The Sound of the South

It’s spring and with it comes the annual sound of baseballs popping in gloves, the cracks of the bats and the ballpark vendors hawking expensive beer and meat byproduct hot dogs.

But here in the south another sound vies for our attention as the trees begin budding and the temperatures climb. It’s the sound of the wailing tornado sirens. Not that I’m rooting for them, but we should hear their cries this spring in Arkansas. 

We had an off year last year with only a few twisters. Meteorologists blame it on the drought; the dry conditions kept storm systems from strengthening over the state and producing the tornadoes. We had only 17 reported in the Natural State in 2012.

This year, though, the drought has improved and forecasters expect at least 50 tornadoes. And with the increase in storms, it means I’ll be heading out more to the various towns that get hit by the winds. One of my duties at the newspaper where I work is to cover weather.

I’ve seen a lot of tornado damage in my years here. In 2008, I drove through a storm cell that produced the longest on-the-ground twister in the state’s history. When I punched through the system, my car was covered in splotched mud and straw.

Once I had the rubber stripping along my car door frame blown off during a storm.  After that, whenever I drove over 50 mph, the wind would blow across the gap and make a whistling noise.

I’ve driven over the remains of a house scattered across a road and dodged downed trees. In 2007, I had to drive through a bumpy cotton field to get to a town that was decimated by a twister because the roads were closed with debris.

And once I covered a tornado in a small eastern Arkansas town that killed two people. Officials set up an area for storm victims in a school gymnasium and posted a large sign “No Media.” While I was there, a second tornado formed and bore down on the school. Police rushed everyone into the gymnasium for shelter, creating a dilemma. As a reporter, do I heed the sign and stay outside, or do I take cover? I took cover.

In 1999, the sirens blared near our home and my wife and I scrambled into a closet under the staircase. She got important papers and photographs to preserve and took them with her; I grabbed my 1998 APBA baseball season set. Priorities, you know.

This year, as we prepare for the storm system here in the south, I’m ready. I have all my APBA seasons already stored in a walk-in closet that, if I were inclined to, I would hunker down during tornado warnings. 

I’ve said here before that in APBA, I never have rain outs. Every team plays its full slate of games in all the replays I’ve done. But, as the winds begin howling and the sirens go off, there may be a few games delayed while I seek shelter and then track down where the damage occurred so I can report on it.

Replay Update, Sept. 24, 1981

Ten days are left in the 1981 baseball season I’m replaying with APBA and the American League East continues to be knotted. I find that, although this is not real, I think about the games while away from the cards and dice as if they were.

It’s quite a race, and it makes me stay up late at night rolling games to see how this turns out.

I’ve reached Sept. 25, 1981. I’m replaying every game scheduled that season and am ignoring the baseball strike that wreaked havoc on the actual season and converted the national past time into a goofy, minor league-like farce with its split playoff system.

I wanted to correct that and wanted to see what happened if each team played its full 162 games. Like I said here before, there’s no player strikes, lockouts or rainouts in APBA.

For those of you unfamiliar with the game, APBA is an amazing stat-based game that uses cards and dice. For the more high-tech players, the game does come in a computer format, but I’ve shied away, both because I am a traditionalist and I’m a computer idiot. (We've just changed computer systems at the newspaper where I work. The adjustment has been a bit rough and one of our techs actually told me that my inability to understand the newfangled stuff gave them job security).

Each player’s season is represented on a card. Players roll dice to determine play outcomes, corresponding the roll with numbers on the cards. It generally takes about 15-20 minutes to play a game. A full season replay, in my case, has taken about 17 months.

It seems like a long time, but when you have a pennant race like the one ensuing in my replay, it’s worth it.

Here are the four teams in the American League East Division as of games ending on Sept. 24, 1981.

Baltimore 91-62

Detroit 90-63

New York 90-63

Milwaukee    87-66

The Orioles will play three at Yankee Stadium and Milwaukee heads to Detroit for a three-game series. 

The National League is wrapped up. Montreal currently has record of 106-46 and is an amazing team to play. They lead Philadelphia by 14 games. Los Angeles, with its four 21-game winners in Fernando Valenzuela, Burt Hooton, Jerry Reuss and Bob Welch, lead Houston by 10 games with 10 to go. The Dodgers will play the Astros in Houston for three games and more than likely will wrap up the West during that series.

Kansas City leads California by 4.5 games with nine games remaining in the Royals’ season.

So, it’s late, but I plan to play a few games before bedtime tonight, advancing this great season. I’ll head to work a bit bleary-eyed tomorrow, but it’ll be worth it. And if it appears I’m zoning out, I’m not catching a nap, but thinking of the games I’ve yet to play and how this will all play out.

The End Is Near

I’ve been playing the games of the 1981 baseball replay game with more fervor lately, rolling up to six games a day. It’s because the end is near; I’m closing in on the conclusion of the season.

Those who roll the dice with the APBA game can attest that replaying a season game by game is a task that takes months or, in some cases, even years. Each game may take 15-20 minutes to play and that time must fit in with work, sleep and the other aspects of life. You may be married and have kids and friends and that takes time. You try and squeeze a few games in when it’s convenient; it’s tough to complete a season. Since I have no other life than work, and I hate sleeping, I can play more games daily than most.

I began the 1981 season in December 2011 and tonight I’ve reached Game No. 1,958. There are 158 games remaining to play and that is what drives me. I hope to finish the year by mid April and I figure that if I maintain my pace of six games a day  I can complete the season by April 1, when the actual baseball season opens.

There is the burnout factor replayers go through when doing a full season and I’ve hit it a few times. It’s hard to get motivated to play those meaningless games late in the season. Those San Diego-Atlanta clashes of the 1981 season don’t really make you want to grab the dice to see how the contest turns out.

But as the finish line nears and the marathon of replaying a season draws nigh, it’s enough to roll a few extra games each day. I’ve got a good pennant race ensuing in the American League East Division which is an additional draw.

So, with 158 games left, I set these higher daily goals to move along the game. When I’m finished with this season, I’ll immediately turn to doing 1942 and, because there were fewer teams in baseball then and they played 154 rather than 162 games, that season will go more quickly.

It’s not that I want to finish the season out of boredom or some felt tedium in playing game after game after game in 1981. In fact, there is a sadness in completing a season. When the games are done, the players’ cards are returned to their envelopes and the box holding those envelopes returns to the shelf where they probably will remain for the rest of my life. I have enough seasons left to play that I can never duplicate a year for as long as I live. The season will become a memory; the characteristics of that particular year will be shelved; the life that I experienced while playing the game will pass on.

But the next replay beckons and I’ll go through the same roller coaster routine of playing it out. The first few hundred games will fly by because of the newness of the season and players I’m dealing with. It’ll slow down in the midsummer of whatever year I’m playing, much like it does in real baseball. 

But as that season wraps up, I’m sure the games will pick up again and I’ll roll them with the maniacal glee I’m experiencing now.

Bad Date

I went out with a girl one night more than 30 years ago in what, looking back, I consider to be the worst date I've ever had. As that evening drew to a conclusion, I hoped I'd skid on icy roads and veer off the highway to end the pain of it all.

In the annals of dating, it was a bad one. But now, three decades later, I just learned that the girl recently died and the impact of that date has changed from being a disaster to a more nostalgic look at our youth.

I'm not pining over the girl by any means. I didn't even remember her last name until someone told me about her passing the other day. Instead, I guess I'm forlorn over a time when we were young and dates were an exciting venture and death was far away.

I don't remember exactly what year I went out with her. It was a one-time deal. I think I was in college and she may have been a high school senior. I know I was out of high school and able to avoid the awkward situation of meeting the girl in school in the following days.

I do remember, however, someone set us up, saying she was really nice person. And maybe she was. Just not to me.

We began the evening arguing over the song “Renegade” by Styx. She loved it; I hated it. We evolved to talking about what shows we liked on television; differing again. We were on opposite ends of which teachers we liked in the high school we attended. I mentioned I loved the New York Yankees. She hated them. When a girl hates your favorite baseball team, it's eminent that the date is doomed.

But I pressed on, despite the difficulty in conducting that fact-finding small talk you do on first dates.

We met another couple at a pizza restaurant about 15 miles from our town and the date continued to slide into a pit of despair. She flirted with the other guy in our foursome and, realizing this was heading for disaster, I didn't care. I may have even offered to drive the other guy's date home since my date and he were hitting it off so well.

The evening drew to a close and I drove her back home. There was none of that adolescent jitters of wondering if I should ask her out again, if I should walk her to her door, if I should even kiss her good night. This was one of those dates where stopping the car to let her out rather than driving by her home slowly and letting her tumble out was adequate enough.

It was the worst date I've been on and I hadn't given it any thought until just recently when I heard she died. I had not seen her since that night and I'm sure she never remembered me.

But now I find it sad that I've reached the time where people I may know are approaching the age when we begin dying. I don't know what she died of; but it happens now. It gives me the perspective of mortality, of time running out. At this age I begin wondering if this is it. Have I reached my goals, despite wanting more? Is time running out? Weird thoughts in a weird time.

So, I reflect back on that date with melancholy thoughts. If I could go back, I'd apologize to her for the date. I'd tell her that the date really didn't matter in the bigger scheme of life, that we had a long life ahead of us and we needed to take advantage of that and chalk up bad dates to youthful ignorance. I'd tell her that, really, I wasn't as bad as she probably thought I was that night and that I'm sure she wasn't the she-devil from the third level of hell, I met that night, either.

Other people have had far worse dates, I'm sure. I went to an Arkansas Razorbacks football game once on a double date with a guy whose date burped beer most of the night. Nice.

But my date with this girl was up there in bad ones. I mean, arguing about the New York Yankees?  

'Ball Four"

Whenever I hear people talk of books that changed their lives, I usually think they're simply being pseudo-intellectuals. You know the type: Those who admit to reading Ayn Rand's “Atlas Shrugged”, those who know how to pronounce Ayn's first name and those who understand the theme of individualism in Rand's “The Fountainhead.”

Notice how one-dimensional I am when making references to pseudo-intellectuals? I'm so bereft of brain I can only come up with Ayn Rand books as my examples.

Another display of my mental skill: A Facebook friend the other day posted an invitation for her friends to note their favorite presidents to honor Presidents' Day. Several of her friends were the high-brow type and they were quick to crow that Obama, Clinton, Kennedy and Roosevelt were the best. A few tossed in Washington and Adams. I, on the other hand, suggested William Taft. Anyone who invented the seventh-inning stretch and admitted to being stuck in a bathtub was all right by me, I wrote.

All that said, however, and in fear of sounding like a pseudo-intellectual myself, there is life-changing book that I've read.

Jim Bouton's book “Ball Four,” the diary of his 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots and the Houston Astros, is the most impacting book I've ever read. Sports fans, I'm sure, have read it over and over. It's one of the rites of spring. Every few Februarys, I take the book from my shelf and read it again. I've done it for more than 40 years now.

I actually remember when and where I got the book. My aunt and uncle were visiting and my family took them to the Headwaters of the Mississippi River in June 1971. (The same place I reference in the previous post about my flip calendar). I saw the paperback priced at the hefty sum of $1.25. I was 11; I begged my parents to buy the book and then they balked, my aunt bought it for me.

On one level, it would seem irresponsible for adults to let a child read Bouton's book. It contained curse words and adult situations and many of Bouton's observations of life went over my head at that early age. But it also had baseball and that was the draw then.

I remember taking the book to grade school the following fall and showing my friends the bad words. And while it was funny to see those words in print, it also put me on a different plane than the others in my reading, and it helped form the way I thought and how I questioned things. While my classmates were struggling through “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “The Outsiders” and “Harriet the Spy,” I was reading “Ball Four.”

A few years later, when my family moved to Arkansas, I left the book in my junior high English classroom after the class ended and we left for the next class. I realized what I had done and despite being really shy back then, I immediately walked back, barged into the room and picked up my book. It was that important of a read to me to shun my attempt at avoiding any attention to myself at that school.

The book is so much more than a baseball book and now, 42 years after I first read it, I still learn things when I read it again. It is an amazing story of how the system works, the ridiculousness of life and the acceptance of being different. Maybe now I tend to over analyze things and look at things from different angles because of this book.

I actually found Bouton once and called him on the phone to talk briefly with him about the impact his book had. I'm sure he gets calls like that all the time and, while I rambled on about the genius of his story, he was probably looking at the clock thinking, “I gotta get out of here.”

So, while the rest talk of the impact of reading the works of Emerson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway or even David Foster Wallace, I tout Bouton's “Ball Four” as the most influential book I've ever read.

It's February again. Time to read his book yet again.

But, despite my foray into the intellectual side, I still think Taft was a great president for that seventh-inning stretch deal.

1981 AL East Race, Sept. 12, 1981

With about three weeks remaining in the 1981 season that I'm replaying with APBA baseball, the American League East division is featuring the tightest pennant race I've seen in the 14 years I've been playing the statistical based game.

For those of you new to the game, APBA uses dice and player cards with numbers printed on them that replicate closely their actual statistics complied for that particular season. Players roll two dice, match the number rolled to that on the player's card and then compare it to a corresponding number on a board to determine the batter's action.

The game company has created cards for most of the previous seasons, so enthusiasts like me, can replay virtually any season. It's a great way to learn baseball history and, as in this case, provides pretty neat results.

I began replaying the 1981 season in December 2011 and decided to act like the baseball strike of that year never happened and play each team's full 162-game schedule. Fourteen months later, I've reached Sept. 12, 1981.

Here's how the AL East looks:

                   W     L     GB
Detroit         85    57      –

Baltimore    85    58     .5

Milwaukee  85    58     .5

New York   81    61     4

Here's the games remaining for those teams:

Baltimore: at Mil (1); at Cle (2); Mil (3); Det (3); at NY (4); at Det (3); NY (3)

Detroit: Cle (1); at Bos (4); at Cle (3); at Bal (3); Mil (3); Bal (3); at Mil (3)

Milwaukee: Bal (1); NY (3); at Bal (3) at Bos (3) at Det (3); Bos (3); Det (3)

New York: Bos (1); at Mil (3); at Bos (3); Cle (3); Bal (4); at Cle (3); at Bal (3)

In the American League West, Kansas City leads California by 3.5 games. The two teams play each other three more times, so that division could turn into a dogfight as well.

Both divisions in the National League are virtually decided. Montreal, with speedsters Tim Raines and Rodney Scott and home run slugger Andre Dawson, is leading Philadelphia by 12 games with 21 games remaining for both teams. Los Angeles, with a chance of having four 20-game winners on its pitching staff, leads Houston by 11 games.

It's why we play this game. I've learned about the 1981 season doing this replay and each night, as I roll games, I create the drama and excitement that comes with real pennant races.

Flip Calendar

Flip, ching.

Metal plates inside a small flip calendar I keep on my desk make a distinctive noise when I change the date. Each plate has a number to coincide with the day’s date and it appears in a window on the calendar.

When I change the date I have to rotate the window mounted on a bracket. The plate slides out of the window’s frame and the next day’s date appears. At the end of each month, a plate flips up to remind you to change the month below.

I’ve been doing this since June 30, 1972. I know this because adhered to the bottom of the calendar is that date on a thin red band I stamped out on a label making machine my father owned. For some unknown reason, I’ve managed to keep this flip calendar for more than 40 years, and it’s been marking off days since.

Flip, ching.

My parents bought it for me a day after my 12th birthday that summer day in 1972 when we visited the Headwaters of the Mississippi River in northern Minnesota. The calendar has a drawing of the Itasca State Park area where the river begins.

I used the calendar to mark the actual days in the past, but for the 1981 APBA baseball replay game I’m doing now, I instead use the calendar to show the day of the replay. I’m at Sept. 10, 1981. So, despite it being February 2013 now, my calendar shows it’s still September 1981. And, since it takes more than one day to replay a full day’s schedule of the 1981 games, the calendar may remain unchanged for two or three days.

On the same token, on days in 1981 when there were only a few games — for example, on Sept. 10, 1981, there were only two games played — I will change the calendar twice in a day.

Flip, ching. Flip, ching.

It’s a way to measure the progress of my replay and it gives me a sense of accomplishment when I change the date. APBA replayers can attest that a season replay takes a long time, and we look for anything to show progression late in the season.

This does it for me. After tonight, when I play the two games scheduled for Sept. 10, 1981, I’ll flip the calendar again to Sept. 11, 1981, and then wait to flip it again while I play the 12 or 13 games scheduled for that day.

It’s somewhat odd to have a calendar, a device normally used to mark the time ahead, to actually show the passage of time years ago. 

And the logo of the river’s birth is symbolic as well. It’s a mark of the beginning of something. The beginning of the river, the beginning of my childhood, the beginning of a life itself, I guess. The flowing of the river is a metaphor for life’s journey, smooth at times, turbulent at others.

It all comes to a loop. I’ve walked across the Mississippi River as a child in 1972 at Itasca many times. Two years ago, nearly four decades later and 1,000 miles south of the headwaters, I stood on a Mississippi River levee in Helena, Ark., and watched large trees, parts of barns and other debris float down the flooded waters. At that spot, the river was three miles wide.

So, as I flip the calendar to signify the days’ passage in my 1981 APBA replay, I think of the river, and the day I got this calendar and the 40 years hence.  Kind of heady stuff when I’m rolling games like Seattle vs. Cleveland, isn’t it.

Flip, ching.