APBA Pro Baseball

Or Pursue the Pennant, or Strat-o-matic, or ....

Everyone kid dreams of hitting the Home Run to decide Game Seven of the World Series; but most of us don’t get nearly that far. We’re sports-obsessed; not necessarily sports-talented. We’ve already discussed Fantasy Sports, but there’s the entire genre of sports simulation — modeling real players to answer the “What-ifs?” Maybe just replay a series, or season. Maybe take players of different eras and match them up. You can do it all.

Baseball is not the only sport you can do this in, but in some ways its the purest example. Pitcher vs Batter with discrete plays, as compared to basketball’s fluidity of motion. And football does have plays, but 11 players interacting at once. It’s messy.

Baseball? Pure.

“You are the manager” Photo by Shawn Gillilan

J. Richard Seitz’s APBA Pro Baseball (1951) wasn’t the first baseball simulation. That honor might belong to Clifford A. Van Beek’s National Pastime, from the ‘20s¹. And there could certainly be an earlier game …. almost certainly if you switch from baseball to cricket!

Which brings up a troubling point. There are several competing baseball simulations that have survived 50+ years (often making the leap from board game to computer at some point in the 80s or 90s). Mostly they are what my wife calls “Bunco for boys,” you throw a bunch of dice, look up the result on the card for the pitcher or batter (depending on the roll) and see what happens. Sometimes you make a fielding roll on a position player. Maybe you get to make a decision (like try to steal a base, or call for a bunt or squeeze), but mostly you just watch a situation unfold.

My personal Bunco is Hal Richman’s Strat-o-matic Baseball.

Strat-o-matic Baseball box. Photo by Jeff Bakalchuck.

I haven’t played recently, but I’ve been in a league with a mini-season (~20 games) where we drafted players from the MLB from a year or two before². It was amusing enough, but also …. bunco for boys.

But if you don’t like Strat, there’s Michael Cieslinski’s Dynasty League Baseball / Pursue the Pennant or Ethan Allen’s All Star Baseball or Jim Barnes’ Statis Pro Baseball or David Neft’s Sports Illustrated Baseball … or … or … or … (no doubt I’ll get a comment on the ones I missed). On Steam I get a yearly reminder that Out of the Park Baseball has a new release. No mouse clicking or anything, just manage your team and watch it go.

And that’s just for baseball. There are football, hockey, baseketball and others; but the baseball games seem more popular and influential.

Why did we play Strat-o-matic? I’d seen a documentary on it and decided to take the plunge³. Is it most influential? It seems to get more media outside of gaming than the others. So …. maybe?

Probably this is a fool’s game to pick one, so I should simply throw in the towel and give the award to Van Beek … but it’s tough to call a game influential when it had all but disappeared from consciousness decades ago. Perhaps its the Velvet Underground of baseball sims … only played by a few people, but they all started their own company. But many (later) games might be influenced by Robert Coover’s novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.,⁴ which itself could have been inspired by any number of the games on this list.

It seems to me that one sports simulation should be in the list, and that it should be a baseball simulation. As to which, well, APBA seems to be the right combination of big and early. Overtaken by the later games, but still remembered.

What do you think?

1. 1930 according to BGG, but he filed for a patent in ‘23 and it was granted in ‘25.

2. Since we only had 5-6 players, we only drafted from the AL East to make sure our teams weren’t ridiculously loaded.

3. There is a newer documentary called “Managing to Win,” about the company, but the one I watched focused on a group that did a yearly 162 game league.

4. A book I’ve heard referenced several times in my life, never in relation to gaming. I suppose I should read it.