June 26, 2003

Ah, the joys of tabletop baseball. Of course, no one plays tabletop baseball much anymore. It’s all on computers. And that saddens me just this much.

In 1988, I was drinking my way through chemistry graduate school at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. One day I was leaving the chemistry building, Buehler Hall, around noon because I had to get down to The Last Lap (as featured in Sports Illustrated) for some critical pinball (The Comet) with my brother, Steve, and I bumped into some guy coming into the building.

He happened to be wearing an Atlanta Braves ballcap with "Oscar Mayer" on the underside of the bill. Because I’m a mouthy, nosy so-and-so, I said, "Hey, I was at that game!" and of course, I had been and I could prove it by producing the same goober ballcap. So we started talking about the game and it turned out we were at the game for the same reason – to see the Mets kick the crap out of the Braves (which did occur). He, too, was a huge Mets fan.

A couple of pitchers of beer later, we’re back at his place. Now, I’m not easy, but when a young fellow is a Mets fan and wants to teach me a new game involving baseball, I can be had pretty cheaply. So there we were selecting our players from the 1986 Strat-o-matic Baseball Game cards. That is correct – I had made it to 23 years old and collected baseball cards my entire life, and yet had never stumbled across Strat-o-matic. I had once played a similar football game called "Paydirt", but never Strat.

We played Strat non-stop. We would watch the Cubs and Mets and Braves on the then-flourishing Superstations (stupid cable systems), scoring those games while we scored our own. New to the game, I didn’t "get" counting the cards right out of the gate, and we simply drafted and played the players we knew and loved. Then we got the 1987 set and so on. Before long, I had developed the standard, but magical, system of counting cards and ranking players. We would roll the three dice, clackity-clack, into the dark hours, cooking Kroger pizzas in the oven and filling up scoresheets on end. It was really from this that I developed my own scoresheet in Excel and the use of a red pen and squiggles to indicate player changes. This pretty much went on for four years until he got a job with the Atlanta Braves – in May of 1991 - and moved away (sniff).

Of course, over that four years, I left graduate school degree-less (hey, I finished the classwork!), and lost a girlfriend, but I learned a great deal about baseball. Dave Magadan’s 1990 card was just dreamy.

Then came the computers. As an employee, my friend got comp seats at the Braves, so I drove to Atlanta from Knoxville quite a bit that 1991 season, and we would play Strat all hours of the night, pausing only to go to the stadium. But I missed the clackity-clack of the dice.

Fortunately, Strat-o-matic felt my pain and heard my pleas sifting through the ether. You could select the "dice and sounds" on the computer to soothe the lonesome beast that dwelled within. Ah, the warmth of three dice tumbling onto a hard wood, but nicely lacquered, tabletop. Three, ten. Another Matt Williams home run.

Strat is a great game and teaches us tons about baseball, and even more about who is really good and who do we just think is good. When I find the box on a neglected shelf in a KAY_BEE TOYS, on sale for $12, I buy it and put it in my closet. It’s usually a couple of years old, but it has the actual cards – oh, how I love the actual cards…

Now I play in a Diamond Mind Baseball League (DMB). Dan Szymborski swears by it for realism – which is fine, but there are no dice to pop up on the screen, no clackity-clack. And evidently, you can't "undo", which is a crying shame.

I do enjoy DMB and I have gotten some good tips from Vinay Kumar, but I prefer an edge – I want to know a player’s "card". I love the reverse platoon split. I want to know just how ugly a player out of position hurts you. These are small things, but I want to have the option of knowing.

If you play DMB or Strat, or some other table top (APBA?), do yourself a favor – get the box out, thumb through the cards and roll the dice on your desk top. Drift away as you close your eyes and feel your mind project each play on the inside of your eyelids. Watch Eric Davis slap his glove on his thigh as the dice come up: Five, five: Fb B – (cf).

Barry Bonds opened the 500-500 Club. Pretty unusual combination.

I only got to score three games in the last seven days, and one of them was the godawful performance of Armando Benitez against the Yankees on Sunday night. That was one torturous 9th inning. The 11th wasn’t particularly entertaining either.

The Tigers, of whom only RMc is a living fan, have reached the depths of the 1962 New York Mets. As with any projections, please don’t try this at home: 0.237*162=38. Seriously? 40-122? Imagine – Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens 300th, and the worst record in a hundred years? This game is FANtastic! (Do I owe the NBA a dollar? I know they need it after that Championship Series.)

Just because it isn’t written about everywhere enough: I like Greg Maddux and he’s a great pitcher, but when Javy Lopez is single-handedly winning games, not having him catch – well, you get what you deserve.