The store could have been a Toys R Us. Maybe even Gemco. Somewhere that sold a wide range of games, at least, because I wasn’t looking at Monopoly or Sorry. I would have been about 9 ½ and almost certainly shopping with my grandparents, who bought me more than a fair share of my necessities as well as frivolities.
I can’t say precisely from a distance of 40 years what made me want to buy the game in the box that looked more like a dictionary than a game. A bookcase game, it was called. It was something more serious, clearly.
Statis Pro Baseball, produced by the Avalon Hill Game Company, included cards for every player from the 1979 season in that first set I took home. I remember the excitement of separating all the cards on their perforated sheets, studying the rules, sorting all the players into their teams, and figuring out how to play games.
I played for fun at that stage as my knowledge of baseball was still growing. Replaying the playoffs. Playing All-Star games. Whatever my imagination could dream up, I could do now. I had a statistical replay game with realistic outcomes and all the elements of baseball. I had the 1979 season and almost every player, save a few with too few at-bats or innings.
Mostly I played the game solitaire, which worked just fine. I managed both teams as best I could, and since you didn’t get quite as granular as selecting pitches or anything that you couldn’t reveal to the other side, it presented no problems. I had learned how to keep score of baseball games over the previous couple years, so I had the tools I needed.
Fortunately, I also found someone to play against. My grandparents had a large network of friends, and that included a couple whose two grandsons would come to visit each summer from their home in rural British Columbia. My grandmother had the idea to get us together during one of my visits, and there began a friendship unlike any other I’ve had.
The older of the two boys was close to my age and, as it happened, a baseball fan. I introduced Caleb to my Statis Pro Baseball game, and he took a liking to it immediately as well. After the 1981 season concluded, he purchased his own version and set about replaying the entire full (not strike-shortened) 1981 season on his own.
After the 1982 season, I got the newer version of the game to get the most recent player card set. When you’re 12, a set from 3 years earlier feels really distant. And I was ready to undertake my own season replay, starting from the most recent season.
Over the next few years, Caleb and I progressed through our respective seasons. Each summer when he came to visit, I would become like a third grandson for his grandparents and spend a few days with them. Sure, we would swim and shoot hoops here and there, but we spent hours stretched out on living room floors with our game sets playing sim baseball.
In between those infrequent visits, we became penpals. In the early 80s, that was the way to stay in touch with your distant friends. You wrote letters. And we wrote long letters. Admittedly, most of them were packed with baseball statistics, standings, and highlights of our seasons. Neither of us really knew anyone else who particularly took the same interest, but we were fortunate to have a correspondence that gave us a way to share our joy with each other.
Statis Pro Baseball became a faithful companion throughout those years, and I have many more stories about it. Thinking now, decades later, what captures me the most is how sharing the hobby helped me make a good friend. People inevitably drift out of our lives, as he did when his visits ended and we finished high school and went off to college. I wonder if he still has his game in his garage, too. I’d bet on it. Bonds like these don’t break.
