Sometimes, I think about other games
ahead in the season and how the pennant race for whichever replay I'm
doing is going. Sometimes I think of ideas I have for writing
something for a magazine.
Sometimes I think of inane, mindless
things.
The other night, while rolling a 1950
contest between the Washington Senators and Detroit Tigers, I thought
of the inane. I've reached Aug. 8 in the replay. The Tigers, while
starting well and making noise in the American League early on, are
now about 10 games out of first behind New York and barring any
miracle, they won't challenge the Yankees for the pennant. Washington
is … well, Washington.
So, while rolling the Senators-Tigers
clash on autopilot, I began thinking of how many times I roll the two
dice in an APBA baseball game.
For the uninitiated, APBA is a
brilliant game that allows people to replay various baseball and
other sports seasons. The athletes are given cards with numbers on
them. Gamers roll dice, compare the results to numbers on the
players' cards which are computed based upon their actual batting
statistics for that particular season. The gamer then matches those
numbers to game boards. The final numbers give play results. It
sounds complicated, but after memorizing many of the resulting
numbers, I can knock out a game in 15-20 minutes.
During that recent Tigers-Sens tilt, I
began tallying the number of times I roll the dice for a game. I use
a mouse pad to roll the two dice upon. If they roll off, I roll them
again. I average about 12-15 rolls per inning. Add the miscues and
the occasional extra-inning games or slugfests that require more
rolls and I'm looking at roughly 120 rolls per game.
Some players use computer generated
dice rollers, others use actual dice towers where they drop the dice
in a bin and let them roll to the bottom to get results. I used to
use the plastic yellow cups the game company provided, but the
clackety-clack noise kept my dad up late at night when I was a kid
playing the basketball game into the wee hours, so I rolled by hand
only. I still do, even though now I have no one to keep awake with
the noise.
I continued with my math exercise while
the Tigers took the lead. Since I began playing baseball in 1998,
I've done nine full season replays. (I know, I have no other life.)
I've rolled replays for 1932, 1942, 1957, 1964, 1974, 1977, 1981,
1987 and 1998. I've also rolled half of 1925 before, regrettably, I
burned out and quit. And I've tossed 842 game so far in the 1950
season I'm currently playing.
I've replayed 17,224 games since I
began this APBA baseball obsession.
Multiply the 120 dice rolls per game by
17,224 games and come up with 2,066,880.
I've rolled the dice playing baseball
more than 2 million times!
And that's just for baseball. Throw in
all the basketball, football and hockey games I've played since I
began APBA in 1977 and it has to be another million or so rolls.
The inane things one thinks of while
playing the game ...
