Leagues of Their Own

Why would anybody spend long hours hunched over a flat surface, tracking the progress of imaginary baseball games? No simple answer may suffice, but since practitioners by the tens of thousands—some of them famous—have engaged in this unlikely pastime, it probably can't be dismissed as sheer insanity.

Long before today's "fantasy leagues"—which entail gambling far more than fantasy—kids of all ages fell under the spell of commercially manufactured tabletop baseball games. These were combinations of boards, dice, cards, and spinners used to simulate contests among actual Major League players. Equally important, the simulations allowed mixing and matching from diverse eras: 1927 Yanks vs. the Big Red Machine? Koufax vs. Cobb? Mathewson vs. Pujols? No problem. Create customized leagues? A cinch. To onlookers, the "action" might appear to be on the tabletop, but in fact, it unfolded vividly in game players' imaginations.

The first of these games appeared in the early 1940s as Ethan Allen's (later Cadaco) All-Star Baseball, a simple affair with player disks that fit over a spinner. The disks were calibrated according to the player's lifetime stats. Where the arrow of the spinner came to rest indicated the play result. Naturally the space for a home run on Babe Ruth's disk was wider than on any other.

A decade later brought Strat-O-Matic and its main competitor, the American Professional Baseball Association (apba). These relatively sophisticated simulations used dice and player cards and charts to replicate not only the batting prowess of big leaguers but also the pitching and fielding tendencies. Game players handled all managerial duties, such as selecting lineups, dictating offensive and defensive tactics, and keeping statistics afterward if they wished. Those tabulations, computerized now, were long, hands-on labors of love.

Over time these games took on enormous cult popularity. Leagues formed across the country. Each fall, champion apba teams and their "managers" met in a World Series tournament; each February, apba fanatics braved snowstorms to line up outside the company's factory in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to receive the latest cards.

Writer-editor Daniel Okrent (who as an adult would invent Rotisserie League Baseball) recalls the wait for a new season's Strat-O-Matic cards as "agonizing." To the uninitiated, he concedes, the codified cards might have looked like hieroglyphics; but to the young Okrent, they were as "thrilling as an epic poem."

"From my first roll of the dice, I was hooked," says Jon Miller, San Francisco Giants and espn broadcaster, in Confessions of a Baseball Purist. After spending long months replaying the entire 1966 National League schedule with his Strat-O-Matic game, Miller proceeded to make up his own league with franchises in Hudson Bay, Rome, London, and even Machu Picchu. By then, presaging his future profession, he'd taken to "announcing" games—even imitating background sounds: pa system announcers, vendors' cries, infield chatter, and rousing stadium cheers. Miller's father, passing by his closed bedroom door, feared the boy was having a heart attack.

Partly because his mother grew tired of stepping over him on the floor, Joe Torre, former All-Star catcher and current Yankees manager, played apba in the basement of his boyhood pal, Johnny Parascandola. The pair established a league and kept stats. "We spent hours upon hours down there, including a good chunk of our winters," Torre says in his memoir, Chasing the Dream. "Even then I enjoyed the decision-making involved in managing." Now, many years since his playing days, Torre still sometimes receives his own apba card with an autograph request. "Whenever I see one," he says, "it's like opening an old photo album."

Torre stayed cool in tight apba games—but not his buddy Johnny, who might upend the table if he lost. Once Johnny stuck a pitcher's card under a running faucet, yelling "I'm sending you to the showers!" It's good that Parascandola opposed the even-tempered Torre rather than Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane, who, as a teenager, according to Alan Schwarz's The Numbers Game, hurled his Strat-O-Matic dice into the...