1972 Important Dates, Scene 1

I came across one of the dates that is significant to me while rolling the 1972 APBA baseball replay. It’s something that occurs when we do replays of seasons that we were alive for.

I recently began playing the games for April 23, 1972, realizing that day was my mother’s birthday 50 years ago. I was 11 years old back then and the day fell on a Sunday. I’m sure we did something to celebrate, but as a sixth-grade kid with a limited allowance, I know I didn’t lavish her with gifts. Instead, my dad probably gave her some things and said it was from both of us.

So, I thought of her as I rolled the games for that date half a century later. Detroit beat Cleveland, 3-1, in the opening game for April 23, 1972. I know the season didn’t start on time because of a strike; I used the original schedule rather than the one created after the work stoppage was settled.

 New York beat Boston, 6-4, in 11 innings and Kansas City took Chicago, 6-2.

Then, Oakland clubbed Minnesota, 21-1, in a game the As scored 12 times in the ninth inning and Reggie Jackson hit two home runs and drove in five in the inning.

I grew up in Minnesota and my mom probably would have laughed at that game if I told her about it. She wasn’t a sports fan, but I credit her and my father for getting me into the APBA world. Sadly, she passed away in January 1998. I didn’t begin playing APBA baseball until Dec. 28, 1998. But, she was the one who wrapped my first APBA game – the football game – and she and my father gave it to meas the headliner gift for Christmas in 1978.

She’d tolerate me doing game recaps of my football contests – mostly the Vikings games --  back then and, a year later, my basketball games when they got me the APBA basketball set. And she would glance at the television and momentarily watch the games when my father had them on.

She once told me my sports obsession would hinder me from being a good husband if my wife didn’t enjoy sports. I told her that my obsession came from my father who…was her husband.

So, she didn’t hear of any of my APBA baseball conquests and as the games for April 23, 1972, played through and I moved to April 24, 1972, I thought of the other dates that are ahead. My dad’s birthday was in early June. I graduated sixth grade in June of that year and in September went to the junior high school in my Minnesota town. My father, diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease two years earlier, began that fall what would be the next to last year of his teaching career at Bemidji State University.

I guess the APBA replays we do of seasons when we were alive are cause for looking back. I’m sure I’ll play Twins games that my father and I watched that season. The Twins weren’t that good that year and I guarantee we suffered many an evening when rivals Kansas City or Chicago or Baltimore may have beaten them.

The other night, I watched the Twilight Zone episode “Walking Distance,” which, in my opinion, is perhaps the greatest episode of any television program in history. In it, Martin Sloan, a New York advertising executive, stops near Homewood to get his car serviced. He grew up in that town so, as the mechanic works on the car, he walks into Homewood.

He finds he has been transported back some 25 years earlier and even sees himself as a child. He goes to his home and tries to convince his parents that he is their son grown up.

In a very emotional scene near the end, Martin’s father approaches him after the young Martin has fallen off a merry-go-round and hurts his leg. The father, who found the older Martin’s wallet and discovers money with dates a quarter of a century later from that year, believes Martin is his son of the future.

But he dispels advice. “You don’t belong here,” he told Martin. “This is [the younger] Martin’s summer. Don’t look back, he said. Look forward for new things.

Martin agrees, but as he walks back to his car, there’ a pronounced limp—the injury his younger self received from the fall. He may look to the future, but the limp is a reminder of his past.

I think of that show as I roll the 1972 replay, too. As I’ve gotten older, I do tend to look back, reveling in the good old days of playing whiffle ball in my best friend’s yard and walking to my grade school in the frigid 20-below temperatures Minnesota could produce. It was a time of less stress and it was free from the responsibilities of adulthood.

As Martin’s father said, though, I can’t always be looking behind me. These season replays do have a tendency to make me do that, especially now when a majority of my path is behind me.

But, there’s also the chance for looking forward in these replays. In the real 1972 baseball season, Oakland and Cincinnati played in the World Series. Maybe some other teams will make it; so far in this replay, the New York Yankees look unbeatable and Pittsburgh and Houston may have a say in the National League race.

And finally, this shows the depth of the APBA game. It’s a simple game that uses dice and player cards to recreate the seasons. But what other game can bring about these memories of life and cause the deep thinking of days gone by?

1972 Begins

Starting an APBA baseball replay takes some work. I write each team’s 162-game schedule on lined paper; for my 1972 replay I just began, it takes 24 pages. Then, I create pages for batters and pitchers to keep up with home runs, wins, losses and saves and, in this season, strikeouts.

I pull schedules from the website Retrosheet, which provides a day-by-day list of games. These are the games set before the season and because there was a strike at the beginning of the actual 1972 season, my schedule is not reflective of the real one the teams played back then. Like I always say, in ABPA there are no strikes and no rainouts. I play a full 162-game schedule for every team (or 154 game for each team in replays prior to 1961).

It takes some time to prepare a new season.

But then, I tossed that first roll of the iconic red and white dice and all the paperwork is worth it.

In my case with the 1972 season, that first roll was a “32” and Houston Astros’ leadoff batter Roger Metzger flied out to Cincinnati Reds right fielder Cesar Geronimo. Fittingly, the first hit for my 1972 replay came from Pete Rose in the bottom of the first.

The Reds won Game No. 1 of 1,944 for the season, 2-1, when, with one out in the bottom of the ninth, Dave Concepcion hit a sacrifice fly to score Tony Perez.

And so, the season begins. The journey takes off. I logged the score on the Astros’ and Reds’ pages, recorded Jack Billingham’s six strikeouts for Cincinnati and Don Wilson’s 11 for Houston and then set the lineups for the second game, California at Minnesota.

There’s a sense of the voyage you get when you see those team pages. The scores beside the 162 games are all blank now, but you know they’ll start to fill up as the games progress. Two months into this 1972 replay, most of the teams have played 15 or so games. The score ares being tallied and written in. The season moves along.

And, despite only having played about 10 percent of the season, it’s showing promise to be yet another fantastic replay. So far, it has a mix of good pitching and decent batting. For example, I had four shutout games in a row, then John Mayberry hit two home runs for Kansas City and they beat Texas, 6-5. 

In Game No. 111, Nolan Ryan tossed a no-hitter for California, blanking the Rangers, 4-0, and Bobby Darwin hit three home runs for the Twins in Game No. 142.

One of the more offensive games I’ve had in a long while occurred in Game No. 176. Minnesota took a 1-0 lead into the second against Oakland at the old Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, Minn. But, like in the real season, the Twins’ wheels fell off. Sal Bando and Gene Tenace hit homers in the second and third innings and Oakland scored three more in the sixth to take a 9-1 lead. But the carnage wasn’t over. Reggie Jackson came to the plate with two on in the ninth inning. I noted, in the play-by-play accounts that I sometimes do in my mind during game, that Jackson hadn’t hit a home run yet this season. I spoke too soon. He clouted one out. Then, in the same inning, he hit a three-run shot, driving in a total of five runs in the inning and helping Oakland to a 12-run ninth. The Twins lost, 21-1. Me and my big mouth.

And on the inverse yet again, showing the diversity of this season, Greg Luzinski of the Phillies struck out three times in a row with the bases loaded.

Again, it’s too early to speculate, but Houston and Cincinnati appear headed for a long National League West Division run, as are Pittsburgh and St. Louis in the NL East. So far, Minnesota leads the American League West, just as they did early on in the real season, and New York, bolstered by Mel Stottlemyre’s four shutouts in four starts, is in first in the AL East.

There’s also a personal level with this replay as I reflect back 50 years (hard to believe 1972 is half a century ago). I was in the final months of my sixth grade year at the laboratory school at Bemidji State University in northern Minnesota. By June, I was out of the safety of my grade school and on to the horrors of a much larger junior high school. I was just becoming aware, really aware, of baseball and its statistics. My father gave me a slide ruler (kids, that’s a mathematical tool that predated calculators! You’d line up numbers on various rules to get percentages and other math equations) and I figured out how to do Earned Run Averages and batting averages.

As the uneasiness of leaving my grade school class increased, the games of the 1972 season, especially those of the Twins, helped soothe some of those fears.

So, in addition to an APBA replay, this season is also a trip full of memories and a reminder of how baseball always seems to help the travels of life.