If you’re tired of or want relief from streaming entertainment, I suggest an alternative, something that sports fans used to do. I’m talkin’ playing baseball board games!
Where I grew up in northern New Jersey, the most common reasons were blizzards and the tail end of hurricanes that swept up the Atlantic Coast. We didn’t have Netflix. We had a TV with a dial that numbered 2 to 13, and the only channels we received were the networks (2, 4, and 7) and local stations 5, 9, 11, and 13. Channel 9 had the Million Dollar Movie, which played the same movie all day. My sister and I watched The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner several times in a row.
But we also had board games. As a sports nut, my favorites were baseball board games.
Tudor’s 1959 Electric Baseball was big, bold, and…noisy!
The first I ever owned was Tudor’s Electric Baseball, circa 1959. When you turned on the switch, the metal board vibrated under the runners, causing them to circle the bases.
Next was Cadaco’s All-Star Baseball, which first appeared in 1941, and has been honored as one of the 50 most influential American board games of all time. Player discs were divided into sectors (like slices of pie). Babe Ruth had a home run slice whose length at the outer edge was maybe a half-inch, while Bobby Richardson’s home run sector was as thin as a pencil point. The “pie” was mathematically divided into doubles, triples, strikeouts, etc., to simulate the batter’s statistics. The player disc was placed on a spinner, which determined the outcome. Pitcher statistics were not incorporated.
That feature was introduced in 1961 by Hal Richmond in Strat-O-Matic baseball. The game used dice to parse the statistics of both pitchers and batters accurately. Several Major Leaguers used to play Strat-O-Matic. When Lenny Dykstra hit a two-run, walk-off homer against the Astros in the bottom of the ninth to give the Mets a 6–5 victory in Game 3 of the 1986 National League Championship Series, he said that the last time he had done such a thing was when he played Strat-O-Matic against his brother.
Not only could you purchase the cards for every team each season, but Richman also made available old-timer teams, such as the 1927 New York Yankees with Ruth, Gehrig and “Murderers’ Row,” or the 1948 Cleveland Indians with Bob Feller and, finally up from the Negro Leagues after the color barrier was broken, the legendary Satchel Paige.
One winter, just after the New Year in the early 2000s, I phoned Strat-O-Matic in Glen Head, N.Y., to order their recently developed computer version of the game. The guy who answered was extremely helpful, explaining which version would work best with my computer and taking the time to go over other details with me. Toward the end of the conversation, he casually mentioned that he was Hal Richman, who was pitching in because the company was short-staffed after the holidays!
Pressman’s 1962 Roger Maris Action Baseball game caught on after Maris’s amazing 61-home run record-breaking season for the New York Yankees in 1961.
Pressman released a great game in 1962, Roger Maris Action Baseball, essentially a pinball game but designed for two players. One player would launch a marble baseball from the pitcher’s mound using a tiny spring. At the same time, the other operated a wooden bat on a spring to propel the marble across the board, which was populated with holes labeled “single,” “double,” “out,” “double play,” and so on. The outcome was determined by the hole into which the marble fell. There should have been more out holes, as games were usually of the 21-19, 17-14 variety, but it was still a lot of fun.
I made the mistake of trading my Cadaco All-Star Baseball Game with a friend for an impostor called Challenge the Yankees. It used the same model as Cadaco, but there were two teams: the Yankees in their early 1960s heyday and All-Stars from the rest of the Majors. As great as that Yankees lineup may have been, I quickly tired of the game.
By the late 1980s, computer baseball games had begun to overtake board games. One of the earliest (1987) was Earl Weaver Baseball, a simulation developed by Dan Daglow. The graphics were rudimentary, but the simulation of players’ stats was quite accurate. I still have Earl Weaver Baseball II, which used floppy disks, specifically the 5.25-inch versions.
Daglow developed his model to bring us the very popular Tony La Russa series of computer games, called Old Time Baseball. After rolling out Version 3, Daglow replaced the 28 teams’ players and ballparks with the complete lineups of every big league team from 1871 to 1981 (12,000 players in all) and 16 old ballparks. Ballparks included Seals Stadium, the Polo Grounds, and the original Yankee Stadium. The stadiums were beautiful color renditions. The animations were very accurate in terms of the body movements of the pitchers, batters, and fielders. However, aside from skin color, the players were generic and all wore number 11.
One could learn a great deal of history by playing the game. One day, I had the 1876 Chicago White Stockings host the 1941 New York Yankees. The White Stockings were the predecessor of the Chicago Cubs. Their one and only pitcher was a guy named A.G. Spalding, who went 47-12 that season with a 1.75 ERA. He co-founded the sporting goods company that bears his name and helped organize the National League at its start. He also popularized the wearing of a baseball glove. Oh, and he beat the Yankees 4-3.
The video game market began to churn out arcade versions with much more realistic, 3-D graphics. Baseball simulation games became even more sophisticated. Get this! Diamond Mind Baseball so accurately represented what happens on the field that the Boston Red Sox started using the game as part of its data-driven approach to baseball in 2003.
Whatever your favorite game, it’s always the perfect time to dust it off and play it, even when you’re not confined to your home.
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This article first appeared in The Vacaville Reporter on March 24, 2020.
