Halfway Point

I’ve reached the halfway point of my 1981 baseball replay. 

Since I’ve ignored the strike that plagued the real 1981 season, and since I have no rain outs in any of the replayed games, I know  there’s 2,106 games in a full baseball season. I reached game 1,053 and using the math skills hammered into me during my formal education, I deduced I am exactly half way done. 

It’s been a great season so far, except for the dismal play of my favorite team, the Minnesota Twins. The American League East Division has three teams that are within two games of the Yankees and California is a surprise team in the West Division. 

In the National League, Montreal is unstoppable. Los Angeles has taken a 10.5-game lead on the heels of an 18-game winning streak stopped only by Houston’s Nolan Ryan, who struck out 10 Dodgers and held them to one unearned run.

Mike Schmidt of the Phillies leads the home run race with 28. George Foster of the Reds is second with 24 homers. Oakland’s designated hitter Cliff Johnson and the Oriole’s Eddie Murray lead the American League with 23 dingers each.

I began playing this replay on Dec. 12, 2011. Eight months and a week later, I’m halfway finished. Looks like I’ll wrap this season up in late April if I continue at the same pace. The game takes dedication and patience to complete and the other APBA game players who replay entire seasons realize this. 

Here are the standings at the midway mark

AMERICAN LEAGUE

East W L GB

New York 50 32 --

Milwaukee 49 32 .5

Detroit 48 33 1.5

Baltimore 47 33 2

Boston 38 42 11

Cleveland 35 45 14

Toronto 26 57 24.5

West

Kansas C. 49 29 --

California 51 34 1.5

Oakland 46 39 6.5

Chicago 40 38 9

Texas 36 46 15

Seattle 28 54 23

Minnesota 26 55 24.5

NATIONAL LEAGUE

East

Montreal 55 26 --

Phil'phia  45 35 9.5

St. Louis 45 36 10

Pittsburgh 37 41 16.5

Chicago    34 47 21

New York 30 49 29

West

L.Angeles 55 27 --

Cincinnati 44 37 10.5

Houston 42 38 12

S.Francisco 38 46 18

Atlanta      32 48 22

San Diego 27 54 27.5

Where It Began

Recently, I passed through my home town and, in a moment of impulsiveness, I detoured and drove by my parent’s old house to see where the APBA obsession began.

My parents moved to Arkansas in 1974 after my father retired from teaching at a northern Minnesota university. It was a culture shock for me, a kid of 14, to delve into an entirely different world. I had to ride the bus to school; in Minnesota, I walked to my school. I had to deal with the southern accent; in Minnesota, I talked like an extra from the movie “Fargo.”

It was a difficult adjustment to make.

But I had sports and that helped ease the transition. Sports is a universal language spoken in any accent and it can usually bridge many gaps. And to help me, I discovered the APBA games which made me a genius, compared to others my age, when talking about football and basketball players back then.

I played the games in the front bedroom of the house, rolling the games on my bed. I sat hunched over on a wooden chair and used a gooseneck lamp to lighten the playing field. And as I rolled the dice and wrote down the results of those games, I also experienced the life of a teenager. I fretted nervously about asking a girl to the high school prom, and I stayed up late being lovesick over the same girl back then.

I also learned heartache and disappointment in that room when the puppy love relationship crashed, as they always do. But I kept playing that game and it comforted me and, like I’ve said before, it was the only consistent thing in the roller coaster life of a kid.

So, years later, I drove by the house again and stopped on the road, looking at the window of that front bedroom. The house looked the same. It’d been at least 10 years since I had last been there. Both my parents are deceased and I ended up selling the house in 2002 when my  wife took ill.

As I sat in my car on the road, an oldies station on the radio was playing Corey Hart’s “Never Surrender,” which was both ironic and overly cliché for the moment. Corey sang about asking for a little more time because his uncertainty could bring him down. “So if you’re lost and on your own, you can never surrender,” he sang. “And if your path won’t lead you home, you can never surrender.”

I’ve been lost since leaving my parents’ home and being on my own, but that day the path led me home and back to where my love of the APBA game began. I drove on and headed to my own house where, when I arrived,  I rolled a few games, continuing the routine that I began in that other house nearly four decades ago.

The Being of Lateness

How do you explain to someone that you’re late because a baseball game that never really happened went into extra innings and you had to see how it finished.

This has happened to me more times than socially acceptable, I think, as I replay the 1981 baseball season with the APBA game I obsess with.

I have a few quirky rules with the game and that may contribute to my lateness on occasion. I never leave a game unfinished. Before I leave my home for work, the game I’m rolling has to be completed, the player cards sheathed back in the team’s envelopes and the scores, stats and standings updated. I won’t even go to sleep until a game is ended and that little quirk bit me the other night when I had a game run 23 innings long on a work night.

So how do you explain to your bosses that you’re feeling a little groggy the following morning because Atlanta failed to score after putting guys on first and third with one out in the 17th inning? 

I am a newspaper correspondent who works in an office by myself, so if I’m late a few minutes coming in, it’s not that big of a deal. However, it’s kind of weird if I’m tarrying on an early morning interview and I tell the source that I’d been there earlier had Rollie Fingers, with his monster pitching card, not been in the groove and forcing the game into additional innings by mowing down opponents.

Or if the White Sox decide to go ballistic and score 14 against lowly Seattle. It takes time to progress a game, for example, when Chicago gets 18 hits.

The quirky rule of not leaving a game in progress may in part be due to my cat. At times she jumps on the APBA table to get a box seat for the game. She also enjoys pawing through the cards and scattering them across the desk and floor.

Once, and I can’t confirm this, my cat may have taken one of the dice. The game utilizes a large red die and a small white die to obtain game results. They are vital to the game. I returned home once and, as I sat to roll a game, I couldn’t find the white die. Fortunately, since I’ve been playing APBA for more than three decades, I had plenty of spare. But I still wondered about that die. I could not find it anywhere on the floor, in the hallway or anywhere my cat may have batted it about. I wondered if she ate it and, briefly, I considered carefully checking her litter box. I realize that was taking ‘craps’ way too far when dealing with dice.

So now I complete each game, tuck the dice away and close shop before leaving. And that puts me behind at times if I begin a game too late. I try to roll two or three games in the morning and, in a perfect world, I can get them in, hit the shower, dress and be at work when I’m supposed to.

But then you get a game where a pitcher can’t buy an out or the teams’ bats become anemic and the run of three-up, three-down stretches the game into late innings.

In the big scheme of life, there’s much more to worry about than maintaining the quirky superstition I have about finishing the games. I think a much more important issue I need to worry about is just where that lost die ended up.

35 Years of Stats

I can’t find a shovel that I know was in my backyard shed and I’ve lost clothing, a vacuum cleaner and even furniture in moves.

But for some reason unbeknown to the realm of rational thought, I’ve managed to maintain notebooks full of the statistics I kept as a child when playing my dice replay games.

I found today the stats for the very first APBA game I ever played. For Christmas in 1977, my parents bought me the 1976 NFL season to replay. It was a complex game and it took a long time to learn how to play it, let alone complete a game. 

Yet, I persevered and trudged on, rolling football games in my small bedroom of the house where I planned my life’s future as a teenager.

The first game I played was Washington at the New York Giants.  The Giants won, 40-24, despite a 97-yard kickoff return by the Redskins’ Bob Brunett. Larry Csonka scored on a 3-yard plunge and Joe Danelo kicked four field goals.

The very first play I ever rolled as an APBA player was a 13-yard run by Washington’s running back Larry Brown.

I know all this because I kept the game recaps in a red three-ring binder my father gave me. Written in black magic marker on the inside cover is “BSI-360,” a code he wrote for his classes for when he taught at Bemidji State University in northern Minnesota. The notebook sits on a shelf in a closet in my home now.

The second NFL game I rolled was, fittingly, Minnesota’s game against Dallas. I was still stinging from the actual, real-life game of  Dec. 28, 1975, when the Vikings’ lost to Dallas,17-14 in the playoffs. Roger Staubach threw a 50-yard heave to Drew Pearson as time ran out, sending the Cowboys to victory and me to a history of disappointments in sports.

In my APBA game, the Vikings won 23-16 on Chuck Foreman’s 1-yard touchdown run late in the game. Revenge is good, even if it’s not real.

And football stats are not all that I’ve saved over the years. I have the first APBA basketball game I’ve ever played. The 1978-79 San Diego Clippers beat the Los Angeles Lakers, 113-112 in my game. Sidney Wicks hit the first three-point FG I’ve ever rolled.

It stumps me that I have these things. I’ve saved the record of the first APBA game I’ve ever played 35 years ago, but I've let so many other things go. 

I’ve moved a few times in my life, always tossing unwanted things during the transfers and losing other items. I’ve lost more family pictures than APBA notes.

Maybe it’s an unconscious grasp of the past and a reminder of a time when things were easier. Then, all I worried about was if I could get a game completed  on a school night before I had to go to sleep.

By no means am I a hoarder, but I have a 35-year collection of the games kept in my tiny printed handwriting. I have hundreds of pages of the stuff. 

Now, if I could find my shovel, I could scoop that collection back up and into the closet.

A Difficult Dilemma

There are tough decisions we’re faced with in life that require  a lot of thought and deep concentration.

Choosing a college, accepting a job offer, getting married, figuring out how to make the monthly house mortgage and just coming up with ways to stay afloat in the sea of life are some of those selections we have to work out.

But, I’m faced with an even more difficult dilemma. Most of those other choices mentioned, well, I’ve picked wrong. I’ve always said when I come to a fork in the road, I end up grabbing a spoon. I’ve not had the most successful batting average in making wise decisions.

So, I look ahead at my difficult dilemma and, although it’s not pertinent until next spring, I give it attention now.

My tough decision: What is the next APBA baseball season that I’ll replay.

It’s a toughie.

My 1981 season replay is nearing the midway point. I’ve reached June 30, 1981, rolling more than 960 games so far. I’ve still more than 100 games to hit the exact halfway point of the season, but, as I’ve tended to do in replays past, I look forward.

Yes, I look to the future to play the past.

I began playing the baseball dice game in the winter of 1998, replaying the ‘98 season that featured the steroid-aided home run barrage of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Then, I replayed 1925 (in part), 1957 and 1974 and then 1932. I completed 1964 and 1977 before tackling 1981.

I see the undertaking of a replay as both a conquest and a means for learning more about that era’s baseball history. I lock into the season and I memorize the batting lineups for the teams and that season becomes more of a reality to me than the actual, real baseball season that’s underway while I play my fictional game.

I look ahead and am pretty certain I’ll play 1942 next. I’ve not played any from that era. As many games as I’ve played over the years, I’ve never rolled the dice for an at-bat by Joe DiMaggio.

I’ve tried to spread out the eras of the replays so I could learn more about those times.

Obviously, I don’t own every season, but I do have a good representation of most of the baseball eras. I own 1901 and 1906 for the first era, 1925 and 1932 for the early years, 1942 for that DiMaggio time. I’ve bought a lot of 1980s seasons so I could play the Minnesota Twins’ games. Sadly, the 1981 Twins in my replay are the second worst team, only ahead of Toronto. But I have other seasons with the Twins and I keep hope alive.

So, with several months still left in the 1981 replay I’m doing, I think I’m doing 1942 next. I may tackle the 1901 or 1906 after just to get a feel for that era. The year 1991 beckons as well, with the Twins’ World Series victory in real life a motivation for the replay.

And, on an entirely different level, I also own a three APBA football seasons, several hockey years and some of the basketball seasons as well. 

I figure I have to stay alive for at least 20 more years to get all the seasons I want to do completed. It’s one reason to stay alive, I guess.

Caught in the Corner of My Eye

Sometimes when I play the APBA baseball game in the small bedroom of my home that’s been converted into a computer room and a shrine to my obsession of sports, I think I see out of the corner of my eye someone passing the door.

But it’s been six years since that’s happened.

Before, it’d be my wife walking from the back bedroom to the living room or kitchen. She’d stop by to see how things were going; she might ask what the score of the game I was rolling. She didn’t care about the tally, of course. Instead, I think she was just reminding me that there was a real world as well as the APBA world I delved into.

Six years ago yesterday, she passed away after a lengthy fight with kidney failure. So now, when I play the games, there’s no one there asking about the game’s outcome. And there’s no reminder that there is another world I live in as well.

I’ve written here before that my wife was supportive of the game. A few months before she passed away, I let her roll the dice for the last play of my 1987 replay. The St. Louis Cardinals faced Kansas City in my game. She rolled an out in the ninth inning and the Cardinals won the Series. She pretended to be amused, I think.

But she also expressed some interest in my  hobby. She bought me a small case once that I could put whatever season I was playing in and travel. We spent a lot of time in hospitals in the last three years of her life and I brought the game with me. She called it my “purse,” but it was her way of teasing me.  I think she appreciated, or at least accepted, that I needed that game during the rough times.

I went through the destructive phase that survivors go through after losing loved ones. But I continued playing the baseball game — the one mainstay in an otherwise twisted up life. I replayed 1974 and 1932 and then 1977. Now, I’m about 40 percent through 1981.

I will keep playing. I’m planning on tackling the 1942 season next and then I’ve got 1901 and 1906 to think about. I’ve got years ahead of me for the games.

I’ll look for someone passing the door while I play. It won’t happen, but it’s a comforting thought of days ago when things seemed better and easier and when I toted the game in my “purse.” 

The Worst Day For Sports

Today, the day after the baseball all-star game, was the worst day of the year for sports.

It’s the day when there are no sports at all. Obviously, baseball is off today. Football hasn’t begun yet and, despite the seemingly endless  pro basketball season, there is nary a round ball game on television.

Unless you count the WBNA as a sport (and who does, really?) and the Canadian Football League,which doesn’t broadcast its games but on obscure high-numbered cable channels between the music stations and cooking shows, there’s no sports.

It’s a sad day.

But it was even sadder years ago when we didn’t have cable television. Nowadays, if all else fails, we can watch a replay of a Northwestern University football game on one cable channel, poker playing on another and the 45th replay of this year’s Home Run Derby that preceded the all-star game on ESPN.

Back years ago, we had about four television channels we were able to watch on our antenna tower. Cable television hadn’t yet snaked its way into the majority of homes and we were just pleased to watch the snowy pictures from television stations within a hundred miles or so.

Not much opportunity for sports back then, but at least we could watch the evening news and wait for the scores to flash on the screen. 

But on the Wednesday after the all-star game, there was a huge void. The local television sports broadcasts were filled with fishing reports,  area stock car racing and video of squirrels that water skied behind toy boats.

My dad realized the bleakness of the day back then and it became a tradition for him to tell me about the baseball he watched when he was a youngster. He grew up in east New Jersey and would watch the Yankees play. He’d regale me with tales of seeing Yogi Berra, Joe DiMaggio and Whitey Ford. It’s probably why  I became a Yankees fan.

So now, the day after baseball’s all-star game, my television set remains turned off. There’s no sports, no scores to pore over, no stats to revel in. 

I think of my father and his stories and realize that, despite a day with no sports, it’s not really that bad a day after all.