It was probably when I was eight or nine years old when I noticed the advertisements in the back of Baseball Digest for something called APBA Baseball. The ad was simple. It had some text describing that APBA Baseball was a simulation game based on statistics and probability. The main component of the game was a set of dice – one larger than the other – and a bunch of cards. The cards held the magic.
About the size of a baseball card, an APBA Baseball card had a players' name listed at the top, along with his vitals: height, weight, birthdate, city of birth, and the position he played. Below that was a series of numbers in three columns. The numbers on the left side represented the dice roll and were listed as 11 to 16, 21-26, 31-36, 41-46, 51-56, and 61-66. Say a dice roller/player rolled the two dice and one die showed 4 and the other 1 – that represented 41. To the right of the 41 on the players' card showed another number. That number represented the result of an at-bat.
Simple, right? Similar to Strat-O-Matic, which seemed to have more of a national following than APBA, but the idea was basic.
Along with the game cards mini sandwich board-style results that one used to look up what the numbers indicated. Better yet, the figure was based on the circumstance of the play. If the bases were empty or there was a runner on first and third (or any scenario), the dice had a reading for that, too. Moreover, a pitcher's grading affected the outcome, also. Pitchers were rated A, B, C or D, based on their statistics and ratios, which further provided answers to what the result of a particular play was.
Statistics, probability, dice, cards, and baseball. All in one little game that took approximately 20 minutes to complete.
Those 20 minutes could add up to quite an afternoon and evening. The APBA Baseball company was located in Lancaster, Pa., not too far from my house. It was probably too far for a bike ride for my friends and me when we were pre-teens. Still, a parent could always drive to the company headquarters (and later, we could), where we could purchase the latest edition of the cards every year so we could re-play the entire past season of our favorite teams. My friend Chris Bernhardt and I would hole up in his room (or mine), blast the air conditioning in the heat and humidity of the summer months, and get to work on our teams. We'd play dozens of games a day by ourselves. Chris usually played the New York Mets – the 1986 club was a particular favorite. I would play the Red Sox teams of the late 1980s.
Sometimes when we would complete a season and the statistics would be entered and updated on a ledger after each game (and then compared to the real statistics), we would take on another team's schedule. Usually, it would be the Phillies or the Orioles, the two teams closest to Lancaster, Pa. and who were broadcast on over-the-air TV every night.
And the late 1980s were really the peak for APBA and over-the-air broadcasts of baseball. Never would it be so simple again. Brooks Robinson and Chuck Thompson in Baltimore and Harry Kalas and Richie Ashburn in Philadelphia would call games as we played our own from the season before. It indeed was a pastime. That's what we were doing with our games – both real and imagined. There were no complications and no crass capitalism that we could see. Just baseball. That was it.
But just like those over-the-air broadcasts, APBA slowly faded away, replaced by faster, more graphically enhanced video simulation games. APBA still exists, but it isn't located in Lancaster anymore. Its building remains on Millersville Rd.; still the same low slung, brick-red building from a different era, but APBA cleaned out and moved to Georgia. It still produces its card-based game, but the emphasis is on its computer games that essentially emulate the dice/tabletop version.
A couple of weeks ago, while goofing off on the internet and searching around for info on APBA, I stumbled over something called Out Of The Park Baseball (OOTP), which was a computer-based simulator being used by the gang at Baseball-Reference to play the 2020 MLB season. For those looking for any indicator of how the 2020 season might have played out, maybe the Baseball-Reference crew can offer a little interest.
For me, the 2020 baseball season is of little interest. At least in terms of the OOTP game. Instead, I was interested in how past seasons could have turned out in the simulation, so I downloaded the game, loaded it onto a couple of computers, and got to work. First, I tried out the star-crossed 2011 season for the Philadelphia Phillies. During the golden age of the franchise from 2007 to 2011, the '11 team was probably the most stacked of them all. Yes, this includes the 2008 team that won the World Series, the 2009 team that went to six games in the World Series against the Yankees, the 2010 team that went on an epic 49-19 run over the final two months of the season to climb from ninth-best record in the National League to the best record in the majors.
The 2011 team won a club-record 102 games, which, coincidentally, is the last time the franchise had a winning record. It seemed poised for another World Series appearance until it ran into the proverbial hot club in the St. Louis Cardinals, who snuck into the postseason, upset the Phillies, and pulled off a stunning victory in Game 6 against Texas before winning Game 7.
As Charlie Manuel used to say, "Funny game."
Nevertheless, I got to work on the 2011 Phillies season with on OOTP Baseball and seemed to struggle with the club through the first half of the season. Injuries were an issue, as they are to many baseball clubs, even computer model ones. For this simulation, it seemed as if the entire pitching staff couldn't stay healthy, except for the indomitable Cliff Lee, who just kept chugging along. In real life, the 2011 Phillies starting pitching staff missed only 23 starts from its top five pitchers, and three of them – Roy Halladay, Cole Hamels, and Lee – turned in at least 216 innings. For comparison, only three pitchers in the 2018 and 2019 season combined, tossed more than 216 innings.
So, my version of the 2011 Phillies, for all of the injuries, still won 97 games and the NL East. There was no sign of the Cardinals in the playoffs. Instead, my OOTP Phillies beat the Brewers in the NLDS, the Giants in seven games in the NLCS, and then took out Texas in the World Series.
Just the way it was supposed to be.
With 2011 vindicated (sort of), why not see what the World Champion 2008 team could do? Well, that one turned out to be a disaster. With me at the helm, the '08 Phillies not only missed the playoffs but also didn't reach .500. It was pretty humiliating.
Maybe not more humiliating than the next simulation. See, with the OOTP game, I can knock out an entire 162-game season in an evening if I really get after it. For APBA, it could take weeks (maybe even a month), to knock out a season for just one team playing the games at the same rate as OOTP. With that in mind, I tried in inexplicable …
I started with the 2000 Phillies, the very first team I covered as a writer for Comcast SportsNet, and began to work my way through the seasons. The idea was to go from 2000 to 2015, which was the last year of games I wrote about. The exciting part is playing the games (with different outcomes) in which I was present and explicitly remember. Maybe I didn't recognize them for what happened on the field. But perhaps it sparked memories from what happened before the game in the clubhouse. Or what a player said after the game. Or what my friends and I laughed about in the press box or in the dining room.
Those were the things I remembered the most. Oh sure, there were no-hitters and division, or playoff-clinching victories sprinkled in, and that stuff was interesting and valuable. After all, the games and the players made the work enjoyable. But just being there, around all those exciting people were some of the best times I'll ever have.
Working through that schedule of 16 seasons of baseball in approximately a little more than a week is quite sobering. A couple of the guys I was with aren't here anymore. A few others are like me and have moved on and are not writing about baseball or sports anymore. Some, like me, miss it quite a bit.
Yet, whizzing through all those games in a little more than a week is a punch in the face. It's a hard reminder of just how much time passes so quickly. It feels like it was just a week ago that I was sitting at the ballpark, getting ready for another game to start and to file another story. It feels like those 16 seasons took about a week, too.
Maybe instead of finding a game that allows us to relive our past so quickly, we can find one that takes way too long to complete. Because if I can get a chance to relive those 16 seasons in a whole bunch of decades, I'll gladly take it.