by Gregg Pearlman
Late in 1969, when I was nine, my dad told me, in a wonderful mixture of cultures, that Santa Claus had told him about the special gift he'd be giving me for Hanukkah. "It's a game, just like one I used to play when I was a boy," Dad said.
"What could it be?" I thought. "Monopoly? Naw, we have that."
I waited with bated breath for roughly fourteen minutes, which is the maximum attention span of a nine-year-old child, and then forgot all about it. Come the holidays, though, I became the owner of a brand new copy of All-Star Baseball, a Cadaco game that had been around since God wore short pants. In the box lived such major league stars as Willie Stargell, Billy Williams, Denny McLain, and the unforgettable Larry Brown, and Paul Casanova. That's about when I learned how to calculate a batting average.
Dad and I didn't discuss it much -- the part about his having had this game as a boy -- but a year or so later, I found his copy of All-Star Baseball -- fairly battered, as it had been around since about 1940, featuring such All-Stars as DiMaggio, White and Suder. (In those days, they didn't bother to give the players' first names. Thank God for those enlightened '60s.)
Each player had a disk -- black-on-white cardboard, with a center cutout, in my dad's game, paper and solid, even somewhat colorful, in mine. What you'd do, see, is you'd put the disk in a spinner on the game board (in mine, a round, plastic pocket; in Dad's, a raised area that the cutout portion would fit over), flick the spinner and wait for it to point to a number (or, more frequently, to the line between two numbers, which meant you'd have to spin it again).
I wish I'd been as careful a kid as he obviously was. His version of All-Star Baseball lasted 30 years before I got hold of it, at which point the game board had about a year to live. I trashed my game board pretty well, too, considering that I played this game during almost every spare moment -- often while watching or listening to real baseball.
The most important area of a disk was the outer half-inch or so. The disks were about four inches in diameter, so a little math (pi times the diameter) would tell you that the circle you were dealing with was about 12.6 inches in circumference. So in theory, if a guy hit .300, about 3.77 inches of that circle should be devoted to hits, right? Right, if the guy never walks. Otherwise it'd be a little less. And if 10 percent of the guy's hits were home runs, then about 0.377 inches should be devoted to home runs. Well, if you were Willie Stargell, you might have well over half an inch devoted to home runs -- just because you were Willie Stargell and hit a lot of home runs.
So overall, this game wasn't terribly realistic. The hitters' disks were calculated solely for their hitting. The pitchers' disks were calculated solely for their hitting -- pitching ability was no factor at all. And I should also mention that in saying these disks were "calculated," I mean that yes, to a certain extent, there was some actual math involved, but more likely, certain players had some stats exaggerated, such as Stargell's home run area. In my dad's game, one pitcher had a huge area for triples. I wonder if he really hit all that many.
The inside of the game box contained the instructions and showed disks for Babe Ruth, and Lou Boudreau (the second of whom I had not heard of at age nine; nor did I know how to say his name), explaining that while Ruth's home run area (a "1" on any given disk) was much larger than Boudreau's, his strikeout area (a "10") was larger as well. Oh.
Still, I played All-Star Baseball just about to death for a year or two, keeping score on the little linescore sheets that Cadaco had thoughtfully enclosed.
Eventually, the enclosed player disks weren't enough. I needed more. More. More! I started lifting names out of boxscores in the newspapers, not only for my deeply beloved San Francisco Giants, but for all other teams, too (even the Tokyo Giants -- whose names were entirely Japanese -- because the Giants had played a couple of games there, one of which was televised, which I watched, enraptured).
Using a compass, I created tons and tons of binder-paper disks with major-leaguers' names. Just their names. Not their stats. No, the "stats" I put on the disks were hardly close to real. I mostly guessed. Oh, sure, people like Willie Mays had home run areas of about three inches (of the 12.6 available -- and split up by other numbers, so as to avert suspicion; if my Giants ever lost a game, I don't see how), and other players I'd never heard of were rooked out of the good numbers altogether, but I had tremendous fun. Of course, eventually, I decided that even the major leagues weren't enough. I made disks of my Little League teammates (who, I noticed, stacked up fairly well against most major league lineups in this game).
Of course, when I was nine, I still had hardly a clue as to how real baseball worked. Because that's how my fourth-grade teacher did things for kickball, I was sure that major-league lineups always went like this: catcher, pitcher, first base, second base, shortstop, third base, left field, center field, right field. I can still remember batting Hank Aaron, Roberto Clemente, and Bobby Bonds ninth, despite overwhelming evidence (in the form of newspaper boxscores) that that's not how it was done.
Shortly thereafter, my family moved to Salinas. (It was thoughtful of them to check periodically to make sure I was with them on the way, as opposed to sitting in my room in our old house in Belmont, playing All-Star Baseball.) Eventually, I made player disks for my new Little League team, and my new best friend, Matt, made disks for his.
All-Star Baseball, and my oldest sister, had piqued my interest in baseball cards, which I began collecting shortly before we moved. When we hit Salinas, I discovered that most of the kids in my neighborhood played a baseball game with dice and their cards in a neighborhood-wide league. I couldn't join because (a), the season had already started, and (b) I wouldn't want to be any team but the Giants, which were already taken.
Nevertheless, I played dice baseball up the wazoo by myself, or with friends -- playing nonleague games. Right away, I became seriously involved with the stats, and toward that end, I started -- and stopped -- about a zillion solo "leagues" for which I was the sole statistician. Sometimes these leagues involved the current major league teams (as represented by the baseball cards I had), sometimes they involved made-up teams consisting of formerly active major leaguers -- whose cards I had.
For the current teams, if Matt or I didn't have a player's card, we just wrote his name, team, and position on a checklist. Since the first person we did this for was Pittsburgh's Dave Cash -- Matt was a Pirates fan -- we started referring to him as "Dave Checklist." Eventually -- and I still use the term, even though the practice is extinct -- "Dave Checklist" became a synonym for any ballplayer for whom we needed to use a checklist in lieu of his card.
I didn't know a heck of a lot about baseball cards, except that I enjoyed them and found them endlessly fascinating, especially when I first collected them in 1970. To know that Dave May's middle name was LaFrance, or that Frank Reberger, who was a Padre according to his card, was in fact the tallest Giant, even taller than Willie McCovey, well, most other kids my age didn't know that sort of thing (or care).
But to say I didn't know much about baseball cards is to say that I had no concept of their monetary value. To me, their value was (and is) entirely intrinsic. So I didn't think twice about putting my initials, or entire name, on the back of my cards to identify them as my own. (Matt still has some 1970 and 1971 cards with "GP" on the back.) I thought it was a good idea to obscure the cap of a traded player, usually by using a similarly colored felt pen -- because, heck, that's what Topps did. And I used to make Dave Checklists out of not only checklists, but of other cards of which I had a surfeit -- such as Rookie cards, which I didn't know would be worth zillions of dollars twenty years later. In fact, so ignorant of this was I that I even cut my Rookie cards in half so that I had the full use of both players in my dice games. (Believe me, I almost want to weep when I think about the Don Sutton/Bill Singer Rookie card that I cleaved in twain.)
Of course, it doesn't really matter much. I don't plan to sell these things anyway, and I'm thrilled that I still have them.
But back to the dice game, which required two normal, six-sided dice and went like this:
By the way, the 12 roll counted as a stolen base only when there were runners on (which I guess should be obvious) -- it didn't matter which base. Double 4's or double 6's were double plays (again, only with runners on base, and again, it didn't matter which base). Otherwise, the fly outs always advanced runners.
Now, it's not as if I don't expect you to be able to work out these probabilities for yourself; it's just that we had no concept of probabilities, either of dice rolls or of baseball plays themselves. You can tell that this was a hitter's league: .313 batting average, .606 slugging percentage, .361 on-base percentage -- and it never occurred to me exactly why, when I kept stats, the team pitching leader usually had an ERA in the 5's or 6's. We tended to think that if a team did well, it was because it was a good team, not because of the luck of our dice rolls.
But the kids in my neighborhood didn't bother with such things. They just played the games and kept track of who won, who lost, and how many homers were hit. No care was taken as to handling a pitching staff, for instance -- a favored pitcher might start every game (which is how Bob Moose of the Pirates once led the neighborhood league in home runs. This was Matt's fault. Again, since I never joined this league, I was on the outside looking in.) No care was taken regarding the team's current roster. While I'm pretty sure they didn't let you use a player who was on another team just because you had his card for your team, they didn't seem to mind if you used inactive players, especially if you didn't have a card for, say, an active second baseman. For example, the kid who had the Braves used Wayne Causey at short, and I don't even think Causey was active in 1970, and in any event, he hadn't played for the Braves in years.
The kid who had the Giants cut a Seattle Pilots Rookie card in half -- and is probably kicking himself now, if he happens to know how much that card would have been worth, intact -- so he could use pitcher Miguel (Mickey, as he was known) Fuentes. This was all good and fine, except for two things: (a) the Giants' pitcher was named Miguel Puente, and (b) Fuentes had died before the 1970 season began.
This game was turned into a real production number. The kids in my neighborhood made baseball stadiums out of spread-out paper bags and drew on them with crayons. One guy -- he was about 16 or 17 and still had no clue about how unrealistic this game was -- went so far as to cut up shoeboxes to make an outfield fence for the park his Minnesota Twins played on.
Meanwhile, Matt and I would get out the cards, usually at my house, and engage in furious Giants-Pirates battles. (Matt was originally a Dodgers fan, having been extremely young and not knowing any better, but someone else already had the Dodgers, so he chose the Pirates and has remained faithful ever since, despite overwhelming evidence that only Giants fans can consider themselves true Americans. But that's another argument.)
It took a while, but I eventually realized that I didn't actually need the cards to play the dice game, and besides, making paper-bag stadiums was a hassle and took up too much room.
Eventually we became pretty sophisticated; too sophisticated for simplistic baseball card games. We realized that our dice game was just not realistic enough and didn't have enough plays. Oh, I tried various alternatives, ranging between three and six dice, but I just didn't have a clue. For instance, no matter how many dice we used, all 1's was always a home run. In a game in which six 1's was a dinger, somebody'd hit a home run every 1,300 games or so. Try to guess the attendance figures for that league. Luckily, these variants never got far before being abandoned.
A turning point came when I received Sports Illustrated Baseball in 1972. Every player was different, with different possibilities for hits, outs, etc., even versus right- or left-handed pitching. Fielding prowess was taken into account, as was pitching ability. The three dice were six-sided, but the combinations were different. The black die, the "tens" die, had a 1, two 2's and three 3's. One of the white dice was numbered from 0 to 5, and the other from 0 to 4, with an extra 0 thrown in.
After two or three years of playing SI Baseball, mostly with Matt, I thought I had figured out the probabilities for each die roll. I was slightly off, but close. (I thought there were 222 possibilities, not knowing that all I had to do was to cube 6.)
When I was thirteen, I undertook quite a task: to play an entire 154-game season for my 16 SI All-Time All-Star teams that I had received as a present the previous Christmas -- or Hanukkah, depending on how you want to look at it. (That's about the point where the historical value of baseball became interesting to me, and I started buying encyclopedias and other reference works. So I tend to give a lot of credit for Sports Illustrated for helping to generate my enthusiasm for baseball's historical aspects.)
It took me five years to finish, what with the batting and pitching stats taking forever to complete -- and type out. I was thrilled to have the Giants and A's finish on top, with the Giants winning the World Series. (Back then, I was an A's fan too, before I learned, correctly, to hate them.)
This was five years of labor, and when the Series ended, I experienced a pall not unlike post-partem depression. I needed to fill this void, and thus was born the Fake League.
What happened was, with my now superior knowledge of how SI Baseball worked -- I still don't really know -- I created an awesome player who could be expected to hit about .400 with 70 home runs. Naming him Joe Shlabotnick, after Charlie Brown's favorite player, I decided to create a fictional team for him. Shlabotnick became part of the Bournemouth Gynecologists, a name ripped off from Monty Python.
The Gynecologists were to be a barnstorming team, playing against my SI 1971 and All-Time All-Star teams, as well as the 1971 All-Star and All-All-Time All-Star teams I created from my existing team sheets (not to mention my All-Horrible team created from the 1971 sheets).
I played a 32-game schedule first; the Gynecologists, all 15 of them -- nine position players and six pitchers -- went 22-10. So I decided to play, for no apparent reason, a 64-game barnstorming season. Shortly after this began, I created a second 15-player team, the LJSI -- the Long John Silver Impersonators (again ripped off from Python -- in a pattern that would become familiar), who were the Gynecologists' "farm" team and who also would barnstorm against my SI teams.
Both the Gynecologists and LJSI did astoundingly well. After the latter team played 64 games, I merged the two rosters and played 98 more Gynecologists games. The G's went 132-30, with 100 taters from Joe Shlabotnick, who, smelling a pay raise, slammed four on the final day.
This all took about a year, and the inevitable letdown occurred once I'd finished. I decided that an entire league was in order: the Fake League.
The FL was chock full of silly Pythonoid names, both for players and for the teams, which were:
Some of these names weren't city names, just because I didn't know enough cities in England. Some arose from mishearing something in a Python sketch ("The Burrows, Oswestry"). Just try to imagine what some of the uniforms must have looked like.
Each team consisted of 4-by-6 index cards, one for each player, rather than the standard SI team sheets. (I wanted to make trades easily.) I played a 48-game barnstorming season for each FL team against existing SI teams, and each team won at least 30 games. Then I made a couple of trades and embarked on the Fake League season, based on the 1979 National League schedule.
By then, I had become close friends with David Beck, who enjoyed the Fake League and the SI game -- which we thought was the ultimate in realism. He especially liked the River-Wideners, who sported two stars named Gehrig Pearlman and DiMaggio Beck (and had corruptions of the names of three of our other friends from high school).
My team, of course, was the Gynecologists, for whom I was listed as the manager and team owner. Of course, since I was also the Commissioner of the Fake League, there was a certain amount of team success built in.
But Dave remained loyal to the River-Wideners, even though I had made up cards for both Dave and myself. (I created us as .250 hitters with little power, speed or fielding ability; that made it all the more satisfying, for me, anyway, if one of us played well -- especially me.) We rarely "played" for the Gynecologists; Dave had his coaching duties and I had to run the club (and the league), but we did well in our limited appearances. (I had always wanted to inject myself into a baseball game somehow.)
About a year after we had become friends, Dave moved to southern California to live with his dad. We began corresponding via cassette tape almost immediately, and I would update him as to how the Fake League was going.
In the time we'd been friends, I had been reluctant -- albeit only slightly -- to show Dave the Fake League, lest he consider me a unique moron. I didn't know until well after he moved that he had a league, too -- and had the same fear.
His league wasn't based on SI Baseball, however. Instead, Dave played a game that he and his brother had made up when he was about ten years old.
As the story goes, when Dave's brother, Patrick, was about eight, he somehow got smacked in the face with a toy hubcap and required stitches. For this he was awarded one of those large, ugly troll dolls that were so popular in the late 1960s and early '70s -- the ones with the hair that stuck straight up. My sister had a bunch of those.
Patrick named his "Alex." Alex Beck. Around Alex revolved a universe full of other, similar dolls, stuffed toys and other things. Dave and Patrick were both playing Little League baseball, so they decided to form a league at home, consisting of troll dolls, stuffed toys, etc. Alex was the biggest and best.
Of course, they needed a baseball game to play, so they invented one. This involved writing plays ("GND OUT"; "HR!!!"; "SAC BUNT OUT"; Dave used to use one of those ruler-stencil things to write the letters with) on cardboard squares and pulling them out of a shoebox to see what would happen.
As should be obvious, a huge realism problem existed in this game, but, at least, if Dave or Patrick felt there were too few home runs, too many double plays, etc., they could add cards, or remove them, as the case may be.
Dave and Patrick kinda-sorta formalized their league, changing Alex's last name to Bock in the process. (Alex had a troll-doll brother named Sylvester, who had managed to lose an arm. Sylvester Bock became a one-armed baseball player -- a catcher yet -- in this league. I think eventually it was decided that he had two arms after all.)
The league started with six teams and eventually grew to 16, in two conferences. At first, games lasted six innings, largely because that's how long Little League games last, and Dave and Patrick didn't know any better.
As indeed did Alex and Sylvester, most of the players in this league had silly names, such as Jimmy Owl, Pup Did, and Bib Bibby. I don't know how long Dave and Patrick actually maintained the league before shelving it for several years, but around 1978, Dave began revitalizing it, and with Patrick's help, established the current, 16-team version of the league, now called the National Baseball League, or NBL.
The NBL had (and indeed has) an American Conference and a National Conference, each with two four-team divisions, which line up this way:
Some explanation is in order. First, the original six teams, I think, were the two Fretnom teams, Tollum, Shearyear, and Worlsam. I don't remember the sequence of the other additions, except that Burch City, Vandenburg, Leynenhom, and Reax were the most recent expansion teams. (Obviously, the league had to be realigned somewhat.)
When I was first exposed to the NBL, I chided Dave for his extremely silly team names. Just by looking, you can pretty much tell which ones he and Patrick made up as kids: the Townbombs, the Specials, the Americans, the Supersmashers. I think my own favorite team names, from a purely imaginative viewpoint, are the Ospreys, the Morays, the Specials and maybe the Pioneers. (By the way, Dave had been misspelling Missiles for years before I pointed it out.) But no matter how silly the team names and players are and have been, they do indeed conjure up real images.
Dave eventually created a home for the league: a land called Azhaerdlikl on a planet called Clariyvl. The Azhaerdlikl news media refers to the AC West as the Reptile Division, what with the Alligators, Snakes, and Lizards all sunning themselves on Rocks -- seeing as Worlsam is pretty much always on the bottom. (I submit that the AC East should be called the Destruction Division.)
The Luten Americans raise some questions. First, why are the Americans in the National Conference? This has not been adequately explained. Second, why Americans? Dave has decided that Clariyvl was settled by an American space expedition. Oh.
Dave and Patrick's game became something more than just drawing cards out of a shoebox. Player characteristics came into play. Each batter had one or two "stars," or not, depending on how good a hitter he was. Each pitcher had zero to three "threes." Eventually they added "asterisks" for footspeed and degree symbols for fielding prowess (these were called "fielding circles").
Play cards became dependent on these characteristics: "HR [star star]/FO" which is a home run if the batter's a "double-star," otherwise it's a fly out. There were plenty of cards with plays that happened for no apparent reason -- random stolen bases, cards that say that the batter bunts, no matter who he is or what the conditions are when he's batting. (Imagine the complete lack of joy you'd experience if your cleanup hitter, with runners on first and second, down by two runs in the ninth, drew a "SAC BUNT OUT" card with one out.)
Around 1978 or 1979, Patrick lost interest, and Dave became the sole custodian of the NBL. Also around that time, I was exposed to it for the first time.
I had gone down to visit Dave in southern California, and he decided to bite the bullet, figuring, "He's got his Fake League. If he thinks my NBL is stupid, the hell with him."
We chose teams and played a couple of games, which I think we split. I laughed at his team and player names, but still adopted one of his players as my favorite: Harry Eml, then the third baseman for the Snakes. He had such a ludicrous name that it just warmed my heart. I was introduced to all of Dave's players, great, terrible and in between. The two most enduring NBL players, to me, are John "Jage" Jekleman, Melly's outstanding right fielder, indeed Dave's favorite player (Dave's favorite major leaguer, for a while, was Fred Lynn in his prime, he was just like Jekleman, although a center fielder.) and Jeff Botnel, Luten's second baseman, who hits like a first baseman and has played in sixty zillion consecutive games
Dave showed me his stats, records, league standings, Hall-Of-Fame. "Geez, how many seasons have you played?" I asked. He'd played about 25 or 30 game-years (that is, 25 or 30 years, with two or three seasons, each consisting of 60, 88, or 90 games, depending on the size of the league). "My God," I said, "where do you find the time? It doesn't take long to play the games, but the stats take forever." I was speaking from experience; handwritten statistics compilation does take forever. Hell, it even takes forever if you do them on a computer.
But I was awash with admiration; I sure wished I could compile stats that fast and move from season to season so rapidly. "How do you do it?" I asked.
"Oh, I just make up the stats."
Somewhere within me, I heard a loud, discordant rumble. Dave's simple answer had torn away the very fabric of my being. He makes up the stats? What of integrity? What of honesty? What, for crying out loud, of accuracy? Dave says he still remembers the expression on my face.
So I derided him for quite a while, continuing to slog through my Fake League season, stats and all. But I found the NBL fascinating, so one day I asked Dave to send me copies of his NBL rosters and a list of his play cards. I received them on March 10, 1980, which is the date you can safely use if someone ever asks you when my association with The Game started.
For Dave's game was The Game.
I had played about a third of the Fake League season, along with a like percentage of the Fake Farm League season. (The FFL consisted of only four teams: the Chick-Ago Pink Sox, Naugatuck Buzzards, Passaiac Piltdowns, and Toro Park Blood-Causers (in honor of all the wonderful softball games in which I had played in Toro Regional Park in Salinas); each team had only 15 players, of whom five each were "owned" by one of the FL teams. Big realism problem. Also, I hated playing the FFL games, because they didn't really matter.) Concurrently, I created the Continental Association and Continental League (CA/CL), to be played in Dave's format. (I found out years later that in around 1960, there was serious talk about -- and serious action taken toward -- introducing a third major league. Luckily, it turned out that simple expansion of the National and American Leagues would be the answer. The point here, which blew me away, is that the third league was to be called the Continental League.)
I guess things had begun to pall with the Fake League. After all, by the time the actual -- and inaugural -- FL season started, I had played 32 games with the original Gynecologists, a 162-game barnstorming season (along with a 64-game season for the LJSI), and eleven 48-game exhibition seasons for the other Fake League teams, for a total of 786 Fake League games altogether -- and all, again, before the start of the actual FL season.
But then the stuff from Dave arrived and took up lots of my time. It's almost like getting tired of your girlfriend and dating someone new behind her back; The Fake League saw less and less action, and the CA/CL saw more and more. The idea of making up the stats and having a long-run-type game was much more appealing than doing tons and tons of weekly stats.
Before even receiving the NBL rosters and play card lists, I had made up 24 teams -- none of this bastard-league, 14-team stuff that you see in the American League. The current CA/CL season was to be 2050 -- 70 years after the current "Earth" year. I decided I wanted the development of CA/CL baseball to more or less parallel major league baseball as we knew it, without some of the bothersome details such as extra leagues and the disorganization of the original National Association, etc.
The teams were as follows:
I really enjoyed the team names. See, the thing about making up teams is that I didn't want to go around using current major league team names; I didn't want to associate the new leagues with the majors at all, and I certainly didn't want to associate a team with a major league counterpart (or with an NBL team). On the other hand, it's tough to come up with new team names; they've all been taken, really. Using NBA and NFL team names wasn't so bad, though. I never associated my teams with those teams. Also, I used some pseudo-major-league names, such as the Greens -- in the nineteenth century, it wasn't at all uncommon to give a team a name based on the color of its uniforms. Blues, Grays, Browns, Reds, certainly, even Maroons showed up in the major leagues at one time or another. Well, that's the Greens.
I envisioned Lenenberg being analogous, geographically, to San Francisco, and Staunton to Los Angeles. They too had moved west, leaving Merton, the main east coast city; the Greens played in the Brooklyn-like Ellerton. (I had trouble, at first, trying to disassociate these teams with the Giants and Dodgers -- I didn't want to hate the Greens.)
Other parallels included CA/CL expansion in years that corresponded to major league expansion years (plus 70, i.e., 2031, 2032, 2039, and 2047). Some franchises moved once, others twice, others not at all. (The Elites and Greens moved west in 2028. Also, the Staley team changed its name from Red Caps -- another "authentic" old-sounding name -- to Rhinos in 1958.) The CA was formed in 1946 -- again, 70 years after the National League's first season -- and the CL came into existence in 1971.
I gave the league a history, established the occasional dynasty, but rolled percentile dice randomly to determine yearly finishes from 1946 on. I didn't think it was all that important to know exactly where my CA/CL cities were, but Dave had drawn up maps of both Azhaerdlikl and Clariyvl, so I felt I had to do the same. I first tried a map of the United States -- upside-down and backwards -- with my 12 "provinces." Dave's response of "that's terrible!" scotched that idea, so I came up with a different "shape."
I played the 2050 CA/CL season -- that is, I played about 10 games per team -- made up the stats, came up with leaders and played the postseason games. By then, Dave had begun sending me handwritten NBL Newsletters that chronicled the season finishes, playoffs, World Series, three-game All-Star Series and the following preseason predictions, so I emulated Dave in sending a newsletter called The Continental Pipeline, which he enjoyed. (I had been sending him a newsletter called The Fake League Scumsucker (TM), which was written in, shall we say, a very loose, silly style designed to answer -- and make some fun of -- the NBL Newsletter.)
Dave and I ended up rooming together at San Diego State University later that year. I took the Fake League and CA/CL down with me, but I maintained the Fake League for maybe another month.
That's when The Game took me over, and I haven't strayed since. (I talk with my dad about The Game every so often. Once he said, "I can tell that when you say 'The Game,' it's capitalized.")
I didn't maintain the CA/CL, however. It had some bugs. For one thing, Dave tended to have team and conference limits on "points" -- stars, asterisks, fielding circles and threes. I didn't know about that, so my teams were seriously overloaded with points, and not very well balanced besides.
Also, I decided that I wanted to build my leagues' history myself as I went along, rather than just making it up, so I canned the CA/CL, went back in time to 1946 and started the CA from scratch, with the original eight teams:
Continental Association (CA)
For some reason, in setting up my 1946 CA, I put the teams in this order. I think it's because this was how they finished in their respective divisions in the 2050 CA, but I'm not sure. But whereas Dave always alphabetizes his NBL, I just keep the CA in this order. It's what I'm used to.
I had stuck the CA/CL in a country ("state," I guess you could call it) called Shercotisca (which I now shortened to Shercot to avoid the "America" parallel) on a planet called Verane. (Clearly we watch too much Star Trek.) Dave had helped with the map once we reached San Diego; he threw in a few mountains and rivers -- on the geography front, I don't have much imagination.
Shercot, I decided, was a monarchy, but a monarchy where the king knows what he's doing. In fact, it was he who brought baseball to Shercot, having somehow visited Dave's planet, where he learned to love the game. (This was just my "tribute" to Dave, I guess.)
I decided, I guess to try and authenticize it and give it an "olden" feel, that the CA would be a dead-ball league with only a few single-stars and even fewer double-stars. The pitchers batted, whereas the DH is in effect in the NBL. (This was not because Dave likes the DH. He doesn't. It's just that he hadn't come up with a pitchers' batting chart, nor did he want to hassle with it in the first place.) I created a pitchers' batting chart, rating pitchers on a zero-to-two-star scale (with no asterisks). Unfortunately, the pitchers hit much better than they should have, so I just instituted the DH on the spurious grounds that, well, sure, the pitchers hit well in the games I played, but they were horrendous in the games I didn't play. Each team, by the way, had only 20 players, not counting the one or two "injury replacements" that popped up.
Early stars included Canleigh's Charlie Adams, a right-handed strikeout artist, and Connie Gleesen, a powerful, rifle-armed right fielder; Merton's Terry Underland, a Yastrzemski-type hitter (though right-handed), and Ernie Murray, an amazing left-handed starter (and his older brother, Stan); Ellerton's number one starter, Edd Burtsin, and center fielder Zach Lemmon, blessed with the best glove in the game (left fielder -- and projected superstar -- Harry Gunders was injured and lost for the season after only two at bats); Staley's leadoff man, center fielder Carl "Pop" Nagelson, and fireballing reliever Milt Kathtarey; first-place Wolfeboro's famous Evens brothers, Gerry (a speedy catcher) and Mel (a third baseman who hit like Don Mattingly -- before anyone had ever heard of Mattingly), Eddie "What A Name" Fame, probably the best right fielder in the game, Carlton Bux, a powerful, switch-hitting first baseman, and Mickey Curry, a stud left-handed starter; Norpont's Kenny Derdiviste, first baseman and home run champ, and Billy Merkenter, who led the league in wins; Lange City's Gary Lep, team manager and shortstop extraordinaire, and Kent Herlingsen, who not only threw with both hands but did so in outstanding fashion (hey, it's fiction); Alverton's Lefty Fonder, another fine starter, and (best for last) Max Mendey.
I think it's a coincidence that his name is Max, but he had the maximum possible "points." Mendey was a switch-hitting center fielder with a fielding circle, two stars, and two asterisks -- far and away the best player in the league. I didn't realize this till years later, but his similarity to Mickey Mantle didn't end with their initials. (I tend to think of Mantle as the Max Mendey of the American League, rather than the other way around.)
As I said, Wolfeboro won the first CA championship, though there was no one to play against in the postseason. Instead, I had a seven-game All-Star Series, which Dave hated for a number of reasons:
For five seasons, the All-Star Series was, essentially, my World Series, even though it never felt like it mattered much.
The NBL had no in-season player transactions or managerial changes, largely because Dave never played full seasons, but mostly because Dave simply decided never to make such moves. (For one thing, his seasons were only 88 games long.) I decided that the CA would emulate the NBL in this fashion, which led to the occasional problem later on, as the CA played a 140-game schedule.
At this time, there was still a great deal that Dave and I didn't quite understand about baseball. For instance, both of our leagues were chock full of the types of players that virtually do not exist: speedy catchers and first basemen, power-hitting second basemen and shortstops, etc. We both reasoned, "Hey, it's not our problem if the major leagues don't have players like that. There's no reason a shortstop can't hit 40 homers a year." We had never heard of Bill James, let alone his Defensive Spectrum (DH, 1b, lf, rf, 3b, cf, 2b, ss; catcher is not on the Defensive Spectrum), which simply states that the more demanding a player's defensive position is, the less offense is expected from him. That is, as you move rightward on the Spectrum, offensive demands will decrease as defensive demands increase. And this had simply never occurred to us.
Another thing Dave and I had were catchers who threw left-handed. Again, we couldn't come up with a good reason not to have them. Sure, we'd heard theories, ranging from the seemingly ludicrous (it has to do with the rotation of the earth) to the reasonable (since there are more right-handed hitters than left, there would be more of a chance for a hitter to get in the way of a left-handed catcher's throw than that of a right-hander) to the most likely (a lefty catcher's throw would tend to tail toward the third-base side of second base, thus forcing a second baseman or shortstop to reach across his body for the throw, then reach back to tag the runner sliding in), but we just decided to ignore them.
Dave, by the way, threatened for years to introduce a left-handed shortstop to the NBL. When I remind him of his dire insanity, he reminds me of Kent Herlingsen, my switch-pitcher, so I tend to shut up. Herlingsen's advantage, in terms of The Game, was that he simply negated the platoon advantage, even for a switch-hitter. But what would happen in real baseball, especially with a switch-hitter at bat? Dave got all over me for that.
For the 1947 season, I expanded rosters to 25 players and adopted the designated hitter rule, which made The Game easier to play. By December, 1980, I had played my first four CA seasons, and Dave and I first talked seriously about somehow marketing this game. However, we still had no idea how well it would work over the course of a full season, so I took on the task of playing 140 games for one team, the Canleigh Hawks, over the five-week Winter break.
I was a natural for this, seeing as how I'd managed once to play an entire nine-inning Sports Illustrated game in nine minutes. I tend to memorize most of the key elements of most of the charts in a baseball simulation, given enough time, so my plan was to play 10 Hawks' games a day, then do a couple of stat sheets. I actually completed the season in 13 days, staying up till about 4 o'clock one morning to complete the last 20 games. I'd had two major injuries, including the loss of Connie Gleesen for the season after about two weeks. I managed the Gleesenless Hawks to a 70-70 record, mostly on the strength of DH Kenny Derdiviste's absolute monster season.
After that season (1950) season, I decided I really wanted to have a World Series to play, so I created the Shercotan National Association (SNA), which robbed about five players from each CA team and required about 150 new players overall (as well as some former CA players who had been languishing in the minors since 1946). The teams were, again in the order in which I created them (and still keep them):
Shercotan National Association (SNA)
In its then current form, The Game featured tons of play cards that said things like "HR [star star]"; nothing else. The question, "What if your batter isn't a double-star?" inspired Dave to develop "Alternate Play Cards," a book of spiral-bound 4-by-6 index cards, each with 12 "alternate plays." The aforementioned card might now have a little red "4" in one corner or another, so the card would mean "Home run for a double-star; if the batter isn't a double star, see Alternate Play Card 4," at which time we'd roll a 12-sided die to see which play it corresponded to on APC 4.
Also, one of us -- I forget which, probably Dave -- had hit upon the idea of rewarding high-average hitters who didn't necessarily have power or speed. Previously, Pete Rose types were limited to just the asterisks and stars to denote a high batting average. Often, such a player would have just a single asterisk -- because he didn't have enough power for a star, or enough speed for two asterisks. The "H" was a new characteristic, to go along with stars and asterisks.
But after the Hawks' season, I came to the conclusion that some more major changes were in order, so when the Spring semester started, Dave and I decided to revamp The Game. We made a list of the plays we would use, plus new ones we needed. We also came up with the "Z" as the antithesis of the H. This gave us the freedom to create a Dave Kingman type, who might hit tons of home runs but still have a low batting average (which was heretofore unlikely).
Another addition had to do with in-game endurance for pitchers. As we had with the H and Z, we came up first with the positive quality: the "A," which simply gave a pitcher a better chance to stay in the game longer. Later we added the "F," which really stood for Fatigue. If you had one, you couldn't have the other.
We bought a few sheets of good-quality off-white posterboard, drew squares on it, wrote our plays on it in a new, uniform, easy-to-understand format, and cut the cards, using the paper cutter at the SDSU library. (The old cards were of different shapes and sizes; when we'd rustle our hands in the shoebox and feel around for the cards, we would -- consciously or unconsciously, I don't know -- seek out a card that "felt like" a home run card. The new cards were all the same size and shape, however, so that problem was averted.)
We threw the cards into an ornate cookie tin and played our first game in a format that now had Alternate Play Charts -- which weren't substantially different from Alternate Play Cards; the new term just sounded better -- as well as H and Z charts, "Double-Letter" keys (that described certain conditions, such as "after the fifth inning" or "previous batter on base.") and more.
For stolen bases, runner advancement and other miscellaneous things, the new version of The Game used a convention that the old version had: circles and squares on the back of each card. There were twice as many circles as squares, and half of all of these were shaded, the other half hollow. Based on the various possibilities, we came up with advance and steal possibilities, but it wasn't as all-encompassing as we'd hoped.
To kick off our new game, we created the International Baseball League (IBL), with which we hoped to market The Game. The IBL had 24 teams, with names (for both teams and players) mostly lifted from the NBL and CA/SNA. Our "test" season consisted of, I think, 16 games for each team (two against division opponents, one against teams in the other division), along with playoffs, World Series and All-Star Series.
The IBL was a fun league, but the game was still in its infancy, and the league died after that one season, although we did make trades and develop rosters for the next season in addition to writing a gameplay manual (which was extremely involved and took forever; plus I don't think we finished it).
In the meantime, we had continued with our own incumbent leagues and did a couple more seasons' worth in each. When the end of the school year arrived, we left San Diego State for good. Dave, in his deeply sensitive, caring way, suggested that I take the NBL with me "so that I can have a social life." (Why he didn't expect himself to do the same, I don't know.)
I did indeed maintain the CA/SNA along with the NBL, although I paid much more attention to my leagues than to his (although I did keep the NBL up to date and found myself sending him the NBL Newsletter). In my 1955 season, I played 140 games apiece for my mediocre Norpont Panthers and my terrible Rosleyville (nee Hemader) Stingrays. Shortly thereafter, I moved to San Francisco, where I not only continued to work on the CA/SNA, but also ran off an 88-game Superston Lizards season for Dave, who now lived near the LA area again.
Though Dave didn't have then NBL -- or even The Game -- with him, we still worked on it together and made changes, adding further characteristics -- "Color Codes" -- for both batters and pitchers. For batters, the codes represented characteristics such as striking out a lot ("Power Whiffer," we called it), not striking out a lot ("Contact Hitter"), walking a lot ("Walker") and the ability to hit well with runners on base ("Clutch Hitter"). Pitchers' color codes were for good control ("Control"), high strikeout percentage ("Whiffer"), a specialty pitch, such as a knuckleball (no nickname) and high ground ball percentage ("Sinker/Slider Pitcher"). This seemed to work well, though we didn't use the color codes for long, because we improved and updated them. The color codes, by the way, were squares for batters and circles for pitchers (red or blue, shaded or not).
In 1983, I was extremely jazzed about beginning the 1960 season, in which I would play 154 games each for the Ellerton Greens and Verville Blues, who had acquired Max Mendey and were the odds-on favorite to win it all -- and meet Ellerton in the World Series. (By then, I had expanded my CA/SNA seasons to 154 games per team.) In a fit of delerium, I had decided to create a third league, the United Players' Association (UPA), for 1959, with it being a foregone conclusion that the UPA would last only one season. I rolled dice to determine randomly who would jump to the new league, and Mendey was one of them. At first, I was very disappointed, because Max was born to play in Alverton forever, but then I thought, "Hey, the UPA is Mendey's idea, and several CA/SNA players will jump with him." In fact, I nicknamed it the Mendey Association. The UPA had only six teams:
United Players' Association
I made Mendey the playing manager of Norden, which had such stars as 1958 CA batting champion Harvey Gill, late of the Eels, former Canleigh catcher Gary Danbury, and ex-Titan third baseman Curt Knott. Norden won the league championship, to my utter lack of surprise, and Mendey was the MVP. Gill won the batting championship.
But the league died right away -- it had to. This, however, left me with the problem of reintegrating UPA players into the CA/SNA (sometimes referred to as just "Casna"). I decided I wouldn't do a Mexican League-type ban, so the renegade players were welcomed back, by and large, with open arms. Mendey, however, couldn't return to the Spiders. Longtime Titans star Rip McClonney was in center field for Alverton now and had won an MVP award in 1959. In fact, the loss of Mendey had caused a flurry of trades: Alverton traded longtime star closer Gurty Harwich to Lange City for McClonney; Lange City traded longtime star starter Al Strane (for whom a Cy Young-type award was named in the 2050 era -- actually, the pitcher was named for the award, which was supposed to have been named after the pitcher) to Rosleyville for star left fielder Smoke Richardson; Rosleyville traded Gerry and Mel Evens (now a center fielder and first baseman, respectively, and still outstanding players) to Merton City (nee Feten) for first baseman Bernie Murcheson and talented center fielder Larry August.
But with Mendey returning to the CA/SNA, I couldn't just reverse the trades. Alverton wouldn't hear of it. Not only that, but even the terrible Alverton Stars (formerly the pretty bad Lenenberg Chargers), for everything else they did need, had a fine center fielder in Kevin Lerner. The only team that really could use Mendey was the Verville Blues, whose center fielder was a fine fielder, but not good enough to overcome his bat. Mendey just signed with Verville -- as a free agent, I guess -- and settled into the third spot in the lineup, between erstwhile third-place hitter Ron Hart (the DH), now moved up a notch, and right fielder Rich Walls, a right-handed Darryl Strawberry-type without the attitude. Ricky Jordake, the left fielder, had had a marvelous year in 1959, and batted after Walls. This was an awesome lineup even without Mendey. Adding Mendey made Verville invincible.
So I began that 1960 season just knowing that Ellerton and Verville would meet in the Series. Ellerton, who'd won four straight pennants, reinstated ex-UPA-ite Rex Carltenson as their DH, which improved their lineup drastically. (Carltenson hit like a switch-hitting 1989 version of Will Clark, but without the run production. Harry Gunders, batting ahead of him, took care of all that.)
A lot of incumbent CA/SNA players were released or sent down, which meant that they stayed in limbo until their "owning" team (or any other team, if the player had been released and unclaimed) needed them to cover an injury. I still didn't have in-season roster changes (except for injury replacements). Several players retired (or weren't good enough to be picked up). Each CA/SNA team ended up with about half a dozen potential injury replacements, which meant that I wouldn't be making up too many players for a while.
(That's how we usually handled injury replacements (IRs). We'd just make them up on the spot, and they'd join the team in time for the next game. Usually they'd just be leaks -- no stars, asterisks or fielding circles (or threes), but sometimes, such as in the Connie Gleesen case in the 1950 Hawks' season, if an outstanding player was injured, I'd give the team a break by bringing up a decent IR, who in that case was Paul Redditor, once a nondescript Norpont IR, whom I gave a star -- and who played like one, for a while.)
The problem in cutting out the fat and reintegrating good UPA players was this: Many players, upon moving to the UPA, had their points increased, just so I'd have some decent players in the UPA. One person I can name specifically was Verville's second baseman, Alex Cordileris, who'd been a sixth-place hitter with a single star. In the UPA, he had two stars and led the league in homers. When he returned to the Blues, I didn't want to remove the second star. That kind of thing happened constantly; the upshot of this was that CA/SNA teams now had far more points than they had had previously, so the overall caliber of players was higher. In other words, in 1959, the talent in the CA/SNA was diluted by, say, 15 percent, but in 1960 it was increased by, say, 25 to 30 percent because I didn't want to "rob" the returning UPA players of their newfound points (and because I integrated most of the better players I had created specifically for the UPA).
This meant that just about every CA/SNA team had, for instance, two stud starters and a stud closer, two to four double-stars in their lineup and a whole bunch of players with H's and not that many Z's. This effectively devalued the type of player who had no points whatsoever and I think that the whole UPA idea hurt the CA/SNA overall.
By the spring of 1983, I could tell that Dave missed The Game and the NBL, so I sent it all down to him, along with the new play charts I was using. (I was rolling percentile dice to determine plays now, rather than drawing cards out of a cookie tin. The play cards tended to disintegrate and become almost round, which caused problems, seeing as how our "new, uniform, easy-to-understand format" had us writing vital information in the corners of the cards.) I did this as part of a big production number in which I virtually bestowed the NBL onto Dave, as if it were his long-lost child.
He was thrilled, although he had just been married, and his wife couldn't have been too excited about having to share him with The Game.
Indeed, that became my problem, to a certain extent. I'd been having a serious relationship with my eventual wife since late 1982, and at the end of October of 1983, she broke up with me, citing, among other things, "too much baseball." (Oh, sure, sometimes she'd stay over, and I'd get up in the middle of the night and run off one or two Greens or Blues games. Big deal.)
Well, I continued the 1960 season for another month or so, but then I just stopped. Just plain stopped. Each team still had about 25 games left, but it was as though Verane just exploded one day. I was horribly depressed about the new developments in my life, and I felt guilty about the CA/SNA, but I didn't return to it. Suffice it to say that I didn't handle rejection well.
Dave and his wife, Wendy (and two-month-old son) had moved to Daly City -- about 15 minutes from my place -- just a couple of days before my girlfriend, Kim, broke up with me. It was wonderful to have this major part of my support net living nearby, but most of the first several months of his and Wendy's life in their new home was occupied with me whining about how things had gone south.
To help distract me, Dave decided that we should do some major revamping of The Game.
Just since I had become involved, we had played about three versions of The Game, I guess: Dave's variously shaped cardboard rectangles, our uniform cardboard squares, and my percentile-dice version (with which I played the 1960 season; I don't really count the dice version I played with the CA/CL).
This new version would require three 12-sided dice, one white, one red, and one blue (and read in that order). We had 432 plays on three pages, called "the 'Three' pages" (even after we added a fourth page later). Each page had 144 plays; a white die roll of 1-4 meant that you looked on page 1, 5-8, page 2, and 9-12 page 3. Thus 1-1-9, an unconditional home run, was the same as 4-1-9. We axed the Alternate Play Charts; plays were either conditional or unconditional. The conditional plays were always things like "FO P3/1B (2B Q3)," which was a fly out for a P3, otherwise it was a single, unless the batter was a Q3, in which case it would be a double.
What's a P3 and a Q3? Well, that was probably the most thing about this version of the game: we changed the terminology. Asterisks for speed became Q's (for quickness) and ranged from 0 to 3. Stars for power became M's (for the ability to "munch" or "mash" the ball; I'll explain that in a bit) and ranged from 0 to 3 also. H's remained H's, but this also incorporated Z's; this new "Hitting Ability Range" (HAR) went from -2 to 2. The numbers were generally superscripted.
The reason we used M's, as opposed to P's for power or something, was that M hadn't been taken yet. P was for overall pitching prowess (replacing the threes, and still ranging from 0 to 3). H (for homer?) was already taken, again, for the HAR. That's why we ended up with things like "u" for bunting ability (-1 to 1), A (and F) for in-game endurance (0 to 1) and "X" to denote a bad fielder.
Here's what we had:
The color codes became number codes:
We called the In-Game Consistency code "The Rich Get Richer, The Poor Get Poorer." For batters, we also added R+, R-, L+ and L-: that is, the batter did better (or worse) against right-handers (or lefties) specifically. A hitter could range from -2 to 2, but couldn't have plus or minus in both. Players could also have as many as two of each number code.
Despite what is now obviously a major lack of other important characteristics, we felt that this game was as good as it was ever going to get. We rewrote all of our charts, dated and made photocopies of everything, and basically whipped The Game into shape and made it playable in this radically new format.
To inaugurate this new version of our Game, we created a league that we would run together and for whom we would play every game. The league was to be kind of like the IBL, but without the pitfalls. For instance, in the IBL, we -- especially I -- lifted names from our respective leagues, both for players and for teams. Also, the IBL had 24 teams -- quite a lot for two guys to keep track of over the long haul.
We called our league the OLB, for "Our League Baseball." Actually, we decided on the name "OLB" before we gave any thought to what it might stand for. The reason for "Our League Baseball" had to do with a tape-related joke. Except for the times we have lived near each other -- in 1980-81 and 1983-89 -- Dave and I have been corresponding on cassette tape, as I said before, since 1978. We used to do little comedy bits and whatnot, and I used to throw in all sorts of things about the Fake League. On my news show, Fake League Commissioner Gregg Pearlman, when asked why he would allow the Gynecologists to add two players (himself and Dave) to the team without giving the same advantage to the other FL teams, was quoted as saying, "Because it's my fucking league, and I'll do whatever I damn well please." So the "Our League" in Our League Baseball basically meant "Our Fucking League."
The OLB had only six teams, with plans to expand eventually:
OLB
Basically, we wanted to use team names that we hadn't used before, or at least not much. (I had used Wolverines in the UPA, and we had a Blades in the IBL.) We created players based on "career codes" and "the Point Allocation Chart."
In the NBL and CA/SNA, players gained or lost points whenever we felt like it (between seasons, of course). Many players never gained points -- and even more never lost points. The upshot of this was that the NBL and CA/SNA were rife with great players who would remain great for eons. It's what we've now come to call the Mendey Syndrome, in honor of Max Mendey, who is now in his early forties and better than ever, just because of my sentimental attachment to him and unwillingness to let him decline. The career codes and Point Allocation Chart were designed to avoid this.
This doesn't mean that they were designed well, necessarily. We don't know, really, seeing as how we only did one OLB season, to my eternal sorrow.
Each OLB player had a career code that consisted of, say, three to 10 numbers (from 1 to 9), letters (from a to e) and symbols (either a slash (/) or a backslash(\)). A given career code might look like this: aaaa19be/dc\. The numbers and letters corresponded to point gain/loss rolls. For instance, if a players code were a 3 for a given year, he'd need to roll 1-3 to lose points, 4-8 to remain the same, 9-11 to gain points and 12 to both gain and lose points (for instance, he might gain an M and lose a Q). The numbers and letters had basically the same function. If a slash appeared in a career code, it would eventually be replaced by (depending on a die roll) one to six "e" codes (which were highly volatile, with a high percentage of change). The slash added the possibility of a longer career. The backslash, on the other hand, signified the end of a career. The backslash would be replaced by one to six "c" codes -- which had low point-gain probability and high loss probability -- the last of which would represent the player's last season. That's it. Irrevocably finished.
The Point Allocation Chart was a series of die rolls for each offensive, defensive and pitching characteristic. We had separate charts for rookies, non-rookies, gains and losses. Each player went through quite an involved process before we could tell just what kind of player he'd be.
Still, we got through it, and we held a draft, determining the draft order beforehand and deciding what strategy each team would use in drafting the players. (For instance, one team might stress pitching and defense, another team might stress left-handed hitting, etc.) Even if we knew what they were, we couldn't have used "standard" major league drafting strategies, simply because no new major leagues have developed lately wherein each team had to draft an entire roster of players from a pool of talent (although the Senior Professional Baseball League certainly had to).
But we did do our draft, and in fact it's funny now to look at the draft list to see which players were drafted then; there are some whom we can't believe went so early in the draft, and others who should have been picked a lot sooner. We created about 120 players, although we'd only need 90 at a time.
Finally, our teams were ready. We set our regular lineups and pitching rotations and were ready to start the season, which would consist of 90 games per team (and 270 overall). Why such a short season? For one thing, each team played each other team 18 times. That's enough. A 150-game schedule would have had teams playing each other 30 times, which would become astoundingly boring. The schedule, as it was, had teams playing two three-game series a week, starting on Monday and Friday. No games were played on Thursdays. The 90 games were scheduled in three rounds of 30 games each. As with the NBL and CA/SNA, we didn't permit in-season roster changes, except for injury replacements and, for the last half of Round 3, late-season callups (which consisted mostly of previous injury replacements and some players who were not drafted in the beginning).
We played these games at a terrific pace, usually nine a day, whenever I went to Dave and Wendy's place. We were hoping to finish the season by August 10, their son's first birthday. A couple of things slowed us down, though. First, I was the sole statistician of the OLB. I did batting and pitching stats (and fielding stats for a while -- they're a horrible drudge), and these were time-consuming, especially without a computer. So usually we couldn't play games till I had done the stats, and I was always reluctant to do them. Each team took about half an hour.
The other factor was motivation. Because of what had gone on with Kim, it was hard to motivate me to do anything. Now, I'm aware that this is entirely my fault, but that's beside the point. Dave pretty much had to bust my hump to do OLB stuff.
Around April, Kim and I got back together, for good this time, and the OLB suddenly took a back seat, which bothered Dave. I think it was fine with him that I was now in good spirits, but he adopted, shall we say, an attitude. I remember one occasion where we had set a date to work on The Game -- I think it was actually Game-related work rather than just playing a few OLB games -- and I begged off because Kim had that weekend free and we were going to get together.
Well, Dave took that very personally, it seems, and he got all over my case -- in a letter, no less -- stating, essentially, that I had reneged on an oral agreement. What I had done, basically, was let him down, and I felt bad about that, but heck, we're best friends; we've let each other down hundreds of times over the years, and those times didn't elicit harsh letters. I still don't know whether he was genuinely mad at me, mad at himself, mad at Wendy, or mad at Kim. Luckily, he seems to have forgiven me since.
It took probably six months longer to finish the OLB season than we wanted it to take. Kim moved in with me in August, 1984, and Dave and I both had our hands full with work and relationships. I played probably the last two weeks' worth of games by myself; Dave just didn't have the time to play them with me. This was kind of disappointing because we had played all the OLB games together previously, and it just didn't feel right to play an OLB game by myself.
Lindenville won the league championship by a fairly wide margin, which made the last few weeks of the season anticlimactic at best. Dannarial, Rellenton, and, later, Wind City gave the '85ers a bit of a run, but Lindenville seemed to be toying with the competition. They had the three best hitters and two of the three best starting pitchers in the league, and it was just no contest. In that situation, that's when you really need a World Series or some kind of "thing" to play for in order to boost your spirits a little, but there was nothing. We couldn't even really play an All-Star series because there were only six teams; how do you divide up the players? So we ended up playing -- my idea, I'm afraid -- a three-game series pitting Lindenville against an All-Star team made up of players from the other five teams. Lindenville, of course, got killed. Absolutely pointless series.
We had decided to add a league for the next season, only there was no next season. After over five years, we just stopped working on The Game. The CA/SNA was in limbo somewhere, the OLB just died, the NBL was in Dave's closet. We'd pretty much lost the bug to work on our marvelous Game. We figured we'd taken it about as far as we could, and the next step was to put it on computer, which was impossible considering that neither of us had one that we could actually program. Dave had a Texas Instruments 99-4A computer that he lent me on an extended basis, but it had no disk drive or software, so it was of little use.
But from time to time, however, I still pored over Dave's (and my) NBL stuff, and sometimes I'd take to reading my CA/SNA player cards, 3-by-5 index cards with some of their season stats and the teams they played for. By early 1988, the bug had returned.
In the meantime, I had begun playing and enjoying various computer baseball games. In 1986 I began working at a computer magazine (actually, the TI computer had helped after all), and as a condition of employment I bought an 8-bit Atari computer, which even then wasn't being supported by Atari or any particular software companies. Still, one of my first pieces was a review of a game called Micro League Baseball, which was fun, but it was no "The Game."
I played a couple of other games that were similar, but didn't have Micro League's graphics, so they were boring to look at and, on the whole, slow. However, they did at least let me create my own teams, so I put various Giants teams in the format of a given computer game, as well as the OLB teams. Eventually, I bought a Micro League disk that would let me do the same thing, so I put my CA/SNA teams.for which I'd played full seasons into Micro League format.
These games, however, are based on players' statistics, not their characteristics. Oh, some games ask for the players' speed and fielding ability, but not much else. This is the fundamental difference between these games and our Game.
In Micro League, you know that if Candy Maldonado, hit .219 for the 1989 Giants with no particular power, there's no point in playing him at all, if you can avoid it. In the majors, however, you don't have the benefit of knowing what his stats will be, so you'll play him long enough to compile his horrendous numbers. Same with The Game. See, in The Game, Maldonado might be an H1 M2 F1 (see below), which is actually a hell of a ballplayer, potentially -- and that's the key word: potentially. Sure, it's true that in a game like SI Baseball, if you don't roll the right numbers for a player, he'll never get a hit, even if he's got hit possibilities all over his chart. That's also true in Micro League, although it's the computer that's "rolling the dice." But it's especially true in The Game.
This is a hard one to justify to people who are in a stats-based game mindset, but what it boils down to is this: In our Game, if you know that Maldonado is an H1 M2 F1, you're going to play him, even if he hits .219 -- because you know he should do better; in Micro League, if you know that the stats say he'll hit .219, you won't play him, even though Roger Craig, who did not have the same benefit of hindsight that you have, would play him. In other words, our Game brings in an element of uncertainty that other baseball games just don't have. Who wants to sit down and literally re-create a major league season that's already been played? Not me, no sir.
Of course, this brings up the question of putting the major leagues into our format. Can it be done? I think so. What you have to know, basically, is not how a player did, but what kind of a player he is. I've tried this with the Giants from time to time, and it works out fine. Oh, sure, Jose Uribe might hit three home runs in a week, but is this impossible in real life? What about Robby Thompson hitting below .200 for 50 games? Didn't he do that in 1989? Believe me, this game works.
As I said, the bug returned early in 1988. I grew wistful for the CA/SNA, feeling guilty about having abandoned it. I felt as if I'd let Max Mendey, and all these other figments of my imagination, down. They were always there for me, so I decided to be there for them again.
I never finished my 1960 season. I didn't want to either create new 1960 rosters based on the OLB format, or finish the season in the older format, so I just decided that there was some whacko natural disaster in Shercot that prevented any more baseball until World Series time. The Series, of course, featured Ellerton and Verville. The Blues won three straight games very quickly, but Ellerton won the next three. (This has never been done in the majors; in fact, when one team has won the first three games, the other team has won even one game only a couple of times, and never more than just the one game.) Verville won game seven, but what a series -- and they only had to wait about four and a half years to play it.
After my 1960 All-Star Series, I drew up 1961 rosters (based on the OLB format), but didn't start the season. I didn't tell Dave about this, because in all this time, he had never shown the remotest interest in the CA/SNA, and I didn't want him to give me grief about retrogressing. But I missed my leagues so much that I had to go back to them, no matter what.
Still, I put off starting the season, partly because I couldn't find my dice and partly because I was very caught up in the Giants. I also had some trouble with the CA/SNA rosters. I had given my 1960 teams some color codes, but in those days, players had no more than one, so I tended to under-award them to players on the 1961 rosters. By mid-1988, the Giants had been playing so poorly, and the inferior Dodgers so well, that Dave and I decided we had to work very hard on getting "real" baseball into shape, so we, mostly he, revamped The Game yet again. This time, it consisted of several charts stuck in binders -- far removed from the shoebox-cards with circles and squares. This is The Game's current form.
Dave worked on making The Game playable for the NBL, and I announced that I was resurrecting the CA/SNA (which didn't seem to bother him much, to my surprise). I redid my '61 rosters to confirm with the now-current format, but that posed some more problems, because of the current characteristics:
A player with an asterisk in a given category is exceptional. For instance, Wade Boggs is an H2*. Babe Ruth was, most certainly, an M3*. Rickey Henderson is a Q3*, and so on.
The COV probably needs a new name, or at least a new function. All we use it for currently is to help determine whether a given batter will be pitched to or pitched around.
The P characteristic has a somewhat different meaning than it used to. Formerly, it was simply an indication of how good a pitcher was overall. Now, it's sort of a consistency factor; it's actually a combination of the P and the 12 code in the OLB version of the game: the higher your P, the better your chance of pitching well to start with, and continuing to pitch well. In the old days, there was no logical or statistical way that a P0 could have been a better overall pitcher than a P1, but now, depending on a pitcher's J, V, X, d and S, a P0 can be a better pitcher overall than a P3. It could happen. (Then again, if the P chart comes up often during a game, a P0 will get absolutely rocked, whereas a P3 will do extraordinarily well.)
As for the NBL, well, Dave really hasn't done much with his league since I sent it back to him in 1983. He says he's played only one season since then, and he hasn't even finished that. Time's a factor; Melly and Reax have been waiting for months to finish their World Series. He just doesn't really have the time to get to it.
The CA/SNA is going pretty well. I have periods where I play tons of games in a few days, and other periods where I leave The Game alone for weeks. Lately I've been doing tons of spreadsheets in which I've given values to player characteristics -- that is, each H is worth, say, 20 points on a batting average, each P is worth 40 points off an ERA, etc. -- and printed out team sheets for the NBL and CA/SNA, as well as top-ten lists and more. It's pretty revealing. (We're taking it as read here that my point-awarding theories are right. I know there are some glitches, however; at least one pitcher has more decisions than games played, for instance.)
I have added some facets to the CA/SNA, such as in-season trades (even in seasons where I only play a few games per team; I doubt I'll ever play every game for every team in a season), a "draft," 40-man rosters and more. Yes, it complicates things, big-time, in fact, but it does make it more realistic. I mean, there's no way a real team should go through an entire season with a terrible player, especially a marginal one, without trying to get rid of him somehow.
Dave still hasn't implemented these things, although we've discussed it. However, I recently concluded that in-season trades are pointless in the NBL because each season (two per year) lasts only 88 games. It works just fine to make trades between seasons. If I were he, I'd still think about 40-man rosters and drafts, but it won't hurt him if he doesn't.
One important point, though, is how Dave and I perceive each other's leagues. Of course, I love the NBL. It's obvious. I mean, it revolutionized my way of thinking about baseball games and doing up the statistics. I owe Dave a great debt in that regard, and I thank him for introducing me to The Game and giving me the opportunity to help improve and update it. The NBL has a great history and tons of color and personality, no matter how silly the player and team names are.
When I created the CA/CL, it was partly just so I could play Dave's Game, taking it seriously enough not to have Fake League-like names in it, and partly as a tribute to Dave's ingenuity in creating an obviously superior baseball simulation -- I mean, even in that early incarnation, it was better than Sports Illustrated Baseball. Dave was kind of interested in the CA/CL at first. He liked the team names, he said. But he made it clear that my leagues just had too many points. I didn't take this as negative criticism; he seemed to have reached a kind of balance in the NBL by imposing a point limit, and it worked for him. This is why I junked the CA/CL and went back to basics with the "original" CA, which was much more reasonable in terms of points.
Dave never showed much interest, though. We have discussed this from time to time, and as near as I can tell, this is why:
Well, I'm not likely to invent an independent baseball game, especially now. Our Game's too good. And I'm thankful that Dave will let me call it Our Game without being resentful. I mean, it's possible that he harbors some resentment at the fact that I've wormed my way into The Game and taken it over in some ways. I don't know. But the truth is, when I discovered The Game, I gave up my quest.
Indeed, and it should be relatively obvious, I have thrown myself into it wholeheartedly, at times, anyway. After the 1955 season, I wrote up -- by hand -- a CA/SNA Baseball Encyclopedia, bound in a three-ring binder. Each player's entry consisted basically of the information on his index card. I had sections for batters, pitchers and managers, much like the Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia. What I should have included were things like World Series stats, yearly standings, leaders, etc.
That's what the 1960 Encyclopedia was to contain, only I never quite got around to it. Once I had my computer, I planned to do the Encyclopedia once and for all, and I zealously worked on it, but it became awfully boring. Each player's entry would have his index-card data (Name, date of birth, bats/throws; Year, Team, Home Runs, RBI, Batting Average) as well as similar statistical data for World Series and All-Star Series play. The point at which this became dull was when I reached the All-Star stats for pitchers.
What happened was that once the SNA came into being, I decided that a simple seven-game All-Star Series between the two leagues would make sense. This worked for a year or two, but I discovered that I usually had at least 40 players in each league who deserved to be an All-Star, so each league had an All-Star preseries of seven games. On the game level, this became tedious, but on the All-Star stats level, it became downright annoying. Each All-Star was likely to have two entries for each year: Blues/Golds and CA, or Reds/Whites and SNA. This meant that some players had All-Star career lists as long as your arm, and that the All-Star stats would dominate the Encyclopedia. I figured I may as well combine each player's All-Star stats into one line, but only after I had already undergone the tremendous boredom of compiling those stats. (World Series and All-Star stats are, by the way, actual statistics compiled from the postseason games I played -- which was all of them. Dave usually played his postseason games, but not always; sometimes he'd just name a winner.)
The good thing is that I have all players' regular-season lifetime averages, home runs and RBIs up to date through 1960, but any kind of encyclopedia is still kind of a daunting project. Maybe I'll do one after the '65 season.
One thing I realized, probably a year ago or so, is how odd it is to find yourself slogging through reams of paper doing feverish research on something that exists only in your mind. I guess Faulkner did something similar; apparently he created an entire fictional community from which to draw his personalities and stories. The same thing is true of Dave and me, although I don't want to get caught up in some sort of lofty literary pretense by saying so.
It's just that we do indeed have our fictional communities, his in Azhaerdlikl on Clariyvl and mine in Shercot on Verane. Basically, the only reason these places exist, in our own minds or not, is for baseball. Our planet histories both read something like, "The planet So-and-So was settled at such-and-such a time. On such-and-such a date, baseball was discovered." Not much thought is given to civilizational history, governments, technology or much else except baseball. Fine. I mean, I certainly don't care about anyone on Verane who doesn't have anything to do with baseball. I imagine that if there really is a Verane, there's someone there who's created a baseball simulation whose league is based on a planet called "Earth;" and has ludicrous team names like the "Dodgers" and "Phillies" (and really great team names like the "Giants"). I'll never know. Probably.
Dave recently asked me how many games I thought I had played over the years -- not just The Game games, but baseball card games, SI Baseball, "Fast Action" (our nickname for a different SI game, Statis Pro Baseball; instead of dice, it features "Fast Action" cards, which you shuffle and draw from a pile), a baseball game I have from 3-M, the various games I played with Matt, All-Star Baseball, a few dozen APBA games, a game I played when I worked at a shoe store that was based partly on the styles and inventory numbers of the shoes requested by customers and partly on The Game, and whatever else I may have forgotten (and let's not even talk about the several hundred football games I've played over the years). I sat down with a spreadsheet one day and entered estimates and formulas, and I finally came up with a figure of roughly 7,000 games, give or take probably 2,000. That's mind-boggling to me. In its current form, The Game takes about 45 minutes to play. If I began a quest to play 7,000 games, starting on January 1, figuring I'd play 12 games in nine hours each day, I wouldn't be able to quit until August 7 the next year, at about noon. That's a lot of games.