Seven Days a Week

It’s hard to knock down many games in my 1947 APBA baseball replay while working seven days a week, but it’s a task I’m faced with. After I was laid off from my newspaper job two years ago, I fell back into a financial pit that I have feared since I was an adult.

I hired on at another newspaper and then in May took a job totally out of my career in order to make a living. And, I got a second job -- a part-time, weekender where I work 12 hours a day. There’s not much time to roll games unless I stay up late and, because I work seven days a week, I’m not as deft at staying awake much.
Ask my Illinois girl, Holly. We’ll be sitting on the couch at 9 p.m.  watching Dateline on NBC when she’ll turn to me to talk about the show.  I’m out, like one of the victims Keith Morrison is always profiling. All I need to complete the scene is a chalk outline ‘round my body, police tape sealing off the sofa and Morrison’s quirky dialogue. “He often rolled the dice in his baseball replay, but this time, the dice rolled him,” he’d say.

I’ve played the 1947 replay now for seven weeks and have rolled 128 games so far. That’s an average of 2.6 games a day. Not too bad, but there was a time when I could average half a dozen games each day. 

So, it’s tough to maintain the pace I like. When you can play five or six games a day, you really get the feel of the season and how it actually went day-by-day in the real world.

But, like I said so many times before, the game is always waiting for us. It’s a game that’s made the transition with us from childhood to adulthood and it’s remained a mainstay for us. No other game, I can say assuredly, has kept the popularity that APBA has through our lifetime.

And, on a side subject, although I don’t play the game as often as I’d like, it’s still there in some form. I was feeling kind of down and tired the other day at my weekday job. I strive to make money and to provide a decent life for Holly and, because I am somewhat a defeatist, I never feel I do good enough. But, a person who works in the same building as I and who also plays APBA, stopped in the office and asked how 1947 was doing. We talked about players and teams and, of course, Jackie Robinson and it perked me up. I have never met anyone else in person who plays the game. Here’s a guy who’s in the same building just one floor down. The game picked us both up and carried us through the day. I went home and rolled a few games and really enjoyed it.

Replays are an adventure meant to be enjoyed, not a task that has to be completed at a certain time. But there are so many games left ahead and each one contains something new to experience. Will Johnny “Big Cat” Mize and Ralph Kiner each hit 51 home runs in my 1947 replay like they did in real life? Will Ted Williams flirt with batting .400? Can the Red Sox challenge the Yankees, like they are doing now in my replay? Lots of questions that are hard to answer when working seven days a week.