Replaying Games on an Impacting Day

If APBA baseball game players replay any of the seasons of when they were alive, chances are they’ll come across games on a date that had some significance in their own lives.

Maybe it’s a date that a replayer graduated school, or the date of their wedding or birth of their child. Maybe it’s their own birth date.

And sometimes it’s an event that, while it may have not seem that impacting at the time, had been one of life’s turning point and an important moment when given the advantage of hindsight.

I came across one of those days in my 1972 APBA baseball replay.

I reached June 30, 1972. And I remembered what I had done on that actual day.

It was a Friday, a day after my 12^th birthday. My aunt and uncle from Arizona visited my family in Minnesota then and we went to the Itasca State Park near our home that day. That’s where the Mississippi River begins its more than 2,300-mile journey through the heart of the country.

I know this because my father bought me a metal flip calendar that day. It’s got a drawing of the iconic tree stump at the headwaters that notifies visitors of the river’s origin. People can flip a metal box on the upright calendar that contains plates with numbers for each day.

On the bottom of the calendar is a red label I made back then with my father’s 3M label maker noting the date I got it.

It’s also the day my aunt bought me Jim Bouton’s classic book “Ball Four.” It was the white paperback with the picture of a hand holding a baseball just before throwing a knuckleball. The title is in green capital letters.

Those not acquainted with the book should immediately go out and get a copy. It’s Bouton’s diary of the 1969 season when he pitched for the Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros. On one level, it’s a rollicking look – complete with cussing a plenty – at a season on an expansion team that was pretty bad. On another level, though, it was a study of why people act the way they do; it was a doctrine about challenging authority and questioning it if it seemed a tad defunct. Don’t accept life the way it is if you see discrepancies in it, Bouton says.

At 12, I didn’t realize the great significance of the book; I giggled at the curse words and enjoyed reading stories about players I watched on the baseball field.

Later, I read it more for content and now think it had a major impact on the way I grew up. Sure, I had my parents’ upbringing, but Bouton’s words made me think for my own albeit with a bit of paranoia and distrust. Now, more than 50 years later, I still own the copy and still read it with that in mind.

So, while the real games went on during that day –Minnesota hosted Kansas City down in Bloomington, Minn., Atlanta was playing a west coast game in San Diego and the Twins’ rivals the White Sox were playing Oakland – I was standing at the beginning of the Mississippi River with my book and calendar in hand.

The symbolism was real: I had just turned 12. I was leaving the safety of my grade school in Minnesota and headed for unchartered territory in seventh grade at the town’s junior high. I, like that river, was starting a new journey.

I walked down the path by the river that day. It’s odd to call it a river there because it’s more a dribble. At points, you could stand on both sides of the banks at the same time. But, like our own lives, it starts small and progresses.

Years later, I stood on the edge of the Mississippi River in Helena, Ark., watching the strength and power of it as it roared. I was a reporter for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and one of my beats was covering weather. The river had reached near-record flooding and its width was more than two miles there. Bits of houses, farm buildings and uprooted trees rushed by. I thought back to the headwaters where it began, and where I got both my book and calendar.

I rolled the games for June 30, 1972, this week. In my replay, the Twins beat Kansas City, 6-2. San Diego crushed the Braves, 13-3, and Oakland and Chicago split a doubleheader.

I still have the calendar. I keep it on the table where I roll my games and keep it set to whatever day I’m on in the replay instead of the acutal date. I also have my first copy of “Ball Four,” along with two other copies. I just read it again early last month.

It’s one of the interesting things about doing replays in the years we’ve lived. We recreate games of the past and bring back memories of those days.