Little Paper Men

I received a package on Saturday, an Ebay purchase. I knew what it was right away. I was hoping that it would come before Columbus Day, and it did. I anxiously opened the envelope....

I collected baseball cards when I was young, I went to my first baseball game when I was five years old, but I became a baseball fan in the summer of 1979. I'll never forget it. Lost five bucks on the World Series that year, to my brother no less, but I was hooked. Ernie Harwell and the Detroit Tigers. Steve Kemp, Jack Morris, and Ron LeFlore.

I bought baseball cards and talked baseball with a neighbor buddy of mine. He had these funny looking cards that I really wanted but he wouldn't give up. Told me they were part of some game. Never heard of it, but OK, Mike was cool, so I was intrigued. It was APBA Baseball, a baseball simulation game in existence since 1951.

It was summer and we were bored. Remember, this was in the days before cable television, before VCRs, before the Internet. When our favorite shows were over, they were over until the next week. We had a lot of time to kill. In order that we might have something to occupy our time, my father took us to the mall to buy us a game or some such time-occupying aparatus that didn't cost an arm and a leg. My brother and I quickly made our way to the board games at Kay-Bee, back when toy stores carried racks and racks of board games. We didn't want just any board game, though. We wanted APBA Baseball.

Well, little did we know that Richard Seitz didn't have his game in very many stores. Probably none outside of Lancaster. But... Harold Richman wasn't Richard Seitz. Strat-o-Matic Baseball was on the shelf, and we picked it up and showed it to our dad, and ten minutes later we walked out of that Kay-Bee store with a box full of dice, charts and little paper men.

I learned quite a bit that summer. I learned that four slashes within a circle stood for a homerun, I learned that home teams bat last and visitors first, I learned that errors counted as at-bats but sacrifice flies were not. I learned what a sacrifice fly was. I learned that a three games to one lead in the World Series was not necessarily safe. And I learned to love Ron LeFlore.

The retail version of the Strat-o-Matic Baseball game only contained two teams of 20 players each. By the luck of the draw, my brother and I got the 1976 Cardinals and 1976 Pirates, along with a coupon that allowed us to order the cards based on the most recent season for a small price. Well, a small price was large for a twelve-year-old boy and his brother, but together.... We summoned our courage and asked our father to write us a check in exchange for a portion of our allowance. He looked at the coupon, looked at us, looked at the coupon again.

"Are you sure you want to do this?"

For a fleeting moment I wondered if this Strat-o-Matic Game Company was some fly-by-night organization out to scam me for my money. But just for a moment. Yes, I told my dad, I wanted that check.

A week later my buddy, my brother and I were out in the carport playing a game. Trouble, I believe. May have been some neighbor kids there. I don't remember. What I do remember is the sight of a large brown truck approaching our house, approaching, slowing, stopping. Somehow we knew. We knew.

"I QUIT!" Mike shouted out, and we all ran to the truck. The driver exited his vehicle carrying a brown packing envelope. He handed it to us, and as one of us signed for it another saw the return address in the corner. Strat-o-Matic Game Company.

And so it began.

The idea of a game like this was to form leagues, either of straight teams or drafted players from different teams, and play baseball games. You rolled the dice, you looked on the cards, you got your result. Occasionally you had to consult another chart to determine whether a player on the opposing team committed an error. You kept score, you played nine innings, when nine innings were over you took two more teams and did it again. Eventually you would play enough games that you could compile statistics that would resemble the actual records of major league players. And you would have some fun in the process.

I played the hell out of this game for several years. I subscribed to a small fan-printed publication called the Strat-o-Matic Review. I bought the special set of Hall of Fame player cards and played them against the modern players. The whole process whet my appetite for baseball. I began to read books of baseball history. Players such as Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth came to life.

I received money for my birthday every year, usually enough to order the most recent set of Strat-o-Matic cards. And Columbus Day with its no-mail policy screwed me every year. Always took one extra day to get those cards. But when they came, life was good, and I played.

They began to produce older seasons in addition to the newest cards every year, and around 1986 they released the cardset that made me drool with anticipation. 1930 was the ultimate batter's year. The National League average for all eight teams was about .300. Hack Wilson hit 56 homeruns. Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Bill Terry, Lefty Grove, they were all there. I had to have it. So it became my birthday gift to myself that year. When it came eight days later I was working at the college library in town, so I asked my mother to bring it to me. By all rights she should have told me to forget it and wait until I got home, but she drove it up there, and on my break I opened the box and looked through the set. And made plans. I would play every game of that season with these cards. I had access to microfilm in the library. I could print out boxscores. I could make the trades on the day they took place. This 1930 project make me excited at a time when little did, when I couldn't see far enough into the future to believe that I would ever get married, when I couldn't even see far enough into the future to know what I wanted to do as a career. But I knew what I wanted to do when I got home. I wanted to start replaying 1930....

All of these thoughts ran through my mind as I tore the envelope and unwrapped the plastic-wrapped parcel inside. And there they were. The Brooklyn Robins. The Washington Senators. The Boston Braves. Johnny Hodapp. Luke Sewell. Pete Jablonowski. Red Ruffing. Lou Gehrig. Babe Ruth. Lefty Grove. 25 years after its release, and several years after I had abandoned the 1930 project and sold the heavily-stained cards, I was looking at a near-mint set. The 1930 season as produced by the Strat-o-Matic game company. And I was ready to play.

Let the good times roll.