Take Me Out to the Ball Game (Cont'd)

It was also during the summer of 1987 that I started helping Steve Stafford with his Strat-o-Matic Baseball team in a league at The Epic Gallery hobby shop. Steve's team in that league was also known as the New York City Corporate Raiders. We made the playoffs, but were eliminated in the first round.

We continued the APBA baseball league during the summer of 1988. Steve Stafford had to drop out because of a lack of time, so his team was taken over by Richard Philipak. Richard re-named one of the teams the Spectres. Also, Frank dropped out half-way through the season, and his teams were taken over by Kenn Leucke and Steven Erdmann. Al's two teams made it all of the way to the World Series, and the Medflys beat the Neanderthals to win the championship.

I moved away from St. Louis in August of 1988 to start graduate school, and although we finished a draft prior to a 1989 season, the season itself was never started, and our second attempt at a table-top baseball league came to an end.

In 2003, we decided to give it another try. I had bought Strat-o-Matic back in the 1990s just to see what the game was looking like. When I received the mailing in February 2003 I talked to Al and Dennis about starting a league, and we decide to give it a try. In addition to Al's (Greenwhich Meridians), Dennis's (Montauk Fighting Rainbow Trout) and my team (the St. Louis Crusaders), we were joined by Steven (The Gallifreyan Timelords), Jeff White (Metropolis Supermen) and Rick (Dallas Diamonds). The Crusaders won the 2003 World Series (defeating the Trout) and Al won the 2004 World Series (defeating the Diamonds). Mid-way through the 2005 season, we fell behind in our games, and we decided to jump straight to a playoff round. The Diamonds ended up winning the World Series (defeating the Timelords).

I don't honestly see us ever trying another league. However, I do think that we learned a number of lessons over the years. (1) It's important that league members reconcile themselves to the fact that "owners" vary in the amount of time that they can devote to the league. Members should have honest discussions prior to starting a league about the time commitment that's expected. Gung-ho members may need to accept the fact that not everyone shares their priorities. If they prefer a league with more games and/or extensive bookkeeping, they need to either find like-minded people or be prepared to accept a lower commitment level. (2) Members should think when creating the league about how to handle team openings. Members' lives will change, and people will move, gain new family commitments or just want to quit. (3) Every game's rules has "loopholes" that can be exploited -- things that allow players to "work the system" in an unrealistic manner. League members need to have in place a solid process for resolving these issues before they arise.

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.