Tag: solitaire games

Categories
Baseball College Hobbies Sim Baseball

Replaying a Season

Replaying an entire major league season requires several tools, not least of which are time and patience. I started with just the National League for 1982, in part because I was not certain from the outset what would happen. The initial plan was to play a month for each league, alternating back and forth.

Using Statis Pro Baseball, with all the cards provided plus a few I made myself for the limited-use players needed to fill out all the rosters, I followed the league’s actual schedule that I had found in a book I still had from the 1982 season preview the year before. That little paperback The Complete Handbook of Baseball, proved invaluable. The 1983 preview edition had all of the individual statistics from 1982 that I could use. 

I collected the books year after year because finding everything you needed in one place was much harder before we’d even dreamed of the internet. The Baseball Encyclopedia was a revelation, of course, putting all of baseball’s historical data into one volume. I bought the updates every few years, because you had to be current. (I still have all of these books. Because of course I do. I have a few posts coming just on baseball books, you can be certain.)

Life in 1983 consisted of more than just simulating baseball games, however. I was in 7th grade at a college preparatory school with hours of homework each night. I had a bar mitzvah in June to prepare for, and I was fortunate to take a trip with my grandparents to Israel and Italy that summer. Plus, you know, pesky things like doing anything else.

This is to say that I did not spend every free moment replaying the 1982 season, but I made progress steadily enough that I became hooked. At that time the National League had 12 teams, each playing 162 games. So that meant 972 games had to be played in all, and each one took over an hour to set up, play, and complete the scoresheet.

After every two weeks’ worth of games, I would compile all the updated season statistics. Though it may seem incomprehensible in our modern computing era while I play online games that do all of it instantly, I had to do all the work by hand initially. I designed special team stat pages and filled them in manually, going through each of my box scores (using the game’s specially designed scoresheets that I could probably recreate from memory right now), adding everything up, and doing all the math.

Once I had my stat updates complete, I would write long letters (on actual paper!) to my sim penpal Caleb and share all the details of my season in progress. He would send me tomes of his own recapping his 1981 adventures. Life got busier for him, too, eventually. He actually could play baseball well and played through high school.

An amazing invention arrived somewhere in the middle of all this: the home computer. I couldn’t afford one until I was about 16 and the mass market developed, but soon I discovered the wonders of a spreadsheet. The program, Lotus 1-2-3, revolutionized my statistical work, though in those days of floppy disks and minimal memory, it could take hours to enter all the data. Saving would take actual minutes, and if anything failed you had to type everything in again.

On average, I could complete about a month’s worth of games in a year. I played all the time in the summer, when I was essentially home alone all day. I’d bring the game with me for visits to grandparents. (I even remember bringing it to a nudist colony my mother belonged to. Yes, there was a nice indoor clubhouse on whose floor I could spread out my game while people outside did whatever it was they did.)

As the years progressed and I stuck with my challenge, the biggest temptation was to move on to a newer season. By the time I reached high school, I was still barely into June of my replay season, and the pace certainly slowed. I attended a very competitive private school, and studying took up nearly all my time. Eventually there were jobs and even a semblance of a social life. Sim baseball basically sat on the shelf outside of vacations in those days.

By the time all the hard work in high school paid off and I headed to Philadelphia to attend the University of Pennsylvania in the fall of 1988, I still was only in early September of my replay season. The game stayed in Los Angeles. 

I reached the end of my season in 1990, some seven years after beginning and 10 years after first discovering Statis Pro Baseball. Forget about the American League; this was just to get the NL season done.

Today with an online simulation, you could do it essentially instantly. But where would be the fun in that?

Categories
Baseball Hobbies Sim Baseball

The Game That Hooked Me

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.

Categories
Jack Bauer Squared Sim Baseball

Game 3: Dominant Pitching

The third game of the opening series continues with the resurgence of dominant pitching. My 1st-round pick, left-hander Teddy Higuera, didn’t allow a hit until the 5th inning and then escaped a bases-loaded, no-out jam in the 7th to leave with a 2-1 lead. Rod Beck and Bob Woodward each pitched a perfect inning to close out the 3-1 victory.

Shortstop Rafael Ramirez atoned for two fielding errors by going 3-for-4, doubling in the 9th and scoring an insurance run on a pinch single by Bob Bailey. 

Game 3

All told, it’s a promising first series. If you win 2 out of 3 in baseball, you’re doing extremely well. We’re only in 3rd place in our 4-team division, however, as two teams swept their first series. Next up we face Block Chain, one of the teams that remains winless, but you can’t put any stock in that. All these teams are good enough to beat you any time, and his 0-3 could be 3-3 just like that.

Categories
Baseball MLB Sim Baseball

All-Star Baseball

Fresh from my garage, my original All-Star Baseball game is still ready to play.

Among the many sports simulation board games still housed in my garage is the original and best-selling All-Star Baseball. Designed by a former major league player and coach, Ethan Allen, and first released in 1941, All-Star Baseball reigned as the ultimate baseball sim for decades.

I can’t trace my first encounter with ASB precisely, but I know I played solitaire and head-to-head games with friends often. The game’s simplicity was critical to its success, even if it overlooked tremendously important aspects of baseball. Everything was reduced to the batter, and the cards realistically simulated the percentage of times a real player did certain things like hit a home run, strike out, or walk. 

ASB cards were discs with numbers around the edges that represented different outcomes in proper proportions. Results were revealed by a spinner that would stop and point to the play’s result. New card sets would come out after each season, and there were also all-time greats available. I remember learning the names of some baseball legends from playing the game.

The version in my garage probably dates to about 1979 or 1980, based on the player cards in there. It was last played close to 20 years ago, as I can tell from one of the simple scorecards included in the set, when I challenged my stepson to a couple games when trying to teach him more about baseball. He beat me, 10-9, so you can tell I wasn’t cheating!

Categories
Baseball Sim Baseball

A Deck of Cards

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.