The Wall

I'm sure there is a wall every replayer hits when doing a season recreation of the APBA game. It generally comes late in the replay's progress when it's hard to get motivated to roll a game between two cellar-dwelling teams.

I've reached that wall now.

I'm at Aug. 8, 1942, in my current replay. And while it's a great season to play with Stan Musial and Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams and the surprisingly good St. Louis Browns, I find myself slowing down when I see on the schedule that the next game up is the Cleveland Indians playing the Chicago White Sox, for instance.

I think we replayers all slow down during seasons. It's a long process rolling each game. It takes a year or more to complete one season; I've been doing APBA baseball since 1998 and I've finished seven replays so far, and I play a lot of games each day. Consider that each game takes about 15-20 minutes to play, and there's anywhere from 1,200 to 2,100 games to play — depending upon the number of teams involved and how many games constitutes a full season for them — and it's easy to see how long these things take.

And I think that the enthusiasm for a baseball replay may also wane when the real baseball season concludes. I find that I've slowed down in my replay baseball now that the actual World Series is over. It seems that whatever sport is in season is a motivator for whatever game I'll play. With that in mind, I've contemplated about pausing the baseball game briefly and dragging out the APBA hockey or basketball game for a spell, just to shift gears.

But then I reconsider and roll on.

I am not an employee of APBA and, like I said here before, I'm not sure the game company even knows this blog exists. But, one of the really great things about APBA now is that they offer every single baseball season there is. And this game is so much better than other sports simulation game.

Game players often chose their seasons based upon personal likes. I bought 1987 and 1991 specifically for the reason that the Minnesota Twins won the Series in each of those years. I purchased 1919 after reading Al Stump's biography of Ty Cobb and I want to someday buy 1947 because that's the first year Jackie Robinson played for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

We also buy seasons that have sentimental value. I bought 1969 because that is the first year I really, really followed baseball closely.

So, like all APBA fans, I have a closet full of seasons to play. And I have to finish one season to get to the next. I'll pick up interest again in the 1942 season — maybe by seeking nuances of certain teams or players and focusing on them when I play the less desirable teams.

I should finish this 1942 replay by February and by then, hopefully, I'll figure out what's next to play.

We may all hit walls at times during our game playing, but those walls aren't impenetrable and we forge on, motivated by the next season on our horizon, and the next one after that and then the next one again.