Cubs Win ... and Win... and Win

 

During the first month’s games of my 1972 APBA baseball replay, it seemed like the teams were replicating the bell curve of statistics. There were a few teams on the winning end – Pittsburgh and the New York Yankees were winning far more frequently than the other teams. And there were the outliers on the other end – Milwaukee and Texas were on a race to see which team would lose 100 games first.

And the rest of the teams all hovered around each other. Most were within two to four games of playing .500.

I wasn’t all that enthused at first. I mean, 1972 was the first real baseball season I became totally aware. I was 11, living in northern Minnesota and watching and reading as much as I could about the Twins then. I learned how to compile ERA and batting averages and I could see that, despite a good start, the Twins were probably destined for a near .500 season themselves.

So, when I began rolling 1972, I was hoping for a stroll down nostalgia lane with teams like Oakland and Detroit and Cincinnati really taking off. Instead, I got mediocrity.

Until May 1972 rolled around.

And the Cubs.

Chicago has won 12 games in a row from May 18 to May 30 in the replay. They’ve moved from fifth place, only a tad ahead of Montreal, to second place. They’re still seven games behind Pittsburgh, but the streak is on-going. The Cubs play two more at home against St. Louis and then start a nine-game road swing against San Diego, San Francisco and Los Angeles, before heading home  to face the same teams nine more times.

Then, on June 23, 1972, the Cubs host Pittsburgh in a three-game set and then play them again at the end of the month in the Pirates’ stadium.

The Cubs have been amazing during this streak. They’ve outscored their opponents 89-14 and pitchers tossed five shutouts during the run, including a 20-0 shellacking of Montreal. The pitchers have hurled an incredible 0.92 earned run average in the 12 games.

The team has batted .320, with Glenn Beckert leading them with a .381 average. Billy Williams has five home runs and 13 RBIs during the streak and is batting .320.

Even Ron Santos, the slowest of the slow, is hitting .341. Prior to this streak, it seemed Santos, who is given the “S” for slow (should have been “GS” for glacier slow) would get on base and then be constantly caught at second or third when the next batter got a hit. If he ever hit a triple in a game, the ivy on Wrigley’s wall would have grown six inches before he slid into the base. Once when Santos hit a double, the grounds crew had to run a folding chair out there for him to sit and catch his breath. Chicago officials are talking with the commissioner to see if they can get Santos a moped or Segway to putter to bases with.

Yeah, Santos is slow.

But in these 12 games, he’s not been caught on base at all.

Long streaks are not that common for me in APBA replays. I’ve had a few teams win 10 in a row and the Minnesota Twins lost more than 20 in a 1977 replay. But I’m pretty sure this 12-game winning stretch has to be the longest I can recall. And it’s not over. Yet.

Burt Hooton is scheduled to start the next games for the Cubs against Cardinal’s pitcher Johnny Cumberland. Cumberland is carded as a “D,” the worst rating given for pitchers based upon their performance. Hooton is a “B” with a “Y” rating for strikeouts, which gives him a chance to record more strikeouts than other pitchers based upon his real-life performance in the 1972 season.

It’ll be a while before I can get to that game. Because of work and life, my replay has slowed down a bit. Maybe this upcoming game-- and the Houston-Cincinnati clash ahead—can speed my rate of play a bit.

This is one of the neat things about the APBA game. It may seem plodding to some to do a complete replay, rolling all the games for every team, but there is always something that’s happening, something to marvel over and something to look ahead to.

 

Anniversaries

I assume it’s a safe guess that most of the APBA players have been playing the sports replay for a while now. We probably began rolling the dice and holding the cards at an early age and the game stayed with us as we grew over the years.

And I suspect many of us began the APBA voyage after receiving the game as a Christmas gift from our parents.

I had two APBA anniversaries last week, including one on Christmas Day in 1977 that got me started. (Actually, there’s a third anniversary—I began this blog on Jan. 1, 2012. Hard to believe I’ve been doing this for 11 years now.)

My parents bought me the football game that year. I probably began backwards; most people first play the basic baseball game as a kid and graduate to the football and other game offerings of APBA. I was indoctrinated into the world of the large red dice and small white dice, the player cards with dice roll results printed on them and the counting of each play as a measure of time keeping with the football version.

That night on Christmas, I played my first game with Washington and the New York Giants. I’m sure I didn’t do it right that time. The rules were difficult and detailed. This wasn’t the Pop Tarts card baseball or the electric football games I used to play. I remember the Giants won the game, something like 41-34, and Larry Brown ran back a kickoff for 100 yards for the Redskins.

A year later, I received the APBA basketball game – a game that received much criticism because of its complex and plodding style of play. I played a streamlined version that consisted mostly of shooting, rebounding and figuring out assists with a detailed dice system. I loved the game and it’s what made me a dedicated APBA fan for life.

Just the other day I also observed another APBA anniversary. I began playing the baseball game on Dec. 28, 1998. I was seduced by the steroid-aided home run race that season by Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and returned to being a fan after the 1994 season-ending strike drove me away. I got the game to replicate that season’s fun.

I’ve been rolling some baseball season now for 24 years and I’ve been with APBA for 45 years.

I am sure there are scores of other APBA players who can boast much longer anniversaries of 50 and even 60 years.

And that’s the point of this game that I mention frequently. What other game has stayed with us for so long? It’s the draw of the APBA game and I think it’s what keeps us coming back to the company to get more seasons. We can live our past by rolling seasons we remember as we continue growing older. I’m doing 1972 now and I recall the season when I turned 12 years old that summer and left the security of my northern Minnesota grade school for a larger junior high. The consistency of baseball helped me get through that transitional time.

The APBA game has been with us as we grew up. We may have put it aside when we went to college or got a job. It may have waited when we got married or had kids and it stuck with us during other life changes. I began my replay of the 1991 baseball season in August 2015. A month later, I drove to Chicago and met the woman who would become my wife. It took four years to complete that replay; usually, because I have no life, it takes about a year and a half to roll a full season replay.

But now, life has settled into a routine again and I roll games nearly every day.

Twenty-four years of rolling doesn’t seem that long. But in the years I’ve been playing the baseball game, I was hired as a bureau reporter for a statewide newspaper, covered a school shooting here that got national coverage, lost my mother and wife, got laid off at the newspaper job, dealt with my own health issues and got remarried. It’s been a lot of life in that quarter of a century and APBA has been there.

Another anniversary has passed. What’s ahead for the next year of APBA games? I see myself finishing the 1972 replay late this year and beginning another season. Maybe I’ll drag out the APBA basketball game. I could finish a game in time for the next anniversary.