Halfway Point

I’ve reached the halfway point of my 1981 baseball replay. 

Since I’ve ignored the strike that plagued the real 1981 season, and since I have no rain outs in any of the replayed games, I know  there’s 2,106 games in a full baseball season. I reached game 1,053 and using the math skills hammered into me during my formal education, I deduced I am exactly half way done. 

It’s been a great season so far, except for the dismal play of my favorite team, the Minnesota Twins. The American League East Division has three teams that are within two games of the Yankees and California is a surprise team in the West Division. 

In the National League, Montreal is unstoppable. Los Angeles has taken a 10.5-game lead on the heels of an 18-game winning streak stopped only by Houston’s Nolan Ryan, who struck out 10 Dodgers and held them to one unearned run.

Mike Schmidt of the Phillies leads the home run race with 28. George Foster of the Reds is second with 24 homers. Oakland’s designated hitter Cliff Johnson and the Oriole’s Eddie Murray lead the American League with 23 dingers each.

I began playing this replay on Dec. 12, 2011. Eight months and a week later, I’m halfway finished. Looks like I’ll wrap this season up in late April if I continue at the same pace. The game takes dedication and patience to complete and the other APBA game players who replay entire seasons realize this. 

Here are the standings at the midway mark

AMERICAN LEAGUE

East W L GB

New York 50 32 --

Milwaukee 49 32 .5

Detroit 48 33 1.5

Baltimore 47 33 2

Boston 38 42 11

Cleveland 35 45 14

Toronto 26 57 24.5

West

Kansas C. 49 29 --

California 51 34 1.5

Oakland 46 39 6.5

Chicago 40 38 9

Texas 36 46 15

Seattle 28 54 23

Minnesota 26 55 24.5

NATIONAL LEAGUE

East

Montreal 55 26 --

Phil'phia  45 35 9.5

St. Louis 45 36 10

Pittsburgh 37 41 16.5

Chicago    34 47 21

New York 30 49 29

West

L.Angeles 55 27 --

Cincinnati 44 37 10.5

Houston 42 38 12

S.Francisco 38 46 18

Atlanta      32 48 22

San Diego 27 54 27.5

Where It Began

Recently, I passed through my home town and, in a moment of impulsiveness, I detoured and drove by my parent’s old house to see where the APBA obsession began.

My parents moved to Arkansas in 1974 after my father retired from teaching at a northern Minnesota university. It was a culture shock for me, a kid of 14, to delve into an entirely different world. I had to ride the bus to school; in Minnesota, I walked to my school. I had to deal with the southern accent; in Minnesota, I talked like an extra from the movie “Fargo.”

It was a difficult adjustment to make.

But I had sports and that helped ease the transition. Sports is a universal language spoken in any accent and it can usually bridge many gaps. And to help me, I discovered the APBA games which made me a genius, compared to others my age, when talking about football and basketball players back then.

I played the games in the front bedroom of the house, rolling the games on my bed. I sat hunched over on a wooden chair and used a gooseneck lamp to lighten the playing field. And as I rolled the dice and wrote down the results of those games, I also experienced the life of a teenager. I fretted nervously about asking a girl to the high school prom, and I stayed up late being lovesick over the same girl back then.

I also learned heartache and disappointment in that room when the puppy love relationship crashed, as they always do. But I kept playing that game and it comforted me and, like I’ve said before, it was the only consistent thing in the roller coaster life of a kid.

So, years later, I drove by the house again and stopped on the road, looking at the window of that front bedroom. The house looked the same. It’d been at least 10 years since I had last been there. Both my parents are deceased and I ended up selling the house in 2002 when my  wife took ill.

As I sat in my car on the road, an oldies station on the radio was playing Corey Hart’s “Never Surrender,” which was both ironic and overly cliché for the moment. Corey sang about asking for a little more time because his uncertainty could bring him down. “So if you’re lost and on your own, you can never surrender,” he sang. “And if your path won’t lead you home, you can never surrender.”

I’ve been lost since leaving my parents’ home and being on my own, but that day the path led me home and back to where my love of the APBA game began. I drove on and headed to my own house where, when I arrived,  I rolled a few games, continuing the routine that I began in that other house nearly four decades ago.

The Being of Lateness

How do you explain to someone that you’re late because a baseball game that never really happened went into extra innings and you had to see how it finished.

This has happened to me more times than socially acceptable, I think, as I replay the 1981 baseball season with the APBA game I obsess with.

I have a few quirky rules with the game and that may contribute to my lateness on occasion. I never leave a game unfinished. Before I leave my home for work, the game I’m rolling has to be completed, the player cards sheathed back in the team’s envelopes and the scores, stats and standings updated. I won’t even go to sleep until a game is ended and that little quirk bit me the other night when I had a game run 23 innings long on a work night.

So how do you explain to your bosses that you’re feeling a little groggy the following morning because Atlanta failed to score after putting guys on first and third with one out in the 17th inning? 

I am a newspaper correspondent who works in an office by myself, so if I’m late a few minutes coming in, it’s not that big of a deal. However, it’s kind of weird if I’m tarrying on an early morning interview and I tell the source that I’d been there earlier had Rollie Fingers, with his monster pitching card, not been in the groove and forcing the game into additional innings by mowing down opponents.

Or if the White Sox decide to go ballistic and score 14 against lowly Seattle. It takes time to progress a game, for example, when Chicago gets 18 hits.

The quirky rule of not leaving a game in progress may in part be due to my cat. At times she jumps on the APBA table to get a box seat for the game. She also enjoys pawing through the cards and scattering them across the desk and floor.

Once, and I can’t confirm this, my cat may have taken one of the dice. The game utilizes a large red die and a small white die to obtain game results. They are vital to the game. I returned home once and, as I sat to roll a game, I couldn’t find the white die. Fortunately, since I’ve been playing APBA for more than three decades, I had plenty of spare. But I still wondered about that die. I could not find it anywhere on the floor, in the hallway or anywhere my cat may have batted it about. I wondered if she ate it and, briefly, I considered carefully checking her litter box. I realize that was taking ‘craps’ way too far when dealing with dice.

So now I complete each game, tuck the dice away and close shop before leaving. And that puts me behind at times if I begin a game too late. I try to roll two or three games in the morning and, in a perfect world, I can get them in, hit the shower, dress and be at work when I’m supposed to.

But then you get a game where a pitcher can’t buy an out or the teams’ bats become anemic and the run of three-up, three-down stretches the game into late innings.

In the big scheme of life, there’s much more to worry about than maintaining the quirky superstition I have about finishing the games. I think a much more important issue I need to worry about is just where that lost die ended up.