Take Me Out to the Ball Game

The Major League Baseball season starts this Sunday, so it seems like a good time to talk about my favorite table-top baseball games.

The first table-top baseball game that I ever played actually belonged to my brother Dennis. It was a simple game -- you would roll two dice and read the result from a chart. I remember that double-twos was a double, double-threes was a triple and double-sixes was a homerun. The chart was actually printed on the back-side of a cardboard chessboard along with a football gridiron. Dennis received it as a gift from our Aunt Alice. To this day we refer to the old game as "Aunt Alice Baseball." Dennis played several shortened seasons using the game in the 1960s (while he was in high school). When I discovered the game in the early 1970s (along with Dennis's records from his old seasons) I was impressed enough that I started to play it as well.

Sometime in the late 1970s I started to realize that Aunt Alice Baseball's stats weren't all that realistic. I also wanted a game that could reproduce individual statistics for Major League players (rather than having every player use the same chart). Over the course of several years I tried to build my own baseball game using actual Major League players' stats. I can also remember making ratings/cards for the guys in our neighborhood and playing a shortened season (with the help of Paul Stephan and Hubert Synn) that put our "team" in a league with actual major league teams. (As an aside, I'm not sure what happened to Aunt Alice Baseball; it's probably somewhere in Mom's basement.)

During the Major League Players strike of 1981, Dennis read an article in Sport magazine describing APBA baseball. We mailed away (as we had to do in the pre-Internet days) to request a brochure describing the game. APBA sent back a glossy brochure and a sample card (of George Brett), and I was hooked. We ordered the game, and I can remember spending the next two weeks waiting every day for the mailman. Dennis, his (now ex-) wife Vicki and I ended up picking teams and starting a 32-game season. The games were a lot of fun (although the record keeping was tedious). The baseball strike ended in August, and as school started up again, we stopped playing our games. Sometime that summer I introduced APBA to Rick VerMehren, who ended up finishing our season.

That same summer, Paul Stephan bought Strat-o-Matic Baseball at our local hobby store (The Epic Gallery). We played a couple of games, but I wasn't that impressed. Looking back, what bothered me the most was that Strat-o-Matic (in those days) used a deck of cards with numbers printed on them rather than a die to resolve certain plays. (At some point Strat-o-Matic replaced the deck with a twenty-sided die.)

In 1982 a group of us started an APBA baseball league (where we drafted the players). My team was the Winnipeg Wilderness; Dennis had the Penguis; my cousin Fred had the Gotham City Batmen; Al had the California Medflys and Rick had the Dallas Diamonds. Also in the league were Paul Stephan, Doug Verseman and Paul Marxkors (although I can't remember their team names). As summer wore on, several of the guys lost interest, and we didn't finish the season.

During most of the 1980s, Rick and I continued playing shortened MLB seasons each year when the cards came out (although to be honest, Rick did most of the playing and 90% of the bookkeeping).

In 1986, a number of us from the 1982 league, plus Bill Lake and a few of his family members started a league using the Commodore-64 baseball game by SSI. Although the season was fun, and it was nice having the computer keep the stats, a number of us missed rolling the dice, so we switched the league over to APBA in 1987. However, since the 1982 league, Rick and I had discovered the APBA Master Game. The Master Game was the advanced version -- taking into account lefty-righty effects, pitcher fatigue, outfielder arms and various other "advanced" features. A few of the folks preferred sticking with the original (so-called Basic) APBA game, but most of us switched over to the Master Game.

There were nine of us in the league, with each person having two teams. I don't remember all of the team names, but the league included Mary (Houtson *s and Bay City Babes), Al (California Medflys and Newark Neanderthals), Mike (El Paso Desperadoes and New Hampshire Minutemen), Doug (Delaware Destroyers and Louisville Sluggers), Rick (Indianapolis Turbos and Dallas Diamonds), Frank (Sparta Spartans and the Doc's), Fred (Honolulu Hurricanes and California Coolers), Steve (NYC Corporate Raiders) and me (Pocatello Penguins and Winnipeg Wilderness). As I recall, Rick's Diamonds beat my Penguins in the World Series that year.

... to be continued.