sites, curses, or even classic teams from the past that will challenge you to exhibition games. With 40,000+ areas to explore and hundreds of hidden items, you never know what you might find.
The first step is to draft a team. You will also choose a zip code where you would like your team to start. Please be patient, as drafting a new team may take several minutes.
Once your team has been drafted you will see your team's dashboard. This page includes a summary of your challenges, your team's current location, team level, the number of moves and miles you've made today, your record, roster, etc. You can return to it at any time with the "Barnstorming" link at the top of the side menu.
The "Move My Team" option is basically the "action button"… it's how you move your team to another town. Enter a zip code and it brings up that town. It will tell you the population and the distance from where you are. If it has an allegiance to another team, it will list who. If you use the link to move there, it will randomly determine if that town's population becomes your fans or not. If not, nothing will happen when you move there. If they do become your fans, a congratulatory message will tell you so. If the town is already aligned with another team, you will see a "Challenge" link. Clicking this will move you to the new location just like the "Move Here" link but it will also issue a challenge to the other team. If they accept, the winner claims the town's fans as their own.
When first starting out, it is a good idea to focus on smaller towns as you have a better chance of gaining fans in towns with lower populations. Keep in mind that your daily miles and moves are limited. You can review this information on your dashboard.
"Challenges" keeps a record of past and pending challenges. Challenges expire after seven days.
"Fans" is a detailed list of your fan base.
"Discoveries" lists all the hidden stuff that you have found. This page also allows you to play exhibition games against and between the hidden teams that you have found. As a bonus, 400 classic teams from across baseball history — including the Negro Leagues — are available to scrimmage against from the start.
You can see game logs of all of your team's games under "My Game History". The drop down box at the top of the page will also allow you to see exhibition games that you have played with other classic teams. Game logs are presented in standard box score format as well as in Retrosheet event file format.
Finally, the "Rankings" page lists all Barnstorming teams with W/L record, RS/RA, total fans and current location. If you click on a team's fan total, it will show you a list of each town they've obtained. There is also a drop down box that will allow you to sort the rankings in various ways.
Those are the basic elements to the game and should be more than enough to get you started. For a more in depth look at the game, keep reading the FAQs below.
"Positions" moves players between fielding positions and the bench. You need exactly one player at each position, and a player can only be assigned somewhere he actually played — the drop-downs only offer positions he is eligible for, based on his real fielding record that season.
"Batting Order" sets your lineup one through nine, and your starting rotation.
"Pitching Staff" assigns the arms: five starters, then your setup men and closer. If your league has relief pitching switched on, the bullpen will be used according to those roles, and holds and blown saves are tracked alongside saves.
"Free Agents / Development" is where a team gets better. Each development spot can be filled with a random player season for 50 credits, or an occupied spot rerolled for the same price.
A reroll is permanent: the player in that spot is released for good and cannot be recovered. The page asks you to confirm before it does anything irreversible.
You can gain fans in one of two ways. If the town is already fans of another team, you will need to challenge that team for those fans via the "Move My Team" page.
The other way to gain fans is by moving to a town that does not currently have a team alliance. You may gain these fans automatically, just by visiting their town. The odds of winning over a town's fans without playing a game are tied to your team level and the town's population. The higher the population, the lower the odds that you can win them over. Increasing your team level will increase your chances of gaining fans in higher population areas. When first starting out, it is best to focus on towns with small populations (such as those with less than 5,000 people).
Once you have gained a town's fans, it may seem foolish to risk losing them by accepting a challenge. On the other hand, winning games is how a team earns the credits it needs to buy free agents and improve its roster. The home team also benefits from a hometown advantage, so in a game between two equally matched teams the home (defending) team should win most of the time.
Beyond wandering the map, teams can join a league and play a scheduled season against the same opponents. League games are simulated for you, and the results feed the standings, the statistical leaderboards and the season records.
Look for "Leagues" in the side menu to browse what exists and join one.
A game mode decides which players exist in your world. The base mode draws on the whole of baseball history, but a mode can be narrowed to a range of years, to one region, to the Negro Leagues, or to players who are not in the Hall of Fame — which makes for a very different draft.
Each mode is its own separate world: your team, your fans, your credits and your map all belong to the mode you are playing, and you can run a team in more than one.
Most tournaments are available to everyone. When a new tournament is announced, the location (zip code) will also be given. At that point, the first X teams to reach that zip code will be entered in the tournament. Occasionally, a tournament will have other conditions added. Your team must meet these requirements to be included in the tournament.
Team levels are a measure of how well known your team is. This affects how easy it is for your team to win fans when visiting new towns. If you are at level one, your odds of winning fans in smaller towns is pretty good but in larger towns, you may have some trouble. As your team level increases, you will find that it gradually becomes easier to win fans in larger towns. Your team level also determines how many moves and miles your team can travel each day. As your team becomes more famous, they can travel longer distances, but they won't be able to make as many moves per day.
Your team starts out at level 1. The only way to improve your team level is by finding hidden sites. When you move to a hidden site, a message will appear telling you what you have found and your team level will be increased by one. Hidden sites could be anything from the site of a ballpark to the birthplace of a famous player.
While hidden sites increase your team level, a hidden curse will decrease your team level by one. Your level can never go below one.
Your total number of moves and miles traveled appears on your dashboard. These totals reset every night at approximately midnight.
Those teams have discovered a warp pipe. Find one and it will carry your team clear across the country in a single move, well past the mileage your team level would normally allow.
The Stats section is a reference for real baseball history rather than part of the game: season and career hitting and pitching, the Hall of Fame and its voting, franchise histories, and lookups by birthday, hometown and college.
It also has Simulate Games, where you can pick any two classic teams — any year, any club — and play a game between them without having a Barnstorming team at all.
Ever since I created the site, I have been playing around with the idea of an online fantasy baseball game. The challenge was creating something different than all of the other fantasy sites. The Tools of Ignorance writer, Jim Williams, wrote a column that made use of the following quote:
“Back then, Cleveland trained in Tucson, and the Giants trained in Phoenix. Then we'd break camp in early April, and we would get on a private train and travel back east with the Indians, barnstorming in all these little towns.”
--Bobby Thomson
This provided the inspiration that was needed to create a fantasy game that didn't rely on merely creating a league and competing within that closed world. I hope that you'll find the game simple yet deep and I hope that it will breathe new life into the fantasy baseball genre.
The Tools of Ignorance is an online community which was conceived as a place where like-minded fans can communicate and research the game that they love.
From 1959 to 1962, two All-Star Games were played each year. The second game was used to raise money for the players' pension funds.