Beginning in the sixth grade, when we were still living in Cambridge, I became an avid reader of baseball articles in Sport magazine. There was an advertisement in Sport for a table baseball game called APBA. (I did not know it at the time, but the letters stood for American Professional Baseball Association.) It looked intriguing. I responded to the ad and materials came in the mail that made me very desirous of purchasing the game. The price was $18.75, which seemed a little steep then, though it was actually quite reasonable in view of the product and turned out to be incredibly so in view of the hours of enjoyment I got out of the game.
There was a foldout brochure. And, there was a sample player card for Ted Williams! The brochure included an account of and box score for a simulated game replaying a 1957 World Series game between the Yankees and Milwaukee Braves in which Warren Spahn struck out 14 batters (in the simulated game, that is). It seemed so real, and the idea of a table game where you could play Major League baseball games at home with real players intrigued me. I was hooked.
My older brother and I purchased the game. It was, as I have noted above, a baseball simulation table game using cards to represent each major league player and boards to represent different on-base scenarios e.g. Bases Empty , Runners on First and Third, Bases Loaded with the results corresponding to the roll of the dice and the corresponding number on a player s card, with the roll of the dice used to generate random numbers. You would check the board for a given situation (runner on first, say) to see the result. Funny things could happen: an injury, an ejection, a rainout.
The game could be played against another person or in solitaire fashion. I always played games by myself, so that I was managing both teams (making the lineup, substitutions, pitching changes, etc.), and I announced them out loud as the game progressed. (I had vague thoughts about becoming a baseball announcer and admired announcers such as the Red Sox s Curt Gowdy and Ned Martin.)
I kept score for each game and recorded statistics in a ruled notebook. It was amazing that, in most cases, the players performances came close to matching their real life statistics. (The individual cards represented real players, and had ratings for batting, fielding, base running, pitching, and so forth.) You could make managerial decisions: elect to bunt, say; or stipulate in advance that on a single, a runner should not try to advance to an extra base because the runner was rated as slow.
Some funny results occurred.
In one simulated game that I was playing, for example, Tom (Ploughboy) Morgan was pitching for the Detroit Tigers. I seem to recall that the score was 10-0 in favor of the Tigers, partly because Morgan, who was pitching in relief in the simulated game, had hit a grand slam home run.
In real life, Morgan, in 1959, the season on which his APBA player card was based, hit two homeruns in twenty-three at bats. This gave him as an excellent rating on his APBA player card as a power hitter.
If you got the result of a 23 or 41 i.e., this result on the game board corresponding to whatever the dice roll showed you would get something unusual, say an injury, a rainout, an ejection, or a weird play.
The Tigers, as I said, were leading by around 10-0 somewhere well into the simulated game and the opposing team batter got a dice roll of 26 (or some such number), which I think corresponded to a 23 on the game board, with a result that on the game board read ball pitcher ejected for disputing umpire s call. The Tigers were leading by ten runs or so at the time (in the simulated game I was playing).
Each year, APBA would come out with a complete set of player cards, based on the prior season’s results, that cost six dollars. They would mail rosters to game owners in advance. When the rosters came out, I would scan them eagerly. In those days, there were eight teams in each league, and each team played 154 games in a season. I played just over half a season, over 300 games, for the 1959 National League, kept box scores for each game, and compiled statistics.
The company s headquarters were at 118 E. James St. In Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It turned out that the company was a single statistically minded baseball fan, J. Richard Seitz, who had created the game in 1951 and marketed it from his home.
In the summer of 1962, my father, mother, younger brother, sister, and I took to trip to Pennsylvania to visit my older brother, who had a summer job there. We took a side trip and drove through the beautiful Amish Country, making a stop in Lancaster, which I had requested.
It took my father a while to find 118 E. James Street. We finally found it and it was just an ordinary house. It turned out that it was the residence of APBA developer and owner Seitz and his mother.
We went to the post office to inquire and were told by a friendly postal clerk that, yes, we had the right address and that Seitz occasionally stopped at the post office to mail APBA games to costumers.
Around this time, the company came out with a pro football game with player cards with ratings for running, passing, kicking, blocking, and defense.
My father got me the APBA football game, which I had requested, for my birthday. They had a policy of usually requiring two to three weeks for shipping, but my Dad wrote them a letter pleading for expedited delivery and got it in about three days. Then he handed me an envelope that had, in the return address on front, the APBA Game Company and their address, below which my father had written “from a big game company” with his own cartoon-ish drawing of a factory building with smokestacks and smoke billowing from them.
The APBA football game had player cards representing the 1958 NFL season. That was the season of the championship game between the Colts and Giants which the Colts won in overtime on Alan Ameche s touchdown run. I played that game over and over again with the APBA simulated table game, and I also played games with various other teams such as the Browns, Rams, and Packers.
Once, my older brother and I decided to replay the Colts-Giants playoff game against one another. I forget which team each of us chose. But, at the end of the game, my team was behind by a few points and I had the ball on something like the opposition s 27-yard line. The way the game was designed (each play represented a designated portion of the clock ), I had one play left.
The APBA football game required you to make coaching decisions. My older brother set his defense, wisely, for a pass play. I rolled boxcars, two sixes, on the dice. This roll of dice would give you the best result for a given situation. There were boards for end run, plunge play, short pass, and long pass; I had elected short pass. For that situation, and, taking into account the respective team ratings for offense (blocking) and defense, the result was disappointing. The gain on the play was one yard short of a touchdown. I was certain that for a dice roll of boxcars, I had scored a touchdown. (If I had chosen a long pass or run, I would have scored.) I was so frustrated and upset, I actually started to cry. It seemed that my older brother always won.
My time spent playing APBA board games comprised some of the happiest moments of my life.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
