Giving "Shoeless Joe" and the Black Sox another chance
On the agenda for the recent two-week pilgrimage I made to Las Vegas was a totally wholesome event in which I participated along with a buddy who also committed journalism here at the Sun and now works at USA Today.
The two of us were entered in a tournament featuring a decades-old baseball board game. Seventy devotees of something called the APBA baseball game gathered at the Palace Station in Vegas – site of O.J. Simpson’s gimme-the-memoribilia event several months ago – to vie for the board game championship playing with great teams of the past.
Sound geeky in a Star Trek convention kind of way? Yeah, probably it is. But the people were extremely pleasant and absolutely total baseball fans and, I confess, the whole thing was pure, unadulterated fun.
APBA is a pre-video games version of EA Sports, meaning a game that allows participants to oversee players and teams whose make-believe performances are supposed to replicate their real-life counterparts. But instead of madly manipulating joysticks, these low-tech game players roll dice and keep track of runs, hits and errors on paper score sheets. The emphasis is on strategy (with a healthy dose of luck) rather than quick-twitch motor skills.
Having nearly the entire universe of baseball teams from which to chose, we decided on the 1919 Chicago White Sox – the team that scandalized baseball by throwing the World Series. Defying history’s verdict on that star-crossed collection of baseball ghosts, my friend and I had hoped to redeem “Shoeless Joe” Jackson, Buck Weaver, Ed Cicotte and the rest.
Ratcheting up our own geek factor, we had custom 1919 ChiSox T-shirts made with the slogan, "The best team that money can buy."
In a weird twist, the day before the 52-team tournament started, we were strolling through the Forum Shops mall that’s attached to Caesars Palace when we happened on a sports collectables store where Pete Rose, of all people, was signing autographs for anyone buying selected items. The buddy, a Red Sox fan, couldn’t resist. He made the required purchase and had his picture taken with the most famous living baseball player exiled from the game for gambling.
I’m not sure what kind of karma that set in motion but our White Sox – playing in a field of 52 great teams, from the dead ball era to the 21st century – finished 4-6 in our eight-team division. Five of our six losses were by one run. We had just two home runs over the course of 10 games, one by “Shoeless Joe”.
If there ever was evidence of the soundness of Earl Weaver’s philosophy about three-run homers -- that was it. We would sometimes get 16 and 17 guys on base and score just three or four runs. That doesn’t work against Ruth and Gehrig.
But as I said, it was a lot of fun. Among the scores of graying, middle-aged men who would spiritedly debate the merits of the ’27 Yankees versus the ’75 Reds, was a guy from Cockeysville, Roy Langhans, who has attended these annual gatherings for years and was playing with the 1957 Braves (Aaron, Matthews, Spahn). Langhans is actually in the APBA Hall of Fame (“Mainly because I’ve bought just about everything they’ve made since 1957,” he joked)
Actually, it’s because Langhans went out of his way at one point to encourage retail stores in the Baltimore-Washington area to carry the game which is mostly sold by mail-order out of Lancaster, Pa.
Langhans’ Braves won their division going 9-1 but in the kind of twist that baseball often provides, it was the only person in the room under the age of 40 who won the APBA World Series.
Brian Wells, a tall, likeable, modest 15-year-old from Wyomissing, Pa., managing the 2001 Seattle Mariners, brushed aside the 1953 Brooklyn Dodgers, for the board game championship Sunday morning.
It was nice to see in an atmosphere where baseball’s past was an obsession for a bunch of nostalgic but mostly aging fans, that the game’s sense of tradition may still have some stewards in the future.
Comments
Bill-I used to be a Strat-O-Matic fanatic for years. It's a board game with dice and cards for each player. Very involved rules made it a bit hard to follow but me and my friends loved every minute of it. the game still exists and was used to simulate the 1981 All Star game during that year's players strike.
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Don,
To reinforce my game geek status, I also briefly played Strat-o-matic in a league. The games have some similarities but APBA and Strat-o-matic fans tend to be divided pretty strongly along partisan lines. Thanks for writing and the info about the '81 All Star game.
-- Bill O.
Posted by: Don | July 15, 2008 5:49 PM
I've played some of those games here and there. Of course, never anything competitive. I remember I had one board game where there were discs with each player, and you had to spin an arrow. The discs were mostly older players, and I remember my dad made a disc for Jose Canseco (my favorite player at the time). Thought that was the most awesome thing I had ever seen. Although, I was a little disappointed that the "strikeout section" of the disc was roughly half of it. hahaha
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That was All Star Baseball ... I think I know too much about this stuff. Great game because it was easy to play but you could get into arguments about whether a spin landed on the line.
-- Bill O.
Posted by: Hatepaste | July 15, 2008 9:43 PM
I had both Strat-o-Matic and APBA. Also migrated to some of the computer based strategy sports games (made keeping track of stats much easier). I believe DiamondMind Baseball was computer based one.
On a separate topic, I'm guessing Bud Selig is cringing everytime the game is tied. What happens to home field advantage if the All Star game ends in a tie (which of course happen recently)?
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Rich
Gee, great question. I'll try to find out.
-- Bill O.
Posted by: Rich | July 15, 2008 11:24 PM