I remember sitting in the otherwise empty conference room of my father’s law office in downtown LA one afternoon. I was perhaps 8 or 9, and the only thing I had to entertain myself for a few hours was a deck of playing cards.
I knew solitaire games, but at some point I tired of them and decided to turn my deck into a baseball game. I did some math to figure out what percentage of the deck should be outs, walks, and different types of hits. And then I started playing a game.
Knowing myself and the era, it was probably Yankees vs. Dodgers. For one thing, my first two World Series memories are of those teams battling it out in 1977 and 1978, and I definitely would have known both teams’ lineups. I can’t remember how many games I played or who won, but I remember flipping over cards to get the results of at-bats, keeping track of who was on base and how many runs were scored, and finding that the time passed quite quickly.
That may not have been the first time simulated baseball crossed my path, but looking back it clearly established that I saw the game mathematically and had the imagination to recreate a game that way. It was like backyard baseball you’d play with friends, but when you didn’t have any equipment or friends or a backyard handy. That would happen a lot over the rest of my childhood.
